NetBSD improves support for the Commodore Amiga | Hacker News Reader

NetBSD improves support for the Commodore Amiga

thenewstrace.com

99 pointserickhill50 comments

It's the only modern OS that can still be also installed on VAX. You can try it yourself with OpenSIMH[1][2][3]. I struggled to successfully setup network though - for some reason it wasn't working as expected.

[1] https://github.com/open-simh/simh/

[2] https://pbraun.nethence.com/obsolete/software/simh.html

[3] https://www.netbsd.org/ports/vax/emulator-howto.html

Does NetBSD still really run on real VAXen? As I recall, there was a time when NetBSD current was broken on VAX, the cross compilation process had gone wrong and no-one noticed. Can't find a source, but I can find an email mentioning that issue: https://www.mail-archive.com/tech-kern@netbsd.org/msg12018.h.... Are there people still running it, or is this just an emulator and cross-compilation thing?

I can't find any proof either way.

I know OpenBSD has a policy of no cross compilation and only real machines, but they dropped support for VAX years ago.

Simh needs to be run as root or with suid, as it requires to open the interface as root. Either that, or try to setup tun/tap or a virtual device under OpenBSD.

This way you won't require root, but virt devices under Linux are scary to set up and dead simple under OpenBSD.

A n00b-level hardware question. I have an old Sony PRS-T1 e-reader with a Freescale i.MX508 SoC (32-bit Cortex-A8, ARMv7-A architecture). If I am not mistaken, this processor might be supported by NetBSD since 7.0? There is a port for the Kobo reader, which has a similar one [0, 1].

Has anybody here maybe used the Kobo-NetBSD port? How much of an effort would it be to get it booting on the Sony T1? Or would it be a definite way to brick the device for good.

I was thinking it would be awesome to have the PRS-T1 as a NetBSD-based "single textfile viewer". No wireless or other goodies, no touchscreen, just a dumb pager, scrolling up and down on a plain text document using the device's physical buttons. For starters, it could, indeed, display just one document, which would be loaded into the device via USB.

In addition to USB access, one would have to map the T1's physical buttons to scrolling commands. Later on, multi-file support could be added (woah!), via some sort of simple terminal-based menu, again navigable with the hardware buttons. The T1 has 5 buttons + power on/off + reset.

Usually, the mods for various e-readers seem to focus on hacking the original, e.g. Android-based OS into something "more complete", that is, adding features. I would rather go the opposite direction -- turn the T1 into an ultra-barebones device. For, as an avid ereader user, I've come to realize that I would actually survive quite happily with just text files. PDFs are somewhat an issue, but ebooks can be converted to plain text incredibly nicely with a text-only web browser. Unzip the epub, navigate to HTML files, convert and merge them into a single .txt via 'links -dump'. For me, images or drawings in ebooks can mostly be skipped without much of an issue.

So yeah, maybe a toaster-running OS would be a good fit for such a project? Has there been any other porting efforts, with different ereaders -- and if not, then what are the main obstacles? (I am definitely not competent, but "ARM is messy", even for BSD wizards?) I couldn't find much examples. NetBSD guys seem to prefer toasters, I guess :).

0: https://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-bugs/2013/08/29/msg0340...

1: https://wiki.netbsd.org/users/jun/kobo/

Just from looking at what needed to be done to get the Pine64 PineNote to work with Linux, eInk displays need special drivers and each one is different. There isn't an eInk driver of any kind in NetBSD.

FYI

"Due to the MMU requirement, it will not run on A500, A600, A1000, A1200, A2000, A4000/EC030, CDTV or CD32 out of the box. You must install a CPU board on them to run NetBSD."

Probably easier to find an old Macintosh with a MMU if you want to try out NetBSD on something of that vintage.

There are definitely more Macs out there than Amigas.

On either 68k platform swapping out a full 68030/040 instead of the EC versions is quite easy, and these chips are still fairly available on the used market.

In the UK the Amiga was huge - a much larger market than the 68K Macs. Possibly Germany too.

The USA (as far as I understand it) had lots of 68K Macs in their schools, where as the UK had more Acorn Equipment (which gradually moved to x86 through Research Machines)

Yeah, it's very market specific. I grew up in Norway, and until the mid-90's I had seen a grand total of one Mac in person (the first Apple machine I'd seen at all) - the mostly ignored display unit at my local computer store. Nobody I knew had Macs - those upgrading from 8-bit home computers mostly went Amiga, Atari ST or PC's.

Ditto in Finland. Most young people with computers in the early 90's had Ataris and Amigas. I think I saw one single Mac at a friend's house once. Apart from that I didn't see any Macs until the Power Macs started getting popular.

> There are definitely more Macs out there than Amigas.

Maybe in the US, but definitely not in Europe - unless you also count modern Macs ;)

The Amiga ruled Britain until the 90s but radically different in the USA. My old boss was an American Amiga owner and he says he sold up around 1989 for the PC.

Runs great on my IIci. Been doing so since 2001. Also use it on a Quadra 605 with a full '040.

The other NetBSD machines around here are a Cobalt RaQ (MIPS), a Jornada 690 (SH3) and a Mac mini G4.

Now that there's an OpenBSD port to POWER9, though, NetBSD has no excuse.

I used to have an LC that I used to run Debian on, sadly it crashed regularly :(

NetBSD runs on Mac LCs.

http://elsie.zia.io/

Basically anyone who still runs Amiga is using accelerator cards, majority of them with MMUs.

My first unix experience. I spent a weekend backing up my A4000 (at work) to to a writable cd (at $30 a pop no less) and installed NetBSD on it, played with it for a few hours and then restored AmigaOS (so I could work on Monday). Might have been sometime in the fall of '93 or so.

The original title is better than the one here, the Amiga has been supported for a long time, recent changes just fixed some things that had bitrotted or been deleted from upstream X11.

What do you actually do with NetBSD once it's been installed on everything on earth? It seems like one of those small computers that's supposedly for education but is actually only used for dads to install NES emulators on.

It’s a well-engineered general purpose operating system. I used it as a development platform and reference box for portability. I’ll drive my projects w BSD Make[0] and nvi[1] in tmux[2] in dwm/st[3] in X.org as well as I imagine Linux does. I’ll occasionally stream radio with it while I’m working, and collaborate in development with git/hg/fossil. In this sense, I may not even be missing anything versus what another system could provide. I can ssh from here to there, I happen to use this box as a VPN/router, dhcp server and recursive DNS resolver, so it also supports other (Windows, Apple) devices in the house. A solid, no-nonsense breath of fresh air.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_(software)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvi

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tmux

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suckless.org

Still no RISC-V support so we’ve got more platforms yet.

> What do you actually do with NetBSD once it's been installed on everything on earth?

Actually use my retro computers instead of having them sit around forever with an empty disk.

My NetBSD Mac mini G4 is a router, running tincd primarily.

My NetBSD IIci handles internal DHCP, RARP, TFTP, DNS, power failure alert propagation, and classic EtherTalk and AppleShare for the oldest Mac clients.

My NetBSD RaQ is a big NFS server.

My NetBSD Jornada 690 is just for fun. :)

> Enough fans in fact, for that a 2022 operating system bothered to add support for graphical sessions (via an X11 server)* on said hardware*.

> And it is that the objective that differentiates this system from other BSDs such as FreeBSD or OpenBSD is summed up, precisely, by its slogan “Of course it runs NetBSD” (Of course running NetBSD)in reference to the vast catalog of hardware architectures that it supports, from the (today) enormous VAX microcomputers (launched on the market in the 1970s) to PDAs of all kinds, passing through PCs, Raspberry Pis or Sega Dreamcast video consoles.

This article seems like it was auto-translated from another language.

I've had articles that I was 100% certain of the original source for, and yeah it either seems like a hatchet job of a machine translation and back, or it's heavily thesaurized. I'd have to guess it's to drive clicks/traffic for advertising money or malware purposes without being so blatant that there's nowhere to hide, legally.

Just my uninformed guess.

Sounds like a GPT-3 article too

Wow, they have X11 working on ECS / AGA i.e. the standard Amiga graphics which were state of the art at the time but unconventional by modern standards. That’s pretty awesome, I was expecting it to need an external graphics card. Sadly my A1200 doesn’t have an MMU so it would be upgrade time if I want to try it.

I'm a huge *BSD fan, and I know one of the amazing things about NetBSD is that it's been ported to everything.. but an OS which is ported everywhere but runs no where in production feels like a really quirky project to me.

Likewise, OpenBSD, FreeBSD will have some adoption (vs Linux, Windows) on the server front, but I worry they won't win the hearts and minds of developers unless there is a solid and modern laptop solution -- this obviously requires developers who are able to get things working.

Before everyone jumps in and says they're running *BSD on their laptop, I'm talking about a modern laptop, and being able to develop on it. I recently tried to install FreeBSD onto a modern laptop (Dell XPS) and it totally failed in every way possible. No power/sleep control, fans blasting, CPU burning through my desktop, and I hadn't even gotten to the wifi and video support to get X working. On Reddit I was essentially told it wasn't worth the pain.

I'm a NetBSD developer but I don't have a recent x86 laptop, it is only in the last year that packages like Firefox and LibreOffice have got too big to run on my old laptop and I have started to think about buying a newer one, everything works fine on the old one.

People fix the problems that they see, but if developers don't have a need to buy new stuff for themselves then newer systems won't get support.

I recently thought it would be awesome to have DragonFly BSD working on Raspberry Pi (or any other modern ARMv8 machine) but it's not implemented yet - there is a small code bounty[1] but I would be happy to extend it for a couple $k. If you would be willing to help or know someone - feel free to contact me or leave a comment.

[1] https://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/developer/Code_Bounties/#i...

Lariza (webkit2gtk4 browser, head to https://uninformativ.de or gopher://uninformativ.de from Lynx ) runs fast enough under OpenBSD i386 base Intel Atom n270 netbook with 1GB of RAM and an Intel 945 iGPU with GL 1.4. Take that as a reference.

I wonder what your definition of a "modern laptop" laptop is ?

I have a T420 with NetBSD on it and it runs perfect (on it now), I doubt I would see a difference with a modern laptop, no matter what the OS is. My other Laptop is a Thinkpad W541, it is pulled apart so I can thermal paste and clean it, that has BSD on it too.

These both cost far less then what a brand new Laptop would cost and they serve me perfectly.

But I am not a gamer, except for games like nethack, so maybe running fancy 3d games may be tough, but for everything else, these are fine.

Slashem is cool, too. And IF games like Anchorhead or All things devours. On 3D games, I run OBSD under an Atom n270, 1GB RAM, crappy GMA. Scummvm supports Blade Runner and much more. Soon the Resident Evil 1-3 games will run under that.

MPV and yt-dlp are capped to 420@30, but it opens 720@30 h264 vids fine.

So, no need for GL > 1.4.

By "modern" I am thinking:

* something which an IT department would likely hand out for a Windows 10 user

* good screen size (13"+), good resolution/brightness to work off

* certainly oesn't have to be a gaming laptop, certainly, but something which is performant

* a model released in the past 3 years maybe?

* weight != a brick

Not trying to be contentious, it's just my viewpoint -- and I'm probably a minority; I'd just say that probably the BSD user base would grow if there was a focus like this

My personal definition of a "modern laptop" would be having USB-C ports.

Bonus points for Thunderbolt 3 or later.

Each BSD has nothing to do which each other.

My 2021 XPS 13 runs OpenBSD flawlessly, and has since I got it (ok, I did need to fix one line of a case statement in iwx.c for a few months).

This is really encouraging -- can you share your specs / model number (I know XPS 13, but there is usually a model number as well). Cheers!

9310. i71185G7 16G RAM, it came with Ubuntu, but I immediately replaced the SSD with a 1TB Samsung (and put the SSD in my Pinebook Pro).

Thanks! Sweet! I might pick up the same.

I can't really recommend it, the keyboard is really bad, the keyboard backlight makes the keys harder to read, the backlight (on the LCD monitor anyway) is both too dim in the sun and too bright in the dark. Battery life is pretty good though (10-12 hours on Linux, ~8 on OpenBSD).

Check Solene's obsdfreqd for OpenBSD. Follow the instructions and install it.

There's got to be a Video Toaster joke around here somewhere, but I can't find it.

Kiki Wipes!!!

>(in turn belonging to the Unix family), stepbrother of macOS and first cousin of Linux

To the common people this means very little

To those who understands version control this means a lot more.

This article (which I'm convinced was "written" by GPT) is actively misleading, since NetBSD isn't supported on any of the legacy hardware described and even pictured in the article.

The change isn't even that huge, since wsfb was already supported on most common Amiga graphics cards, including CyberVision, Picasso, Piccolo, Spectrum, Domino, Merlin and oMnibus.

Here are the release notes for 9.3: https://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-9/NetBSD-9.3.html

I don't think it is GPT generated, seems similar to the kind of stuff on Phoronix that has been editorialized from mailing list posts, which of the legacy hardware mentioned do you feel is incorrect?

It shows an Amiga 500, and specifies "released in 1985".

Perhaps it was poorly translated. It's hard to say.

But be aware that there are many, many dozens of accelerators for the Amiga 500, so it is, in fact, easy to have NetBSD running on such hardware.

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