Jay 🚩 @jaypatelani@bsd.network

@JdeBP @phlash @jaypatelani Yeah ideally you want both because some ports need disklabels to boot, and if you're formatting a FAT-32 USB drive for example you probably don't want GPT.

@phlash

I just gave the world a re-write of the boot chapter of the #FreeBSD Handbook that does away with bsdlabel and (finally!) uses gpart.

https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/117326574782531292

I wonder whether we can get the FreeBSD Handbook people to embrace this. GEOM was a big new thing in FreeBSD in 2003.

I see that the #NetBSD Guide suffers from the same disklabel-centrism, when it is closing in on 2 decades of having the gpt command.

@jaypatelani
#geom

Enjoying the design of #NetBSD native audio. Simple, direct and outstanding sound quality.❤️
Check it out at the NetBSD Kernel Interfaces Manual - audio page.
https://man.netbsd.org/audio.4

Learned the hard way with #NetBSD : if you want the #gd and/or #ImageMagick libraries in PHP (commonly required if you're installing Wordpress or in my case, @movim), one must install the X11 sets when installing NetBSD.

You can install them later using `sysinst`, however, have a back-up of your `/etc` handy, because it's real easy to accidentally blat your `/etc` config files with system defaults that will boot to single user mode with no `sshd` running.

In "How to use file system snapshots in #NetBSD" https://wiki.netbsd.org/tutorials/how_to_use_snapshots/ , does …

『Recovering from a snapshot

If you made a mistake and need to recover from the snapshot, you can [...] revert files back to what they were in the snapshot:

# rsync -aHc --delete /home/.snap/20260706/bofh/. /home/bofh/.』

… mean the snapshot, of FFS (not ZFS), does not have to be mounted to restore a file?

Or, is "Recovering …" section relying on the reader to mount the snapshot per "Taking a snapshot" section?

#NetBSD trip report: This reminds me highly of setting up Arch Linux in the mid-late 00's. Including being very confused how to get PulseAudio to work.

On the plus side, the wifi card in this laptop works (an Intel one) although the speed is maxing out at 54 mbits/sec. Graphics performance is pretty good as well given the Intel onboard GPU from a Broadwell CPU. Just need to figure out how to get sound to work...

(Intel HDA audio. audiocfg test has worked, but so far nothing else has...)

Finally got my old 2015-era laptop's NVIDIA Optimus card to disable under #NetBSD by following the instructions here by @bkrawczyk !

Had to change out the ACPI methods being called to the ones used by my laptop (in my case, \\_SB.PCI0.PEG0.PEGP._OFF and _ON) which I found by running a Linux live USB, blacklisting the nouveau module with modprobe.blacklist=nouveau installing the bbswitch module, reading the kernel log of the ACPI device found by it, unloading bbswitch, building and installing acpi_call, testing with that a bit, and then rebuilding the NetBSD kernel module with the new ACPI method.

Also I had to compile the NetBSD kernel without Nouveau built in.

I really should write this up on the NetBSD wiki or something...

(Or port bbswitch properly. But that runs into the problem of my test cases being a grand sample of one.)

@prokyonid To be fair, it’s worth noting that the process of installing #NetBSD on an SBC is also quite an adventure when you don't already have #NetBSD installed😉

https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/evbarm/allwinner/#index3h1

*Yes, I’m aware of the ready-made images for Raspberry and Pine, but—wouldn't you know it—I always end up with Mango, those odd Orange boards, and the like, which don't have ready-made images :)

Question: Is it possible to game on NetBSD or is it server and programmer only? Can you run steam on it? Is there Wine and Proton? Will modern AMD graphics cards work?

#NetBSD

Funny thing is that this Latitude and my eeePC have... different tastes in BSD when it comes to wifi to put it mildly.

The Latitude uses a wpi device... which NetBSD detects but doesn't like. #OpenBSD needs firmware, but it plays nice otherwise.

The eeePC has an ath device, which OpenBSD detects but doesn't like, and no firmware can satisfy it. #NetBSD is the only BSD that likes it in my experience.

New rule at BSD Cafe: Do not promote AI

BSD Cafe prefers to define itself by what it supports, rather than by what it opposes.

We support people, open technologies, decentralisation, technological independence, privacy, user control, the sharing of knowledge, and communities where technology remains a tool rather than becoming the authority.

For these reasons, we cannot support the current direction of AI and the ecosystem surrounding it.

Much of today's AI technology is developed and controlled by a very small number of extremely large companies, through an unprecedented concentration of computing power, data, infrastructure, and capital. This creates dependencies that are fundamentally at odds with many of the values this community was built around.

We are also seeing increasingly direct consequences for people. Skilled professionals are losing work to automated systems. Organisations are becoming dependent on services they cannot inspect, understand, or control. AI-generated technical advice is often presented with confidence while lacking essential context. Automation is being used to scale abuse, manipulation, spam, and attacks.

At the same time, fear of these threats can itself push people and organisations towards a handful of large centralised providers, further reinforcing the same concentration of power.

The problem is not simply the existence of artificial intelligence as a technology. The problem is how these technologies are currently being developed, deployed, controlled, marketed, and increasingly presented as an inevitable replacement for human skills, judgement, creativity, and interaction.

Too often, the message coming from the companies selling these systems is essentially: *this is inevitable, it will replace what you do, and you will have to adapt to it whether you want to or not.*

At the BSD Cafe, we believe there must always be another choice.

For this reason, we ask members **not to use BSD Cafe to promote, advertise, or evangelise AI services, or the idea that replacing human work and decision-making with AI is inherently desirable, inevitable, or something everyone should simply accept.**

This does not prevent discussion.

But please do not use this community to promote the current AI-driven model of technological centralisation and human replacement.

**"Own your data" and the current state of AI are simply not compatible.**

#BSDCafe #BSDCafeRules

@stefano ok, I 💯agree and fully understand. So what is your opinion about last #FreeBSD declaration about AI? Are you planning exchange FreeBSD with f.ex. #NetBSD? Many persons looks now in NetBSD direction.

I've installed the 64bit version of NetBSD on the Pi3. Mate works, but doesn't seem to be very well integrated with the system - it can't even mount/unmount a USB stick from GUI and "My Computer" leads nowhere. Everything is a bit slow. It doesn't use the full screen and I can't change the resolution from GUI. Firefox is unusable but Dillo works (and has that early Internet charm 😄).

Text mode has a number of bugs/performance issues. And the internal WiFi refused to work after a short while (though I remember that happening under Linux as well, perhaps a thermal problem).

I wasn't able to install sway, since it's not available for 64bit ARM. Also I've read somewhere that video acceleration is only available on 32bit. So I think I'm going to start over with 32bit and see if I can install sway.

#NetBSD #Mate

Welp, couldn't get sway to run on NetBSD. It complains that XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is not set. Seems like seatd is the solution, but I couldn't get that to work either.

I then tried various of X11 window managers, but the only one that I found marginally tolerable was fluxbox. I'd use i3, but they're open to LLM contributions sooo nope.

And on top of all that, I couldn't even install Mate anymore, the package just isn't there (even though it says it's available for earmv7hf in the online package list).

I found out where to set the screen resolution though (in the RPi's /boot/config.txt). But I couldn't find a configuration that really used the full screen resolution or at least a stretched 1080p.

#NetBSD #RaspberryPi

@Unsightly3055 We don't decide on which software to port to pkgsrc or not, it's just around 100 of us, plus contributors, who spend time creating and updating packages for things that we use.

We love it when people get involved and help out packaging up the software that they like and need, and we're looking forward to welcoming new contributors as they migrate from Linux.

Until then, yeh you can usually run Linux binaries using the emulation, or even still run VMs for a bit.

#netbsd #pkgsrc

If your timeline is full of man pages, kernel panic stories, ports trees, daemons, and unnecessarily opinionated discussions about which BSD is best… 👀

I’ll probably follow you. ❤️

Bonus points for FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and other niche UNIX wizardry. 🐡🖥️

#FreeBSD #OpenBSD #NetBSD #BSD #UNIX #Linux

@ricardo My $dayjob matches 100%. I love making bigtech match my donation to awesome FOSS 😊

#netbsd

@joelp @ricardo
My job as well, a big corp, matched at 100%. Thanks for reminding me of that possibility.

#netbsd