sometimes i miss simpler days. this is a fresh install of netbsd in a vm. /sbin/init is 36K. there is no desktop environment beyond vanilla x11 with ctwm. by all appearances, this could pass for #retrocomputing.
if I were to start learning more about one of the listed BSD operating systems, which would you recommend? Guessing the answer could be different if we're talking about daily desktop usage vs server, so maybe clarify your answer via a reply if you can (fwiw, probably more interested in daily desktop usage, but open to whatever too).
Hey #BSD friends. I want to try some bsd as my daly driver. Work and everything and I need some help to find live systems to try on my hardware. Any recomendation? #freebsd, #openbsd, #netbsd will work for me.
I have run a dozen or so automated tests on #NetBSD 10 BETA over the last 2 weeks to see which of the #Heisenbergars remain intermittent and how much so. I used multiple architectures (arm and amd64), finding some tests fail between 10% and 100% (no failures get you kicked out of the club), some from 1% to 10% and even some that fail less than 1% of the time. Pesky #Bugs !
can someone ELI5 why #FreeBSD, #OpenBSD, and #NetBSD don't share package manager? I get that they need need different binaries, but why each has their own way to package install?
My SO made me the lovely diamond painting attached to this Toot.
I was asked (some moons ago) to join the EuroBSDcon board - which I humbly accepted.
My talk for EuroBSDcon 2023 in Coimbra, Portugal was accepted.
I feel so incredibly honored to serve the BSD community that I fall short of words. Thank you all, really - from the bottom of my h3art (pun intended) :flan_heart:
Evening reflection, observing the little Raspberry Pi A that manages the outdoor lights (powered by FreeBSD): one of the reasons I chose FreeBSD over other BSDs and Linux is the ease of running it in read-only mode when installed on a UFS file system.
Just change "rw" to "ro" in /etc/fstab, and upon the next reboot, the system will operate in read-only mode.
For systems with unstable power or the potential for dirty reboots (especially when using memory cards not optimized for frequent writes), this can ensure near-infinite file system longevity.
This has often saved remote systems, even those powered by batteries or solar panels, from corruption and inaccessibility. Achieving the same with OpenBSD or NetBSD isn't difficult, as they always write to specific locations (easily mountable in RAM file systems), while many Linux distributions (except Alpine and a few others) tend to write all over the place, making the operation more complex.
Sharing some technical details about how I'm setting up the hosted email service. It will not be a service of BSD Cafe but tied to my own business. It will run entirely on BSD systems and on bare metal, NOT on "cloud" VPS. It will use FreeBSD jails or OpenBSD or NetBSD VMs (but on bhyve, on a leased server - I do not want user data to be stored on disks managed by others). The services (opensmtpd and rspamd, dovecot, redis, mysql, etc.) will run on separate jails/VMs, so compromising one service will NOT put the others at risk. Emails will be stored on encrypted ZFS datasets - so all emails are encrypted at rest - and only dovecot will have access to the mail datasets. I'm also considering the possibility of encrypting individual emails with the user's login password - but I still have to thoroughly test this. The setup will be fully redundant (double mx for SMTP, a domain for external IMAP access that will be managed through smart DNS - which will distribute the connections on the DNS side and, in case of a server down, will stop resolving its IP, sending all the connections to the other. Obviously, everything will be accessible in both ipv4 and ipv6 and in two different European countries, on two different providers. Synchronization will occur through dovecot's native sync (extremely stable and tested). All technical choices will be clearly explained - the goal of this service is to provide maximum transparency to users on how things will be handled.
<< Let me just say, I liked #NetBSD as soon as it booted [...], even though I didn’t know how to get it to do anything. [...] NetBSD felt small & light & stable. If #Manjaro was a very smart, powerful person who was overcaffeinated & under-rested [...] NetBSD was an aging but good-natured accountant, quietly & placidly adding sums by hand over its spectacles, while sipping tea. >>
Tinkering with Manjaro & NetBSD on the Pinebook Pro