It's Saturday, so we sudo dd if=NetBSD-11.0-amd64-install.img of=/dev/disk6 for a fresh NetBSD install.

The USB stick with NetBSD is prepared, the laptop is ready to go, the bootloader finds the OS, and then... The OS immediately fails to boot because it couldn't find the installation USB disk it was booting from.

Might have been a fluke, might have been an issue with some of the USB ports - I moved the stick to a different port, and things started to move.

The laptop is a second-hand (third-hand?) Dell with 11th generation Intel. It's not the best laptop for NetBSD, but with some tweaks, it is workable. I have had it working, but my ArcaOS install destroyed my partitioning table, so I want a fresh install, ideally with the encrypted root partition.

NetBSD installer does not play nicely on the laptop. The kernel log messages keep overwriting the text user interface, sometimes breaking the interface completely. Some disk operations cause the installer to crash.

I was hoping to get a new encrypted partition right out of the box, but it seems the menu-driven installer doesn't support it. Worse still, trying to delete existing partitions caused crashes, making it a really frustrating experience. I had to ask the installer to erase the disk, and even after that, trying to use modern GPT disk partition over legacy MBR disk partition caused the installer to crash.

Oh well, I'm frustrated enough, so I'll redo it in a moment. For now it'd be MBR.

Okay, this is the status of my NetBSD install for now. The system has been installed, and it can boot into X. I can't find my WiFi dongle, but I can use my Ethernet, so there's enough to get me started.

For now, I'm going to re-do the installation with the disk encryption, following this guide: https://www.dwarmstrong.org/netbsd-encrypt-install/

Some more photos after I'm done/during the next break.

@nina_kali_nina how'd it go?

@ravenlb it's still on-going. I had it working, but I want to re-do the installation

@shia I don't know what ventoy is, but I just dd'd the image from my Darwin

@nina_kali_nina there's something strangely comforting about how that x looks... maybe it's giving amiga?

@0x47df Indeed. I think this is probably due to the screen scaling

This time, I followed the manual on NetBSD install with the disk encryption from https://www.dwarmstrong.org/netbsd-encrypt-install/ by @dwarmstrong
(many thanks!) and it was surprisingly smooth. Things just worked exactly as the manual said.

It is not for people without *nix experience, though: the manual expects you to have at least the basic knowledge of the shell and your computer. It doesn't require you to have a second computer with ssh, but it makes things far easier.

Half an hour later, and we have the desktop working again.

Things to do next:

• fix screen resolution (easy),
• add a mirror for binary packages,
• install a few things to make the life comfortable (a desktop manager, a web browser, and other things I want to have)

aceBSD?

@nina_kali_nina At least the swap partitions are always encrypted already (sysctl vm.swap_encrypt = 1).
It seems weird you had such trouble with sysinst, but I have to admit I don't use it for upgrades, so I don't use it very often at all.

@rhialto yeah, I think if I stick with NetBSD, I'd have to figure out why it was so broken, and maybe submit patches

@nina_kali_nina it's been some decades since I saw screens like this. 🙃

@knowprose I want to mention that NetBSD has KDE and XFCE packaged for it, it's just not installed by default.

@nina_kali_nina Patches are always welcome.
In a pinch, NetBSD can be installed "manually" but it is more tedious. The main steps are partitioning, extracting all wanted sets (taking care to use the tar option to preserve file modes and ownership) and then the "little things" postinstall is doing. And putting the boot loader files in the right place.

@rhialto this is fun!

@nina_kali_nina @rhialto NetBSD suffers/benefits a lot from the itches particular developers want to scratch. NetBSD-11 is the first release that runs really well on the Wii :), and you can boot smolBSD in just over 10ms, but we could definitely benefit from more people who want to scratch at the installer :-p

@abs0 @rhialto <3

The lunch break is over, migrating to NetBSD continues. First things first, fixing the resolution.

The laptop is 11th gen Intel with Iris Xe, which is not supported by NetBSD's port of i915drm yet. So, the graphics is going through llvmpipe. The resolution it chooses by default is "safe one", instead of the native panel resolution. Fixing the resolution required adding gop 0 in the /boot.cfg file for my default boot option.

Now I can add packages, and install a desktop environment, a browser, and other stuff!

Adding binary packages to NetBSD isn't that difficult. Normally, one would use pkgsrc, which is a very well documented procedure - as most things in NetBSD. This is usually done by configuring a mirror in the command line (I still use an ssh session to the laptop for it), and installing pkgin by calling pkg_add pkgin.

Due to my non-conventional setup, I somehow didn't have SSL certificates installed, so I had to bring them to the laptop and install manually.

Ta-dah, desktop NetBSD OS on a laptop! pkgin install xfce4 xfce4-extras firefox140-esr FiraCode, followed by enabling dbus in rc.d and just using startxfce4 from the command line.

The lack of graphical acceleration hurts a little bit, but the system is usable. Keyboard and touchpad are working, and so does sound and video. Playing videos from YouTube works (unless they're full-screen, then things start to lag due to video driver not being up to date).

This is a good start.

@nina_kali_nina basilisk is availible in netbsd official repos?

@mittorn I see BasiliskII-20190405nb19.tgz in the pkgsrc

@nina_kali_nina how is glxgears and glxinfo?

@montyontherun glxgears shows some really high numbers, but it is a lie. The renderer is Mesa swrast(?) over llvmpipe.

@nina_kali_nina what font is that? (the sans serif one in your browser that looks like the old apple font)

@chinmay Yeah, the fonts are a bit borked. Firefox insists it's Lucida but I'm not so sure.

@nina_kali_nina so, very old versions :(

@mittorn depending on its dependencies, it might not be too difficult to compile a newer one - there are just not that many maintainers

@mittorn I grabbed the latest sources recommended by emaculation (last commit from a week ago, it seems), and managed to compile them following the instructions without much troubles. I didn't need any patches, just had to install gmake, autotools and pkg-config. With self-compiled BasiliskII I could boot into an emulated Quadra 900 without any issues.

@nina_kali_nina its a fresh BSD + xfce install kind of weekend. Getting use out of ancient thin client ewaste.

Good luck with the NetBSD journey!

@Officeplant nice~

@nina_kali_nina i meant old firefox fork, but this cool too :)

@mittorn Oh, this one https://www.basilisk-browser.org/ ? Then the current port is at basilisk-2025.10.10nb3.tgz

@nina_kali_nina swrast is a legacy name. AFAIK, this is just llvmpipe using a fake moustache.

But if the numbers are good, this is enough :)

@montyontherun There's no vsync, so the render is really not smooth

@Officeplant @nina_kali_nina nice, you’re tempting to find my old tosh r600 and stick NetBSD on it for kicks.

What’s the glitzy top/htop style you’ve got running there?

@Officeplant @nina_kali_nina it’s a very long time since I last ran NetBSD, and never as a desktop OS. The install went smoothly. Looks like this could be fun 😎

Now to install some software and make it useful!

@WiteWulf @Officeplant have fun! 🥰

@nina_kali_nina you probably are already aware but beware xfce they are courting slop.

i hope this isn’t gonna ruin your day

@cyberquixote yeah, I'm aware. Going to migrate to something else in the future, when I'll figure out what

@jmorris 🫠 not everything that is posted online is supposed to be executed

@nina_kali_nina do you mind if I ask what that fascination of NetBSD is over say a self proclaimed lightweight Linux? Is it more efficient in memory / cpu etc? More secure? More customisable? All of the above :)

I've got an old Pentium 3 era Centrino cpu laptop with 1.5Gb ram which doesn't like the Linux kernel above 2.4 so it's stuck on winxp (yeah I know) and doesn't get used as a result which I'm guessing is a good candidate?

@Pionir I think you'll be able to run the latest NetBSD on it without much problem. I have a Mac Classic II that I used with NetBSD 10 (that used to be latest stable back then) for a short while, without X11 though

@cyberquixote @nina_kali_nina Do you have a source for this? This is something I've been hearing recently & I wanted to read about it.

@jackemled @cyberquixote https://blog.xfce.org/2026/07/