NetBSD 11 boots to a desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4 with surprisingly little fuss
NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
A step-by-step guide to putting NetBSD 11 on a Raspberry Pi 4: flash the arm64 image, add the Raspberry Pi UEFI firmware, and reorder the boot options. Then fix the bwfm0 WiFi driver by supplying the missing NVRAM file, install pkgin and doas, and build NsCDE for a CDE-style desktop. The author picked NetBSD partly because it ships no AI slop.
NetBSD is the only open-source operating system in development that I know of, that doesn't include AI slop.
- rustyhancock
As the saying goes. Of course it runs NetBSD.
They have a nice wiki page around running on Arm which might be helpful (and subpages for the main boards).
https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/evbarm/
I set it up on an Arm SBC last year and I have to say it did not seem as involved a process as that blog post. I hope it hasn't become more complicated.
- forinti
I've been trying NetBSD 11.1 on an RPi1 these last few days.
It takes a long time to install anything and I don't expect to surf the web on it, but it's nice to have this OS as an option.
I wanted to try out openconnect-saml on it, but the install failed because of lack of RAM/swap. I have managed to run xfreerdp over openconnect on it though (FreeBSD had better performance).
- lilbigdoot
I've been dealing with NetBSD on VMs and my desktop lately and it's really lovely. By far the fastest install and boot of any OS I've tried on my system
I really love the amd64 "live" .img they provide too. It's a disk image you just write to a disk and on its first boot it expands the image to the full size of the disk, reboots, and your system is ready to go
For anyone curious to try, do note that EFI boots significantly faster than BIOS. I forget exactly why but BIOS boots requires an unpacking step every boot that EFI boots do not
The one thing keeping it from my daily driver on my desktop was my GPU is not yet supported. I do love the OS though. PkgSrc is nifty
- MobiusHorizons
> pkg_add pkgin
NetBSD noob question: what’s going on with this command? Is pkg_add not a package manager? If you already have pkg_add why do you need pkgin? I am familiar with `pkg` on FreeBSD, and `pkg_add` on OpenBSD, but they are both perfectly good enough on their own, I never wanted to install another package manager.
- krautburglar
I think the biggest problem with many of the non-Linux open source kernels these days is high idle CPU consumption — on both real hardware, and under virtualization.
Did latest OpenBSD & Haiku recently under KVM. Idle OBSD was using around 20% CPU to do nothing. Haiku, 30%. And it’s not just a virtualization thing. Thinkpad battery test yielded similar results.