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.
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by seanw444 on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @02:48PM
(#50445364)
NetBSD is so cool. I love how broad the hardware support is, and how straightforward the whole architecture is. My only complaint is that OpenZFS isn't really a thing yet, and the built-in implementation is very outdated. Otherwise I'd have it on my Orange Pi running my NAS.
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by skrellm on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @09:54AM
(#50441246)
"Get Balena's Etcher (if you don't have it)"
You lost me there. Why are ppl still using this electron monstrosity when there are so many better alternatives? (Like dd, WIN32Imager, USBImager, DiskImager, etc.)?
I mean, Etcher is bigger than the entire NetBSD image, what the hell?
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by jandrese on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @11:36AM
(#50442712)
This is one of those things that SystemD can make more complicated. When you DD a disk image on something it rewrites the disk header, which can cause SystemD to reparse the header and do some weird stuff with the device that causes the write to fail or get corrupted. Etcher works around that problem.
That said, the more lightweight "Disk Image Creator" also gets around this problem without dragging in an entire self contained browser.
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by skrellm on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @12:48PM
(#50443637)
> You usually don't even need dd, plain cat <iso >device is fine
Definitely not. In fact, even dd is insufficient unless you use os specific flags to flush the disk cache, otherwise your stick might be corrupted. Read about the fdatasync syscall.
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by skrellm on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @06:21PM
(#50447722)
May not work, OS dependent. According to POSIX "sync" flushes the file system level buffer cache of opened files, and not necessarily the block device cache inside the kernel. (Eg. "sync" flushes devfs under /dev, so updates the /dev/sda directory entry, but maybe not the block cache of the (8,0) device.)
There's a good reason why the dd command exists, believe me.
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by somat on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @03:20AM
(#50450924)
For what it's worth, probably not much, openbsd still has raw devices /dev/rsd1a vs /dev/sd1a(the block device) while it looks like linux made them all block devices (unless opened a special way O_DIRECT) and freebsd(as best I can tell) made all devices raw. https://docs-archive.freebsd.org/doc/11.2-RELEASE/usr/local/...
So, on openbsd, make sure you use the raw device when writing images with dd, and in my experience you want to use dd because the block size on cat is too small. dd bs=64k if=image.file of=/dev/rsd2c (c on obsd is entire disk)
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by skrellm on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @12:46PM
(#50443615)
> It’s cross platform, so you can recommend it to anyone. It prevents you from writing to system disks accidentally. It verifies the image after writing.
USBImager likewise, but it's multilingual and just 300 kilobytes and does not collect your data like Etcher.
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by aduty on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @01:11PM
(#50443958)
I'm not who you're replying to, but maybe alternatives need better marketing. However I'm going to check this out and if I have a good experience I'll recommend it to people I know in the future instead. Thanks.
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by skrellm on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @06:53PM
(#50447988)
> It looks like on Linux that the authors are obsessed with making the smallest possible binary instead of the smallest possible binary that runs anywhere.
Yep, the site offers a download link to a binary that should work everywhere (small JS detects OS and arch). The default Linux binary even has an embedded UNICODE font and implements its own widgets to avoid any shared lib dependency.
But if you want, there's a smallest version too in the repo (uses GTK widgets and fonts installed on the system, calls the portal for open file modal, and relies on udisks2 daemon to access the device without privilege). This latter also downloadable as .deb (Ubuntu and RaspiOS ARM too).
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by 1313ed01 on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @10:15AM
(#50441575)
Read the original gemini version then. I have not looked at it, but gemtext has no support for setting fonts at all, so it can not use a font you dislike unless you set that up in your gemini client.
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by MisterTea on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @11:13AM
(#50442384)
> Very legible to my eye.
Your retort is ableism. Some people have vision problems such as myself and I find reading the cute yet blocky font to be very uncomfortable. Thankfully, reader mode fixes this.
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by MobiusHorizons on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @01:36PM
(#50444310)
bitmap fonts were the norm on computers for many years, and are still the default if you are running a computer in text mode (ie not running X11 or Wayland on linux / BSD), or using basically any low powered device with a screen. I was surprised to hear that anyone had trouble reading these, since they were just what fonts looked like on screens with certain constraints. I can understand that some people have become so used to high DPI displays and antialiased truetype fonts that they consider fonts with visible pixels ugly. If anything I would expect them to be easier to read with poor vision, since there is not much subtlty to miss out on.
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by q4y2u35uk on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @01:49PM
(#50444490)
English-only was also the norm for many years. First you make it work, then you make it accessible. But there's no reason to dial back on accessible formats once you have them.
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by JdeBP on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @02:37PM
(#50445201)
It isn't a bitmap font. It's Berkelium64, which is a re-work of a Commodore GUI font for GEOS with a fair amount added. It's proportional, rather than monospace, and it only looks like it is a bitmap.
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by mrob on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @01:20PM
(#50444103)
In Firefox settings menu:
Accessibility, Fonts, Advanced Settings, Allow pages to choose their own fonts.
Presumably other browsers let you do the same. I don't usually allow pages to choose their own fonts, but I turned it on specially just for this page and it looks like a normal pixel font to me.
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by forinti on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @10:08AM
(#50441461)
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).
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by maxmalkav on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @04:00PM
(#50446260)
I have been using a RPi1 B+ (512MB RAM) for 2 months now as DHCP server for my local network. It is still running 11.0, sysupgrade ran fine but I still see version 11.0 after rebooting, I have to figure out what I am doing wrong.
Software installation is indeed slow, my booting times are not terrible though (running just sshd, ntpd and dhcpd probably helps).
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by LordLotherak on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @10:31AM
(#50441787)
They're probably commenting on Linus Torvald's decision to accept commits that may or may not have been assisted with agentic coding in part or whole, getting accepted/rejected on a merit basis instead.
(Apparently that's too much gray area for some zealots)
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by coredog64 on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @10:43AM
(#50441972)
He's got me thinking I could recreate something that looks like 4dwm and put my NetBSD Pi into a defunct O2 case. A "good" O2 from 96-97 would have been 200MHz w/ 256MB of RAM and a 1600SW display (1600x1024).
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by cf100clunk on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @11:22AM
(#50442531)
I see in the list of NetBSD packages that the parts for a fairly good Pi-Hole replica seem to be there. This writer seemed to need WiFi and a desktop, but of course neither is necessary for a Pi-Hole type of host.
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by MobiusHorizons on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @10:52AM
(#50442119)
> 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.
I prefer to do it that way since pkgin has its own repository config, and if I use pkg_add after installing pkgin it'll be to install packages from the pkgsrc and that might clash if PKG_PATH is set.
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by JdeBP on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @12:43PM
(#50443562)
If you are familiar with FreeBSD, then the parallel answer to the others in this thread is that on FreeBSD there's the bootstrap pkg that you get in base and the pkg that's in the ports tree itself. It's not quite the same, but the general idea holds that there's a less featureful package installer in base and a more featureful one in the package system itself.
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by krautburglar on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @11:09AM
(#50442328)
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.
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by HeckFeck on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @11:41AM
(#50442790)
That's the blocker for me too. I'd love to roll NetBSD, OpenBSD or Haiku.. but how well does it work with hardware, energy consumption and resource management? It's really just the mainstream OSes or nothing, sadly.
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by krautburglar on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @02:48PM
(#50445372)
Despite the high idle, Haiku was really impressive. Had all of my staples (vim, tmux, git, ssh), recent versions, in their package manager, and it worked beautifully. Stable, rapid booting, responsive.
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by qubex on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @11:21AM
(#50442514)
I find it hilarious that the author deliberately chooses to talk the novice user through the use of Vim (including how to quit it) rather than suggest something simpler such as pico or nano.
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by JdeBP on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @12:53PM
(#50443696)
It's not vim. It's Bostic's nvi. And in fact one of the things that vim users need to be reminded about is that the habitual :wqa and :qa are vim-isms and do not work in other clones such as nvi.
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by qubex on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @01:04PM
(#50443867)
Fair enough, I stand corrected. The point I was trying to make though (and clearly I failed, since I’ve been heavily downvoted) is that the poco/nano/atto ‘lineage’ of “Microsoft Edit”-like text editors are quite a bit more approachable for newcomers than the holy-war dichotomy of vi and emacs would seem to imply.
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by JdeBP on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @01:42PM
(#50444395)
One of the things that FreeBSD has had for a long time is the 'Easy Editor', written in 1990 for HP-UX and added to FreeBSD a couple of years later. There was even its successor 'Another Easy Editor' which the world has completely forgotten about.
But NetBSD and OpenBSD went their own ways on this, to the extent that NetBSD didn't even have a non-vi-like editor in base until just a month or so ago.
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by qubex on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @01:45PM
(#50444440)
Yeah I just found it genuinely amusing that the author felt a duty to digress into quitting vi for the sake of their audience but I’ve been downvoted and apparently people must have very strong opinions on this and I apologise for any offence caused.
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by so-cal-schemer on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @06:32PM
(#50447823)
The true vi:
Vi is actually one mode of editing within the editor ex. When you are running vi you can escape to the line
oriented editor of ex by giving the command Q. All of the : commands which were introduced above are available
in ex. Likewise, most ex commands can be invoked from vi using :. Just give them without the : and follow them
with a CR.
Re:NetBSD 11 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4
by lilbigdoot on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @12:03PM
(#50443108)
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
I recently came across this after using NetBSD in a couple VMs and trying it on my desktop, its a really nice tiny OS that's easier to start with than it looks
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.
You lost me there. Why are ppl still using this electron monstrosity when there are so many better alternatives? (Like dd, WIN32Imager, USBImager, DiskImager, etc.)?
I mean, Etcher is bigger than the entire NetBSD image, what the hell?
Admin/root superuser of rpi4: dd
Admin/root superuser of NetBSD, other BSDs, or linux: dd
But the others do. They are all minimal GUI apps.
Less of a chance of swapping if/of and destroying something unexpected.
That said, the more lightweight "Disk Image Creator" also gets around this problem without dragging in an entire self contained browser.
Exactly my point. Also that self contained browser hides a spyware (telemetry without notice and opt out), so illegal in the EU.
Definitely not. In fact, even dd is insufficient unless you use os specific flags to flush the disk cache, otherwise your stick might be corrupted. Read about the fdatasync syscall.
There's a good reason why the dd command exists, believe me.
FYI: https://linux.die.net/man/2/sync syscall is not the same as https://linux.die.net/man/2/fsync syscall.
So, on openbsd, make sure you use the raw device when writing images with dd, and in my experience you want to use dd because the block size on cat is too small. dd bs=64k if=image.file of=/dev/rsd2c (c on obsd is entire disk)
USBImager likewise, but it's multilingual and just 300 kilobytes and does not collect your data like Etcher.
https://bztsrc.gitlab.io/usbimager/
I prefer to recommend that instead to anyone.
Yep, the site offers a download link to a binary that should work everywhere (small JS detects OS and arch). The default Linux binary even has an embedded UNICODE font and implements its own widgets to avoid any shared lib dependency.
But if you want, there's a smallest version too in the repo (uses GTK widgets and fonts installed on the system, calls the portal for open file modal, and relies on udisks2 daemon to access the device without privilege). This latter also downloadable as .deb (Ubuntu and RaspiOS ARM too).
https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/usbimager/#usbimager
https://www.netbsd.org/~martin/rawrite32/
- https://sourceforge.net/projects/paud/files/tools/rawrite/
- https://sourceforge.net/projects/zoollinux/files/Utility/Raw...
- https://sourceforge.net/projects/ntrawrite/
- https://uranus.chrysocome.net/linux/rawwrite-old.htm
- ...etc.
Neither of these had a GUI though, so not recommendable to average users.
Your retort is ableism. Some people have vision problems such as myself and I find reading the cute yet blocky font to be very uncomfortable. Thankfully, reader mode fixes this.
Try to have this font and regular one next to each other (scroll to the the code snippets)
now start moving further away from the screen till you can barely read it.
Which one becomes unreadable first?
* https://www.kreativekorp.com/software/fonts/c64/#berk
I switched the page over to unscii, and I found it to be a lot more legible.
Accessibility, Fonts, Advanced Settings, Allow pages to choose their own fonts.
Presumably other browsers let you do the same. I don't usually allow pages to choose their own fonts, but I turned it on specially just for this page and it looks like a normal pixel font to me.
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).
I'm using a Cat 10 card. Maybe a better card would speed things up.
Software installation is indeed slow, my booting times are not terrible though (running just sshd, ntpd and dhcpd probably helps).
(Apparently that's too much gray area for some zealots)
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/linus-torvalds-p...
He spends half the tutorial getting Wi-Fi working, then installs a modern desktop environment styled after a desktop environment from 1993.
next level nostalgia
https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/index-all.h...
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.
Pkg_add simply installs binaries you ask it to and dependencies but can't do searches or broader package management like pkgin.
or is it just some special case?
With PKG_PATH set (he does it in the .profile in the blog post)
pkg_add pkgin becomes pkg_add https://cdn.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/$(uname -m)/$(uname -r | cut -d_ -f1)/All/pkgin
I prefer to do it that way since pkgin has its own repository config, and if I use pkg_add after installing pkgin it'll be to install packages from the pkgsrc and that might clash if PKG_PATH is set.
I know it seems contrived.
https://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/using.html
* https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=pkg&manpath=FreeBS...
* https://freshports.org/ports-mgmt/pkg/
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.
https://man.netbsd.org/atto.1
* https://man.dragonflybsd.org/?command=ee§ion=1
* https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ee&manpath=FreeBSD...
But NetBSD and OpenBSD went their own ways on this, to the extent that NetBSD didn't even have a non-vi-like editor in base until just a month or so ago.
Vi is actually one mode of editing within the editor ex. When you are running vi you can escape to the line oriented editor of ex by giving the command Q. All of the : commands which were introduced above are available in ex. Likewise, most ex commands can be invoked from vi using :. Just give them without the : and follow them with a CR.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50373004
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50403300
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
I recently came across this after using NetBSD in a couple VMs and trying it on my desktop, its a really nice tiny OS that's easier to start with than it looks
https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/10/13/netbsd-m...