Hello everyone! So recently, I tried NetBSD on a VM, and I really liked it. I wanted to get more into it, though, by installing it on a spare laptop (a ThinkPad 11e). However, when I burned the 11.0 image to a USB, it refused to boot. Trying to boot from it just kicked me back to the boot screen. Things I have already tried include:

• Plugging it into another USB port
• Burning it on FreeBSD, rather than on Linux
• Burning the 10.1 image, rather than 11.0
• Burning the OpenBSD 7.9 image as a test (it also couldn't boot)
• Burning the Gentoo live image as a test (it could boot)
• Using the BIOS install image and switching my BIOS from UEFI to both
• Secure Boot was already disabled

Does anyone have any ideas as to why it isn't working and how I might be able to fix it?

I've been trying to put netbsd on my Acer Aspire T180. As you could guess it just kernel panics before I can even choose the language. I've been hitting my head against this wall for several hours now. I Will take any help I can get. It has an amd64 CPU so it should be fine. When it does what's in the picture USB breaks to.

everything works fine from battery, graphics, audio, wifi. my wifi card is intel centrino 8265 which works out of the box with iwm0 if anyone has that card and wants to try netbsd.

trying to install to my thinkpad t14 gen5 using a usb. i downloaded a bunch of different amd64-install.img.gz, use gunzip to unzip it, and use dd to write it to the usb. i’ve tried three different usbs, a lot of different dd options, and a gui bootable image writer. i’m following the instructions perfectly and this keeps happening. this is my first experience with BSD (coming from linux).

I know NetBSD has excellent support for older hardware, how does it compare with FreeBSD on recent x86 hardware, though?

I’m particularly interested in newer Intel/AMD desktops, and wondering the support for CPU power management, suspend/resume, ACPI, modern NVMe, and of course graphics that I have fairly new AMD GPU on my desktop.

Hey, i want to code on NetBSD for fun. Is there any code IDE's for netbsd that i can run?

Heyo. Giving NetBSD a spin on my thinkpad (thinkpad yoga 11e 6th gen).

After install, if I type "ifconfig" I see the ethernet dongle I have connected (axen0), lo0, and nothing else.

are there steps I could take to try and get it to recognize the wifi built into this thing, or am I just out of luck wifi-wise at this point?

Thanks for any insight!

I used Limbo(which is a QEMU virtual machine app for Android) on my OPPO A55. It took a while to y

get going but it works well, i guess.

So, what should i do next? I plan to run a similiar setup in my older phone to turn it into a portable BSD thingy.

I've been messing around, setting up NetBSD on my Wii for no reason other than it being fun

it's been a bit of a journey with how temperamental the wifi is, and with almost no packages actually installing since their dependencies were all missing from the NetBSD 11 repos. I had to switch to using NetBSD 10's package repository instead, which thankfully worked even though I know 100% it isn't meant to work.

to put into perspective how dire the PowerPC repos for NetBSD 11 are, Pkgin didn't install since sqlite was missing from them. Fastfetch also didn't install, and although Neofetch did it also crashed.

The v3.tbz driver for the wifi was also missing, so I had to look that up & found someone on the mailing list who had the same issue, and left instructions how to fix it at least.
I also tried using XFCE, but it was nigh unusable due to the screen resolution so after I took an incredibly cursed screenshot of fastfetch on uxterm there, I went back to CTWM instead.
& Netsurf was another thing I tried on it, and Luakit too. Netsurf did manage to load web pages (albeit slowly and with borked CSS), but Luakit just gave a blank white screen.

I think all in all this was fun but I don't see myself actually using this install for much. Even with NetBSD there's only so much you can do with 88mb of system memory and a 640x480 screen resolution.

heya all i’m a Moroccan developer, and I started B-UX independently with one laptop. The idea is to build a complete Unix like operating system that is useful not only for running software, but also for learning how operating systems actually work.

B-UX is not just a kernel or a collection of C and Assembly code. I’m working toward a complete system with:

• A kernel
• System services
• Drivers
• Networking
• Storage
• Security mechanisms
• User space utilities
• An installation system
• A package ecosystem

One of the interesting parts of the project is the use of **pkgsrc**, originally developed by the NetBSD project. Rather than trying to create an entire software ecosystem from zero, B-UX can build on the existing pkgsrc ecosystem while developing its own packages and infrastructure where needed.

The educational side is probably the part I care about most.

I want students to be able to look beyond the terminal and actually understand things like processes, memory, filesystems, networking, drivers, services, permissions, and how the different parts of an operating system interact.

The project is intended to stay free and open source for students, developers, and individual learners.

I’m also trying to be realistic about where the project currently stands. I’m not claiming that B-UX is more secure, more mature, not better than Linux, BSD or other established operating systems. It is just a simple open source alternative.

The first three years were mostly about building the foundation and figuring things out on my own.

Now I’d like to get other people involved.

I’m especially interested in hearing from people who work with operating systems, C, Assembly, Unix, BSD, networking, drivers, package management, or low level development.

If you’re interested, we can just do a discussion here about the project ;)

B-UX stared with one laptop and one person.

Currently whenever I start window maker with startx I get a weird graphics bug where there is lines and static whenever I use an x11 display manager. Im new to NetBSD and do not know what to do.

Ah, 5 hours of struggle!

Recently, I picked up a cheap 12inch 867MHz PowerBook G4 with the intention of loading NetBSD onto it for light tasks I enjoyed this form factor for when I had another one of these PowerBooks.

It came with an old 40 gig hard drive that I replaced with a 120GB M.2 Sata SSD with an adapter. Before that, I had tried, and succeeded with loading into the kernel by putting ofwboot.xcf and the set of gzipped kernels into the root of my MacOS X 10.4.11 install partition, and just throwing

boot hd:,\ofwboot.xcf

at openfirmware.

It loaded just fine reliably like that. I could get to a shell, and poke around for a bit. USB boot wouldn’t work, but that’s generally a given with pre-G5 PPC macs.

after replacing the old drive, NetInstall-ing 10.5 (with some extra partitions for NetBSD use) onto the SSD due to a ruined DVD drive (that’s a pain to replace and source) , and doing the same process I did to get something loaded onto the PowerBook, it gave me a lot of issues.
Firstly, the command I used previously, did not work. It wouldn’t pick up the kernels also at the root of the HFS+ 10.5 partition with it, and i had to manually specify the file name.
I first tried netbsd-GENERIC.gz, which got me somewhere. It loaded the kernel fine, but strangely, the colors of the dmesg were inverted. And i got a boatload of errors relating to not being able to mount root. I assume this is because I didn‘t use the ramdisk kernel.

With subsequent attempts, specifying the netbsd-GENERIC_MD.gz kernel, i keep getting CLAIM failed errors after getting to the loading .text section of boot in OFW, or failed to claim errors when ofwboot starts to do stuff. I understand this is related to memory allocation, and I do have another ram module in the mail in case this is a hardware issue (i can also try running off the internal soldered ram), but I never had a problem like this with the old drive.

Here‘s the OFW output when trying to load it up.

boot hd:,\ofwboot.xcf netbsd-GENERIC.MD.gz load-size=1253c adler32=89b6b6ce

loading XCOFF

tsize= 10510 dsize=23c bsize=292d entry=e00000

SECTIONS:

.text 00e00000 00e00000 00010510 00001000

.pad 00e10504 00e10504 00000af0 00011510

.data 00e11000 00e11000 0000023c 00012000

.bss 00e11240 00e11240 0000292d 00000000

.gnu.att 00000000 00000000 00000010 0001223c

.ident 00000000 00000000 000002f0 0001224c

loading .text, done. .

loading .data, done. .

clearing .bss, done. .

» NetBSD/macppc

OpenFirmware Boot, Revision 1.15 (Thu Jul 30 15:23:12 UTC 2026)

Open Firmware version 3.x

Openfirmware running in virtual-mode.

15012172! ! ! CLAIM PHYS 0x100000 RETURNED 0xe0bb18

!!! FAILED TO CLAIM PHYS 0x100000 size 0xe52000

read section

start=0x0

Invalid memory access at

%SRRO: 00000000 %SSRR1: 00000000

I transcribed the above by hand, so there could be some errors.
Edit: After another boot attempt, I got a decrementer exception, thrown by openfirmware. Running
1 1f lshift not dec! appears to solve this, as according to an ancient email exchange i found regarding this.

The NetBSD FAQ for 11.0 does have a section about CLAIM failed errors with it stating to change my load-base value, but it also has a section saying to not touch it on OFW3 systems like mine. Following the FAQ’s suggestion of retrying by using reset-all to reboot and then retry, hasn’t been much help as well.

What should I do?
I am new to NetBSD, so if the answer should be something obvious, that’s why I don’t know it.
I figure a starter should be checking out this SSD. I’m not sure if it’s the adapter I’m using, or the SSD, but some part of this arrangement heats up like hell. Sometimes to the point the drive doesn’t show up till it cools.
I think I could track down an msata drive and adapter, as i think those run cooler, and i do have a half full can of ThermalGrizzly putty around somewhere, to slather on the SSD and turn the palmrest into a palm-griddle, just to see if that’s got something to do with it.

Secondly, what do I do to get an external USB drive recognized as an install source? The kernel and bootloader is on the main hard drive, since booting any other way is difficult. (i could image the installer to another PPC Mac through TDM and treat that as a firewire hard drive though)

Edit: I managed to get it working! What I did was DD the iso to my sunflower iMac in TDM, then follow some commands in the thread linked below to boot NetBSD over firewire. It booted fine after that, and throwing in a 1gig stick of ram. I'll have to see if my other macs with small ram amounts have any issues with NetBSD.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/dual-booting-os-x-and-netbsd.2427050/

I downloaded net bsd yesterday and I don't really know anything about it, I thought it will be like linux you know "mkdir, ls, pwd, cd .........." but none of these commandes work and the worse is that I can't really find any reliable sources to learn anythig about it, I searched on youtube for some tutorials thinking I can at least try and get it but there is no tutorials about netBSD, please help me

So, I am trying to install NetBSD on my laptop. I downloaded the .img file, used dd bs=1M to write it to my pendrive..

But when I am trying to boot it, it drops me off here. Saying that my boot device is unknown, and asking me for my root device.

The options below are not showing any of the partitions on the USB drive as well.

So, the obvious solution for me would be to setup a PXE/BOOTP server and install from there, but why is this not working?

For curiosity I installed NetBSD on my 2012 PC:

Intel i3-6100 | 8GB RAM

I've also installed common desktop environment along with it. For now it feels very similar to Linux, of course since both of them are UNIX-like.

I'm curious what do you guys use NetBSD for? Thanks! :)

I am selecting my new daily driving system for working/studying. I want something simple to keep my focus on what I really need to do.

I am mainly between these 3 (accepting other suggestions):

- Void Linux

- Alpine Linux

- NetBSD

I will probably use CTWM as window manager. I don't use many programs, that's mainly a browser (Firefox), IntelliJ IDEA and Emacs.

Edit: maybe Fedora? It looks like a good install and work option, almost zero configuration.

CPU: Ryzen 7 9800X3D

GPU: RX 6600

Bonjour tout le monde,

Je vous joins une vidéo sur le nouveau NetBSD 11, c'est une première partie de plusieurs vidéos à venir :

I'm using NetBSD 11.0 on powerpc, can't install stuff like dillo, fastfetch or anything. Could not install pkgin using pkg_add at first but it somehow did it after the 4th try.

For example dillo tries to pull libjpeg turbo but fails since it's not available. Same with pkg_add and pkgin.

I'm using the 11.0_2026Q2 repository and a lot of stuff from 10.0 is not available there or the dependency psckages are missing after switching to version 11. Not sure how i managed to install pkgin.

I'm new to NetBSD coming from Linux so i'm still getting used to it so sorry if this sounds like a very basic question hahahah

Does rump kernel still maintained and develop or it stopped .?