A 'live' NetBSD.....?

[bsd-keith]

There used to be a 'live' version of NetBSD, but it seems to have been dropped, but OpenBSD & FreeBSD still have people producing theirs, so I was wondering if any of our gurus could produce a new one(?).

I don't personally need it, but it seems a shame that the other flavours have them - & they are a great way to introduce newcomers to the BSDs.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

I've never actually tried NetBSD (I don't have any spare toasters) but they have sysutils/mklivecd. Have you tried that?

[bsd-keith]

As above, I'm not asking for myself, rather that NetBSD itself produces/promotes it in some way; also it would need to be a GUI based system to show what can be done with NetBSD; I think the last version was in about 2007 as a CD image only.

mklivecd is a simple shell script that allows you to build a custom
NetBSD/i386 or NetBSD/amd64 Live CD-ROM/DVD-ROM with a command line
interface.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

I'm pretty sure that means the mklivecd utility is command-line based. I don't think that is referring to the ISO images that may be produced. Only one way to find out though :-)

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Just installed NetBSD in a VM and mklivecd does indeed offer to install the x11 set on the ISO image. Looks like exactly what you want. Try it out.

[bsd-keith]

...but will it create a live bootable suitable for a pendrive, with MBR & UEFI(?)....that's what will be required these days.

FreeBSD has NomadBSD (& GhostBSD), & OpenBSD has FuguIta, but NetBSD doesn't have one at all.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

I don't know what it creates because I didn't try it. Try it yourself and find out.

It is certainly possible to convert an ISO image to the "hybrid" format of which you speak but note that OpenBSB doesn't bother doing that with their ISO images — they have separate USB & CD versions.

[cabriofahrer]

Originally Posted by Head_on_a_Stick

I've never actually tried NetBSD (I don't have any spare toasters)

That cliché about NetBSD and the toaster will probably never go away...^^. But seriously, apart from that, are there any interesting recommendations about special hardware, where NetBSD really comes in useful, because e.g. FreeBSD would not run on it? Or any other general arguments / positive experiences in favour of NetBSD?

[jmccue]

I believe there is a lot of hardware that NetBSD can run on that FreeBSD and OpenBSD does not support. See ports. But I think you may need to define "hardware".

But one thing I find very useful is its rump kernel. At one point I had to find an old document (resume I think), I found it on a 20+ year old MS-DOS diskette. First I tried getting the doc off via Linux many times all tries either caused panics or hangs.

I had NetBSD 6.1 on a very old and now dead PII. I had just found out about rump, so I said lets try it. On the first couple of tries, rump crashed but NetBSD itself had no issues. After a few tries I was able to completely pull the document.

So this alone makes me have NetBSD on one of my systems.