NetBSD and my life (2005)(mail-index.netbsd.org) |
NetBSD and my life (2005)(mail-index.netbsd.org) |
I've also used Gentoo professionally on many occasions, of course for one-off servers that I treated like pets early in my career, but also in a more cattle-like role. Had a custom updater that copied a new stage4 into a "B-Slot" (btrfs subvolume) from a golden master system. That contraption drove about ~25 POS systems for a small retail chain.
And it tought me to 'rice' NetBSD like Gentoo, being spoiled by its use-flags. Didn't translate 1 to 1 OFC, but was very noticable.
Also noticable were the many bugs you ran into on the way.
But...
No risk? No Fun!
No pain? No gain!
No idea where it is now but this post has inspired me to have a look.
OTOH it gave a very usable console at 132x60 on a 21" CRT, which NetBSD didn't at the time, at least not on X86. Its ports tree was also more comprehensive.
Imagine Lynx, (E)Links(2), W3M on that. Which were perfectly usable then!1!!
What else? Lemme think... the slow rebuild to MP from 4.4 to 5 made me abandon it.
By that time I've mastered NetBSD and gave a shit about the 132x60 textmode, because X with FVWM gave me so much more virtual desktop. It also used the 1.5GB Virtual Channel Memory SDRAM without having to do anything special, like under Linux, or FBSD, which somehow ran unstable with it.
I think the thing with the BSDs in general was the fact I didn’t always even need any extra software packages on them. The base install was that useful.
Two things:
1) “We were” (sorry I had to do it).
2) Why NetBSD? Why not FreeBSD or Debian or heck even Ubuntu Server or RHEL/CentOS (forgot it was 2005)?
Glad you got the spend more time with the family!
openbsd = security: internet exposed services
netbsd = portability: already ported / most easily portable to every cpu arch & platform including old and new obscure ones. If you want a big-endian os for whatever academic reason, it's netbsd on an old sun sparc or pi3. I had an HP Jornada that had a SH3 cpu and shipped with wince, the only alternative os on that was netbsd.
He might be from around London
I love the subtlety of the dual-use closing-parenthesis here.
even in 2005 this is abysmal. no reflection of netbsd tho - likely a terrible app.
It was a different time.
I think that all 3 of the BSD's have matured into GREAT server operating systems.
My work environment has for many years used FreeBSD as file servers, both with UFS / and most recently with ZFS. excellent performance!
of minor related interest, at the Santa Clara California restaurant 'Empress of India', both the original NetBSD development team and some of the Linux folks (Linus particularly, who lived a couple of blocks away), would dine at that same restaurant in the 1980's and early 1990's... ...The NetBSD folks would sometimes wear a shirt with a BSD daemon 'buttf' the Linux penguin from behind...
Linux has also matured into an impressive OS. I personally think that the principle *BSD/GNU/Linux crews all deserve to share in a Nobel peace prize for their impact on the world... Much more positive impact on the world than that gates-crap DOS/DimDoze.
Same solution, though...
2 little,
3 little-endian squirrels
hums a tune
It was... cyberpunk. I can't think of any other way to describe the aesthetic, the feel, of early Linux. All these bits and bobs written by many hands yet somehow working together, none of them beholden to how some corporate overlord felt I should be using my computer. I became aware of the suck of proprietary software even in 1995.
NetBSD is a lot like this, still even today. I love working with/in/on it.
because the optimizations I applied during compiling without really understanding them(at that time) gave me many, many surprises, or the potential of destroyed hardware?
Yes, you could overdrive your screens into magic blue smoke.
Or speaking wrong to some interface-card, say SCSI, or ATA-CDROM.
All of that could happen. I only suffered from destroyed filesystems, though.
Phew!
The base install _was_ useful. Can still do stuff like write, and those sorts of old packages still work, but browsers.... not so much.
Not true. There were many lesser known Distros like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Mage , or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T2_SDE which survived to this day.
I'd say the latter is running on more diverse hardware platforms than NetBSD, and actively developed and maintained :-)
Portable means just that: "Potentially portable if someone makes the effort."
Which NetBSD didn't in comparison.
And even if, it's lacking drivers for being fully featured.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system) would have been more practical.
If you had any of the less common things like your mention or mine though, it was pretty good for job hunting. FWIW, never heard of your suggestion (more surprised I hadn't). But a lot of things were word of mouth back then, if not Computerworld, or something like it. I personally liked QNX a sh-t ton.
The last time I touched Windows in a professional setting was about 2001. Yay! Finally! Good Riddance!
Later on I had (by then obsolete) Sparc stations, and smaller pizza-boxes with PA-RISC 7500, or something. And many X86s. I abused my large kitchen as 'Cyberkitchen', having arranged all the systems in one corner, along two empty walls in a right angle, sometimes even shaped like an U. When I came home while it was dark, before switching the lights on it looked like something out of Sci-Fi, with all the status LEDs glowing in different colors :-)
But I didn't have any of that stuff in my living or sleeping room. I've found 'couch surfing' to be uncomfortable/unergonomic, even with early laptops. Always a good office chair, and big, non-wobbly/vibrating desks at the right height, even if somehow improvised.
Didn't do much with QNX, because I only had the demo version. While very impressive, it seemed impractical for my use-cases. Similar for BeOS.
At the moment I feel really comfortable with CachyOS running Plasma/KDE, minus all the gaming stuff, which I'm not interested in.
Absolutely hassle-free since about 2 years, doing everything I need without any lag, in most wacky configuration like ZRAM over all the 32GB physical RAM, on BTRFS.
Plus profile-sync-deamon for holding the browser profile in RAM, too.
And syncing it back periodically to 'disk', err...SSD, making even good old Firefox(or a derivative like LibreFox) fly.
Oh, and working suspend/resume every single time. AHARR HARR HARR!1!!
I preferred Byte, UnixWorld, c't, and iX to Computerworld.
Edit: Since you've mentioned GNU/Hurd/QNX/BeOS, ever heard of https://chimera-linux.org ?
Or https://genode.org ? I find the latter to be a most interesting alternative to things like QNX/BeOS/Haiku. Especially since it has a native port of current QT. But I have been too lazy and spoiled by CachyOS to invest much time into it. Though it does boot into live mode from USB-Keychain on my hardware. Hrrrm. Decisions, decisions...
Pity you abandoned Windows before even winsock/trumpet came out.