Interesting perspective. sysinst could certainly use better ergonomics, but I wonder whether he’s really approaching NetBSD like a typical user would - someone after a classic Unix experience on modern hardware.
With an old-school Unix mindset myself, I’ve always found the CLI installers of OpenBSD and Alpine Linux cleaner, more straightforward and in line with that philosophy. Honestly, I’d rather see sysinst replaced by something along those lines.
I've had the classic Unix experience. It's not something that a typical user of the 21st century would either want or enjoy. There was everything from modem line noise to whether it was BS or DEL this week that actually erased a character. And yes, things like what is pointed out in the article: output from other places randomly overwriting the UI of a full-screen (curses) program.
We who lived through the classic Unix experience also remember how at the time MS/PC/DR-DOS had things that we 300 BPS terminal users could but dream of, like an Alt key that just worked and highlighted menu option accelerators when one pressed it. And function keys that didn't just cause a mess, or beeps, or surprise commands to happen.
Typical users of the 21st century would be appalled when faced with it. And there's probably no retrocomputing enthusiast that is quite that masochistic. (-:
Much of what sysinst does is just farmed out to tar, pkg_add, ifconfig, and other programs. It even handily prints their command lines at the top of the screen when they are running. So someone who wants a CLI rather than a TUI, and not really the actual "classic Unix experience", could just run those programs. And there's probably room for an installer that does the same thing as sysinst but in the old text-adventure-game style of print-menu-prompt-for-line-with-selection for people with printer terminals. (-:
But don't knock full screen TUI programs like sysinst. There's definitely a place for them, and on the commercial Unices, where the vendors had gone to some effort to make the installation and configuration programs user-friendly, they were the "classic Unix experience". SCO had one, for example. They even managed to have it recognize F1 for help.
Function keys. F1 for help. This stuff for contemporary Unix people was like the "Classic MS-DOS experience", but at the time when PC users were using GUI installation programs in DOS+Windows 3. (-:
I'm not sure anyone invoking "classic Unix" is pining for modem noise or line printers, though that seems to be how you're interpreting it. That’s more a caricature of early computing than what defines the Unix philosophy or what NetBSD preserves.
When I say classic Unix, I really mean "simple software":
- Text-first, scriptable interfaces where tools do one thing well and can be composed
- Human-readable configuration in plain files, no XML or opaque binary blobs
- Predictable, minimal system design where you can understand what’s happening under the hood without chasing abstraction layers
- Manual pages that matter, and a userspace that favors understanding over wizard-driven opacity
- A system that’s BSD-like in spirit: clean, coherent, documented, and built by people who care more about correctness and clarity than flash or trends
This is in contrast to modern Linux distributions where systems are often a tangled mess of systemd units, layers of more or less obscure daemons and processes, unpredictable behaviors, and YAML/JSON/XML-based abstractions that sit between you and the actual system.
So no, I'm not glorifying the past or pretending users in 2025 would enjoy a serial terminal setup from 1984. I’m saying that a clean, simple, consistent, modular Unix, in the traditional sense, is still valuable and NetBSD is one of the few OSes that still embodies that ethos.
It's an impossible task to meet what typical 21st century users expect. For that, the OS would have to come pre-installed.
Furthermore, most typical users today are so entrenched in commercial software, and their walled gardens they wouldn't even attempt to use an OS without that software.
The OpenBSD and Alpine Linux CLI installers are honestly a high-water mark for me when it comes to high risk applications where getting it wrong might mean a bricked installation. More people should book out 20 minutes to just spin up a VM and try them out for themselves, to see how nice a good old fashioned command line approach can be!
A rather fair review and the partitioning step can be confusing to new users. A first time user should read the Guide a few times and maybe refer to it during install. It renders fine on a smartphone.
I had never seen this before. Although I am now trying out lagrange and seeing what it can do.
Sorry for hijacking the thread on what is a great post, but is gemini common these days? This is literally the first time I have ever seen it, and it seems fairly interesting, albeit deliberately limited.
Many HN users can’t seem to get past some minor issues about the spec. Despite this, it’s a working protocol that has a critical mass of real world users, mostly bloggers (which is what the spec author mostly had in mind). One of my blogs on Gemini has a “like” button and it gets several clicks a week, indicating that people are indeed reading my content in Gemspace.
That would be one way to do it, certainly. It's boring, though. (-:
There is another. In NetBSD one can, at least according to the manual, open the wsdisplay of the relevant terminal and read out the display contents, with the WSDISPLAYIO_GETWSCHAR I/O control. sysinst is just a full-screen TUI program.
(The manual says that character values are "ASCII", but the data structure uses a 16-bit unsigned integer for them. So I wonder whether this is UCS-2 or NetBSD has been saddled with some 512-entry character set mess from back in the 1990s.)
Presumably there is a third one if the virtual terminal's wsdisplay is in graphics mode and one can access its frame buffer.
There was also a fourth for the serial console screenshots, although they were clearly done the boring way by screenshotting a GUI window, as its scrollbars are visible in the images. Presumably the terminal emulator at the other end of the connection had some sort of direct screen shotting functionality. That was definitely something that serial device DTE emulator programs in the days of yore used to have.
That's an interesting thought, actually. I wonder whether one could do that at all with many Unix/Linux tools, like GNU screen in its serial terminal mode. One could with (some of) the terminal emulators that used to be available for MS/PC/DR-DOS. There would be some "dump screen to file" menu option, or in extremis a TSR program that could do that. (-:
Did not have "being jelaous of NetBSD wscons framework" on my bingo card.
How does one make a "screenshot" of a TUI program? The classic terminal APIs don't have a "framebuffer" (or "textbufffer" I guess) from what I can tell.
I could use such a mechanism to create automated screenshots of a TUI program (using Terminal.GUI in this case) for documentation generation.
That's what I understood as well. Also, the author mentions:
> The installation succeeded, but the system would panic during boot. *Bhyve is more of a niche thing and not among the hypervisors supported by NetBSD*, [...]
I am guessing what he meant was rather "the support of NetBSD (as a guest OS) by the hypervisor Bhyve", because Bhyve is an hypervisor running on FreeBSD. Given the other posts on the blog, it would not be surprising if the author was daily driving FreeBSD while doing this experiment, and Bhyve is well maintained and probably the best fit in the BSD world for this. I don't even know if OpenBSD's vmm can virtualize something else than OpenBSD.
> Q: What VM operating systems does bhyve support?
> A: bhyve supports any version of FreeBSD i386/amd64. OpenBSD, NetBSD, illumos and GNU/Linux are supported using the UEFI and the sysutils/grub2-bhyve port.
You also can set timeouts and switch between virtual terminals.
PS: I’m love good TUIs. Clean and concise and it is surprising how well user can use them. If - they’re well made. I think the installer of Debian or Linux menuconfig are good examples.
Cheapest HDMI splitters are ~$10 and compressing capture cards are ~$5, it's not hard or expensive anymore to capture display contents at emergency or illustrative use quality if these weren't VM screenshots or taken through OS feature.
For completeness, as I pointed out on the FediVerse: The article has things backwards when it comes to partition table schemes. It's the older firmwares that place the requirement on what partitioning scheme is used; not the newer ones. So the suggested change to one of the forms, as it stands, would be telling users the wrong thing.
And Ed Maste has confirmed that FreeBSD is quite happy to accept non-U.S. keyboard layouts, contrary to the implication that NetBSD accepts them where FreeBSD has not. Even more ones, that is. (-:
This is the same question as: Why does changing the number of items to zero in an item line in an order on one's on-line shopping cart delete the entire item line? And the answer lies in the same user expectations from collective experience of this, rightly or no, being the model.
From the perspective of the pure techicalities, disregarding the shared user experience model, a size zero partition will break a lot of stuff, as there's a lot of stuff that assumes that DASD slices have at least one block, a VBR or a superblock of some kind that determines the volume format.
There's probably an enormous amount of code in firmwares, boot loaders, operating systems, and applications programs that does not check that block 0 is legally within the DASD slice limits. Although the ones that look for superblocks in other than block 0 might do such range checks, there's almost always an assumption that of course there is a block 0.
A case in point is the MBR in block 0 of the entire DASD, used by old firmwares to load the VBR of the bootable volume. There's often no check for a non-zero size in such code.
Here's OpenBSD's MBR code, just for starters. It has no range checking for zero size partitions.
Readit News
With an old-school Unix mindset myself, I’ve always found the CLI installers of OpenBSD and Alpine Linux cleaner, more straightforward and in line with that philosophy. Honestly, I’d rather see sysinst replaced by something along those lines.
We who lived through the classic Unix experience also remember how at the time MS/PC/DR-DOS had things that we 300 BPS terminal users could but dream of, like an Alt key that just worked and highlighted menu option accelerators when one pressed it. And function keys that didn't just cause a mess, or beeps, or surprise commands to happen.
Typical users of the 21st century would be appalled when faced with it. And there's probably no retrocomputing enthusiast that is quite that masochistic. (-:
Much of what sysinst does is just farmed out to tar, pkg_add, ifconfig, and other programs. It even handily prints their command lines at the top of the screen when they are running. So someone who wants a CLI rather than a TUI, and not really the actual "classic Unix experience", could just run those programs. And there's probably room for an installer that does the same thing as sysinst but in the old text-adventure-game style of print-menu-prompt-for-line-with-selection for people with printer terminals. (-:
Like AIX 7's installer:
* https://ibm.com/docs/en/aix/7.3.0?topic=system-using-bos-men...
But don't knock full screen TUI programs like sysinst. There's definitely a place for them, and on the commercial Unices, where the vendors had gone to some effort to make the installation and configuration programs user-friendly, they were the "classic Unix experience". SCO had one, for example. They even managed to have it recognize F1 for help.
* https://sco.com/products/openserver6/reviewers_guide2.html
Function keys. F1 for help. This stuff for contemporary Unix people was like the "Classic MS-DOS experience", but at the time when PC users were using GUI installation programs in DOS+Windows 3. (-:
When I say classic Unix, I really mean "simple software":
- Text-first, scriptable interfaces where tools do one thing well and can be composed
- Human-readable configuration in plain files, no XML or opaque binary blobs
- Predictable, minimal system design where you can understand what’s happening under the hood without chasing abstraction layers
- Manual pages that matter, and a userspace that favors understanding over wizard-driven opacity
- A system that’s BSD-like in spirit: clean, coherent, documented, and built by people who care more about correctness and clarity than flash or trends
This is in contrast to modern Linux distributions where systems are often a tangled mess of systemd units, layers of more or less obscure daemons and processes, unpredictable behaviors, and YAML/JSON/XML-based abstractions that sit between you and the actual system.
So no, I'm not glorifying the past or pretending users in 2025 would enjoy a serial terminal setup from 1984. I’m saying that a clean, simple, consistent, modular Unix, in the traditional sense, is still valuable and NetBSD is one of the few OSes that still embodies that ethos.
If an OS has to be installed by the end user, it is niche.
Furthermore, most typical users today are so entrenched in commercial software, and their walled gardens they wouldn't even attempt to use an OS without that software.
People don't own their devices anymore.
https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/
One thing to note, if you create a separate /usr and/or /var partition, y0u really should (must) add this line or similar line to /etc/rc.conf
critical_filesystems_local="/var /usr"
otherwise you will get odd boot errors/warnings, Dir order does not matter.
The perspective of an otherwise knowledgeable user who is new to something is incredibly valuable.
Some links:
https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/specification.gmi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
Sorry for hijacking the thread on what is a great post, but is gemini common these days? This is literally the first time I have ever seen it, and it seems fairly interesting, albeit deliberately limited.
Annoyingly the learn more about it link https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ is now dead, as possibly might be protocol.
Edit: no it just redirects to https://geminiprotocol.net which seems to be the new official site
There is another. In NetBSD one can, at least according to the manual, open the wsdisplay of the relevant terminal and read out the display contents, with the WSDISPLAYIO_GETWSCHAR I/O control. sysinst is just a full-screen TUI program.
* https://man.netbsd.org/wsdisplay.4
(The manual says that character values are "ASCII", but the data structure uses a 16-bit unsigned integer for them. So I wonder whether this is UCS-2 or NetBSD has been saddled with some 512-entry character set mess from back in the 1990s.)
Presumably there is a third one if the virtual terminal's wsdisplay is in graphics mode and one can access its frame buffer.
There was also a fourth for the serial console screenshots, although they were clearly done the boring way by screenshotting a GUI window, as its scrollbars are visible in the images. Presumably the terminal emulator at the other end of the connection had some sort of direct screen shotting functionality. That was definitely something that serial device DTE emulator programs in the days of yore used to have.
That's an interesting thought, actually. I wonder whether one could do that at all with many Unix/Linux tools, like GNU screen in its serial terminal mode. One could with (some of) the terminal emulators that used to be available for MS/PC/DR-DOS. There would be some "dump screen to file" menu option, or in extremis a TSR program that could do that. (-:
How does one make a "screenshot" of a TUI program? The classic terminal APIs don't have a "framebuffer" (or "textbufffer" I guess) from what I can tell.
I could use such a mechanism to create automated screenshots of a TUI program (using Terminal.GUI in this case) for documentation generation.
> Both installations will be in VMs just for the sake of convenience.
> The installation succeeded, but the system would panic during boot. *Bhyve is more of a niche thing and not among the hypervisors supported by NetBSD*, [...]
I am guessing what he meant was rather "the support of NetBSD (as a guest OS) by the hypervisor Bhyve", because Bhyve is an hypervisor running on FreeBSD. Given the other posts on the blog, it would not be surprising if the author was daily driving FreeBSD while doing this experiment, and Bhyve is well maintained and probably the best fit in the BSD world for this. I don't even know if OpenBSD's vmm can virtualize something else than OpenBSD.
From https://wiki.freebsd.org/bhyve :
> Q: What VM operating systems does bhyve support?
> A: bhyve supports any version of FreeBSD i386/amd64. OpenBSD, NetBSD, illumos and GNU/Linux are supported using the UEFI and the sysutils/grub2-bhyve port.
https://github.com/GunnarMonell/fbgrab
You also can set timeouts and switch between virtual terminals.
PS: I’m love good TUIs. Clean and concise and it is surprising how well user can use them. If - they’re well made. I think the installer of Debian or Linux menuconfig are good examples.
And Ed Maste has confirmed that FreeBSD is quite happy to accept non-U.S. keyboard layouts, contrary to the implication that NetBSD accepts them where FreeBSD has not. Even more ones, that is. (-:
* https://mastodon.social/@emaste/114625612735189948
Why would the installer discard them if you created them ? Do what i mean, not what i say ?
From the perspective of the pure techicalities, disregarding the shared user experience model, a size zero partition will break a lot of stuff, as there's a lot of stuff that assumes that DASD slices have at least one block, a VBR or a superblock of some kind that determines the volume format.
There's probably an enormous amount of code in firmwares, boot loaders, operating systems, and applications programs that does not check that block 0 is legally within the DASD slice limits. Although the ones that look for superblocks in other than block 0 might do such range checks, there's almost always an assumption that of course there is a block 0.
A case in point is the MBR in block 0 of the entire DASD, used by old firmwares to load the VBR of the bootable volume. There's often no check for a non-zero size in such code.
Here's OpenBSD's MBR code, just for starters. It has no range checking for zero size partitions.
* https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/9213be19d4b9057bbb074ab1...