luke8086 (u/luke8086)

luke8086 commented on NetBSD on a JavaStation fatsquirrel.org/oldfartsa... · Posted by u/jaypatelani

markus_zhang · 6 months ago

> Sun’s bootloader environment from that period was called OpenBoot, and consisted of a FORTH interpreter, from which you can interrogate the device tree and pretty much do whatever you want.

This sounds interesting. I have read quite a few FORTH posts on HN but never gave the thing a look. It is really different than anything I have looked at. For example, for functional languages I never got pass Scheme's ' symbol, but at least I get most of the syntax. FORTH really is another level.

luke8086 · 6 months ago

Bootloader developers used to be particularly fond of Forth.

For example, for many years the FreeBSD's 3rd-stage loader used FICL (Forth Inspired Command Language) for scripting [1]. It's still supported, although in the recent years it was deprecated in favor of Lua [2].

[1] https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/tree/main/stand/forth

[2] https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/tree/main/stand/lua

luke8086 commented on Show HN: FixBrowser – a lightweight web browser created from scratch fixbrowser.org/... · Posted by u/jezek2

frfrrf · 8 months ago

>Planned support for systems in the near future: Linux GTK3/4

FLTK is better then GTK on linux. Since version 1.4 FLTK supports HighDPI displays and Wayland https://www.fltk.org/articles.php?L1947 GTK3/4 and Qt5/6 are bloatware!

luke8086 · 8 months ago

This was also my first thought, but looks like it's already designed to be toolkit-agnostic, like NetSurf. So it should be easy to port to fltk or anything else.

  $ ls -1 fixgui_\*.c
  fixgui_cocoa.c
  fixgui_gtk.c
  fixgui_haiku.c
  fixgui_win32.c

luke8086 commented on Running NetBSD on IBM ThinkPad 380Z luke8086.dev/netbsd-on-th... · Posted by u/jaypatelani

AshamedCaptain · 8 months ago

> To me the article indicates he used a small root partition. Or did I miss something ?

The article explicitly says a single full disk partition was used -- it's right on the quote I used.

In any case, this is a BIOS limitation affecting all bootloaders from all operating systems. It has nothing to do with any particular BSD or OS, and you do not need to care if your computer is less than 20 years old.

luke8086 · 8 months ago

Yeah, you're right, sorry for the confusion! I've just rewritten this part to make it more clear.

luke8086 commented on Running NetBSD on IBM ThinkPad 380Z luke8086.dev/netbsd-on-th... · Posted by u/jaypatelani

1vuio0pswjnm7 · 8 months ago

"It doesn't matter to operating systems, but confuses some bootloaders. In general it's safer to use a smaller root partition and a separate one for /home. However, NetBSD worked just fine off a single full-disk partition."

A favourite component of NetBSD for me has always been the i386 bootloader. Perhaps it is personal taste but I have not found another one that I like better.

"Even NetBSD comes with some bloatware ;-) To save as much RAM as possible, you can turn it off by adding to /etc/rc.conf:

   inetd=NO
   postfix=NO
   cron=NO
   virecover=NO
   makemandb=NO
   powerd=NO
   syslogd=NO"

Isn't powerd off by default

For example, if install provided sets from https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-9.4/i386/binary/set...

Look at https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-9/src/etc/d...

"You can also reduce the amount of consoles by commenting them out in /etc/ttys."

By default only one tty is enabled

Look at https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-9/src/etc/e...

NetBSD might have some "bloatware" but _the user must enable it_ first

Everything is off by default. That is one of the things that makes NetBSD great IMHO

"I was able to fix it by adding usermod disable wss to the bootloader line."

Does he mean userconf

Another option is comment the driver out in the kernel source and recompile

For example https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-9/src/sys/a...

"... I think it's the ultimate UNIX to put on a spare, underpowered machine."

100%

Some folks who are not "developers" or gamers use underpowered computers every day

I've used it for decades as a daily driver

luke8086 · 8 months ago

> Isn't powerd off by default

Sometimes it's on, see https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-10/src/etc/...

> By default only one tty is enabled

Ah, but the rest is getting enabled by the installer, see https://github.com/NetBSD/src/blob/netbsd-10/usr.sbin/sysins...

> NetBSD might have some "bloatware" but _the user must enable it_ first

> Everything is off by default. That is one of the things that makes NetBSD great IMHO

I mean, it gets pretty close to that, and I don't even mind syslogd and powerd, but I'm confused why they enable stuff like postfix, inetd and makemandb without asking. Especially makemandb is pretty intensive on slow machines.

> "I was able to fix it by adding usermod disable wss to the bootloader line."

> Does he mean userconf

Whoopsie, that's on me, good catch!

luke8086 commented on Running NetBSD on IBM ThinkPad 380Z luke8086.dev/netbsd-on-th... · Posted by u/jaypatelani

jmclnx · 8 months ago

I like seeing all these NetBSD articles ob various sites. That OS, especially 10.0 seems to work great. I recently started using NetBSD again because I finally got a couple of free "older" thinkpads. My old hardware failed about 5 years ago and the Laptop I replaced it with has troubling hardware for both Open/NetBSD.

The 2 "new" systems (T430, T61) runs NetBSD without any issues. FWIW, if running a BSD you may want to add your dmesg here:

https://dmesgd.nycbug.org/

Also curious, what is that file manager in the print ?

luke8086 · 8 months ago

> Also curious, what is that file manager in the print ?

XFile - https://fastestcode.org/xfile.html

luke8086 commented on Running NetBSD on IBM ThinkPad 380Z luke8086.dev/netbsd-on-th... · Posted by u/jaypatelani

BSDobelix · 8 months ago

It's even less, as you can see 18 of those 32MB are cached stuff, but this is without X.

luke8086 · 8 months ago

On the other hand, note it only shows 133MB of total mem, rather than 160MB that is installed. I believe the missing 27MB is used by the kernel (the kernel file itself is 23MB) and its data structures.

That being said, I suspect 64MB could be enough for console-mode work, and if you recompiled the kernel without any unused drivers, perhaps you could make it under 32MB.

luke8086 commented on Running NetBSD on IBM ThinkPad 380Z luke8086.dev/netbsd-on-th... · Posted by u/jaypatelani

AshamedCaptain · 8 months ago

> In general it's safer to use a smaller root partition and a separate one for /home. However, NetBSD worked just fine off a single full-disk partition.

Right until there is an update or anything and a bootloader or one of its required files gets written past the 8GB barrier, rendering your system unbootable.

luke8086 · 8 months ago

Yeah, I suspect so!

To be honest, I wouldn't notice this issue at all, if it wasn't for FreeBSD which refused to boot right off the bat. It has a more advanced bootloader though, so perhaps it does some extra sanity checks.

luke8086 commented on Show HN: Retronews – TUI for HN and Lobsters emulating classical Usenet readers github.com/luke8086/retro... · Posted by u/luke8086

johnisgood · a year ago

How come it is 80x25 instead of 80x24 (default dimensions for XTerm)?

luke8086 · a year ago

Interesting, I never noticed that 80x24 resolution. Apparently it's been inherited from VT100.

Now 80x25 was the standard text mode of IBM PC, which I'm much more familiar with. I used it because I was testing (over telnet) on some retro ones.