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NetBSD as a workstation OS
I'm planning to test NetBSD as a workstation OS on my home computer (primarily on my old laptop, but possibly also on my newer home desktop machine).
One particular problem I seem to reacll from my previous attempts to install NetBSD was that that I had trouble accessing ext2 formatted removable media. So how do you manage your removable media on NetBSD? What filesystem do you prefer for removable media? Do you have any advices for someone who would like to try NetBSD as a workstation OS on a home computer? |
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I'm not trying to discourage you but of the 3 major BSDs, NetBSD seems to take the most work. Particulary to set up a one of the major desktops. You will learn
alot in the process but success is not likely to come on your first attempt. A lot depends on the source of packages you use (pkgsrc vs precompiled binaries). Most removable media (thumb driver, flash cards) does not come ext2 formatted but msdos (msdosfs) formated. Usually a mid level user can be reformat the media to ext2. NetBSD should support the ext2 filesystem as well as msdosfs. I am not sure what your goal is but if you want to get your feet wet with a BSD I would recommend OpenBSD as being the easiest. The FAQ is accurate, succinct and up to date. |
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The advantage of NetBSD that I'm particularly interested in is that pkgsrc includes an up-to-date version of the LyX document processing program, which is compatible with the LyX version that I have used in some Linux distros. The versions of LyX that are available in FreeBSD and OpenBSD are older, and not compatible with the LyX documents that I have written in Linux.
I'd rather continue using Linux because that's what I'm used to, but the recent changes in Xorg break the graphical interface on my old laptop (although the older versions of Xorg worked just fine). The problem seems to be related to the close integration with the Linux framebuffer console and the newly introduced Intel Linux KMS, so I thought perhaps a BSD system might be worth a try because BSD's don't use a similar framebuffer console as Linux distros. I need to study this issue a bit more. Perhaps I'll find that NetBSD suits my needs, or perhaps it doesn't. There are also a couple of other aspects where I suspect NetBSD might excel in comparison to the Linux systems I've used so far -- like leaving the system alone for several months and still being able to upgrade applications without any major breakages. But my main concern is currently to see if I can make NetBSD work as a workstation OS with a graphical interface. And that's why I asked for NetBSD users who actually use this operating system as a workstation OS to share their experiences. |
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That is depens on your graphics card mostly (if there are accelerated 2D drivers availabe).
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religions, worst damnation of mankind "If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened." Linus Torvalds Linux is not UNIX! Face it! It is not an insult. It is fact: GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU's Not UNIX”. vermaden's: links resources deviantart spreadbsd |
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The graphics controller on the old laptop is Intel 82830M. I seem to recall that you need to recompile the NetBSD kernel to get the the best performance out of Intel graphics controllers.
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I have set up NetBSD with XFCE4 and one of the problems I recall was the choice
of Xorg. You can use the sets that come with the install CD or install a modular Xorg. Google for 'modular xorg NetBSD wiki' for more on this. Your post indicates you will pull LyX from pkgsrc so I would install the Modular Xorg from the same version of pkgsrc. I'm running Arch linux and recall that there are alot of on wikis on how to disable KMS. Xorg 1.8 just went into testing in Arch Linux. Another thought. I'm not familiar with LyX but Slackware has version 1.6.3 in the SlackBuilds page. I have had some sucess editing the build scripts to newer versions. This may be one way to get an new version of LyX with an older Xorg. http://www.slackbuilds.org/repository/13.0/office/ Last edited by shep; 30th April 2010 at 02:11 PM. Reason: another thought |
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Hmm... I'd rather use the version of Xorg that comes with the default install, but I'll check out the wiki page if it doesn't work. I don't have too much time to work on my NetBSD installation over this weekend, but I'm going to work on it a bit more perhaps sometime next week. Thanks for the tips, though.
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I seem to recall that NetBSD doesn't support some newer features in ext2, so you need to be careful in formatting removable drives as ext2 if you want to make sure that NetBSD can read them. I think I read about this in NetBSD documetation, but that was years ago. I'll have another look when I get some free time. |
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Speaking of LyX I hope you know that much that LyX is just WYSIWYM for TeX. Official TeX distribution for Unix is TeXLive. Current TeXLive release is 2009. Since TeXLive release cycle is one year you are not going to see new release until December 2010. While I concede that NetBSD port of TeXLive is far more granular than OpenBSD port bare in mind that OpenBSD was second OS after Debian to have TeXLive. The OpenBSD port is current (2009) and exceptionally well maintained. If you need to use TeX you will have to live with GNU bloat anyway so you might as well install whole 1 GB of non-sense even though it is possible to install just core which is the size of teTeX and just manually add what you need. As of LyX port of OpenBSD I can say just one thing. LyX uses Qt 4.5 libraries. Qt 4.xxx requires GCC version of 4.xxx or above. GCC 4.xxx doesn't compile on OpenBSD due to bugs. Hence you can not have Qt 4.xxx on OpenBSD and in turn you can not have KDE 4.xxx nor LyX in OpenBSD. GCC upstream has never been interested in OpenBSD patches. They are interested only in supporting Linux. OpenBSD community at this point has completely given up on GCC and we are eagerly awaiting PCC. Fortunately unlike GCC bloat PCC is C only compiler so it can not compile C++ code used for Qt. I am not aware that there is much concern about that in OpenBSD community as there is little love for C++ anyway. Speaking of FreeBSD you are right. TeXLive is not officially ported to FreeBSD even though there are some unofficial ports circulating. At this point it looks like FreeBSD will never get TeXLive port. All complains regarding TeXLive on FreeBSD should be sent to professor Hiroci Sato of Tokio university who have single-handedly killed TeX on FreeBSD. Cheers, OKO |
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I find it kind of weird that *BSD systems and Linux don't seem to be in talking terms. Mounting Linux file systems on a *BSD system is difficult, and Linux seems to have equally poor support for the BSD ufs/ffs file systems. These are all FOSS, which means that the source code is available for everyone, so it's a bit of a mystery to me why BSD and Linux cannot exchange files more easily. |
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From my OpenBSD amd64 box
Code:
$ ls -l /sbin/newfs* -r-xr-xr-x 2 root bin 193656 Apr 4 00:45 /sbin/newfs -r-xr-xr-x 1 root bin 160888 Apr 4 00:45 /sbin/newfs_ext2fs -r-xr-xr-x 1 root bin 177272 Apr 4 00:45 /sbin/newfs_msdos $ ls -l /sbin/mount* -r-xr-xr-x 1 root bin 148600 Apr 4 00:45 /sbin/mount -r-xr-xr-x 1 root bin 87160 Apr 4 00:45 /sbin/mount_cd9660 -r-xr-xr-x 1 root bin 83064 Apr 4 00:45 /sbin/mount_ext2fs -r-xr-xr-x 1 root bin 83064 Apr 4 00:45 /sbin/mount_ffs -r-xr-xr-x 2 root bin 193656 Apr 4 00:45 /sbin/mount_mfs -r-xr-xr-x 1 root bin 201848 Apr 4 00:45 /sbin/mount_msdos -r-xr-xr-x 1 root bin 185464 Apr 4 00:45 /sbin/mount_nfs -r-xr-xr-x 1 root bin 83064 Apr 4 00:45 /sbin/mount_nnpfs -r-xr-xr-x 1 root bin 87160 Apr 4 00:45 /sbin/mount_ntfs -r-xr-xr-x 1 root bin 210040 Apr 4 00:45 /sbin/mount_portal -r-xr-xr-x 1 root bin 83064 Apr 4 00:45 /sbin/mount_procfs -r-xr-xr-x 1 root bin 83064 Apr 4 00:45 /sbin/mount_udf -r-xr-xr-x 2 root bin 410744 Apr 4 00:45 /sbin/mount_vnd -r-xr-xr-x 1 root bin 312440 Apr 4 00:45 /sbin/mountd The BSDs already have great problem reading each other filesystems, due to incompatibilities in the disklabel format.
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You don't need to be a genius to debug a pf.conf firewall ruleset, you just need the guts to run tcpdump |
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PCC is more of a long term solution, and right now, that's pretty much stalled right now.. as some significant work remains, unfortunately. |
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@ laconic: Thanks for the links from wiki.netbsd.se. I use ro mount of FFS under Linux all the time without problem. (Never tried rw.)
I learned about -I 128 and no journal the hard way, but didn't know about ^dir_index. Maybe that can fix a problem I'm having with NetBSD's fsck_ext2fs; will have to look into it sometime. |
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