Re: NetBSD 8.0 on a Mac IIsi

[Bjarne Bäckström <m9411%abc.se@localhost>]

> 13 jan. 2019 kl. 20:45 skrev David Brownlee <abs%netbsd.org@localhost>:

> Nice -  I particularly like the macOS like x11 wm in that shot :)

   Now I recall it was the MiX X server by microimages.com . It was bundled with their software for Geospatial Analysis, but could be downloaded separately for free. On the shot it was running the default twm (-ish) wm, but xdm was provided in the package also. As far as I know, it was the only free X server that ran on a plain farmer’s Mac OS ( 68k and PPC ) at that time. A really nice piece of software it was.

> Its somehow amazing to think that in 2019 we can run the same actively
> developed OS on a 68k mac and a 64 bit amd64 box with a TB of RAM and
> many dozens of cores, though obviously the set of useful tasks is
> somewhat different…

   A good part of the fascination is the time span, of course. But I also have use for a few terminal servers that can do RS232, RS422 and RS485. Old Macs can do that, and ”real” terminal servers are ”pig expensive” these days. And one can do a lot more with NetBSD.

   One has to be careful about what one is asking for, though: When NetBSD 7.0 was released, i installed it on one of my Performas, and was happy to see ’avrdude’ in pkgsrc, because I’ve been working quite a lot with the 8-bit AVR controllers, and their programming/”burning" equipment is maneuvered via a serial line. Now, avrdude isn’t a ”monster package”, really, so without much hesitation I simply ordered pkgsrc to make! it — and hell broke loose. That innocent looking avrdude seemingly wanted a piece of every other package in pkgsrc, and the poor Performa was chewing and chewing package after package. After a couple of weeks I thought that I should just let it run until it crashed, just to see where it would happen. But it didn’t. Several months later it finished without any hickup at all. But then pkgsrc had been updated, so I let it have a new run — with the same result. And next time I started up the Performa, its power supply gave up because of some tired capacitor…

   Now I have at least learned to have a look at a package's dependencies before trying to compile it… ;-)

Best,
/Bjarne.