NetBSD 10, But It's On A 25Mhz VAX Somewhere In Canada ...

[@SoulcatcherLucario]

👀 what's this perfect thing to watch while getting chemo, thank you for the content over the years, only two transfusions left!!

[@grappydingus]

Kick cancer's a$$!

[@NCommander]

Comments like this is what keeps me going on the bad days.

[@maltoNitho]

Bleh, chemo. What an evil necessity. Best of luck to you!

[@buttholesurfer2000]

get well soon

[@oscarcharliezulu]

Best wishes, get well soon!

[@AndiSteilwandi]

You, Sir, are now an officially certified DEC engineer! 🎉

[@jbglaw]

I found this video by accident and while watching it, I remembered the recent LCG thread on port-vax. While thinking "Whee, this poor guy was just a teeny tiny bit too early, that has just been fixed!", I later on realized that you were the guy fixing it. Thanks for working on NetBSD on VAX! 🙂

[@NCommander]

I was tempted to throw the video link on port-vax TBH, but it seems out of place to me.

[@thatguyfrye]

Whoa whoa wow wow, more computer stuff for me to watch and only vaguely understand!!!

[@NCommander]

We all start somewhere

[@thatguyfrye]

@NCommander Ty, I'm actually learning a lot from your channel! I hope to one day start development on a game where the characters are based on operating systems, and your channel is definitely helping me get an idea of how these systems work. Love the content and streams, keep it up!

[@karolisr]

The monochrome orange phosphor CRTs look so cozy.

[@NCommander]

Indeed. This has been my digital yule log watching things building.

[@jefffrasca4054]

I typically custom compile my NetBSD kernel just so I can patch wscons with an amber based color scheme. It's very cozy.

[@CrassSpektakel]

I installed NetBSD in 1992(?) on my Amiga 3000, shortly before the AT&T lawsuit. Then changed to Debian until Debian and Linux basically dropped the Amiga Plattform. Last Year I upgraded it back to NetBSD. And it just ran. Even supporting my SVGA card through the framebuffer device, although with little acceleration. It is amazing how much NetBSD can do.

[@Spaztron64]

Take a shot every time the word "However" is said.

[@systemchris]

That said🎉

[@jonasastrom6579]

@Spaztron64 you trying to get us blind? 😂

[@jonathanyang6230]

faded than a hoe

[@karlchen81]

Thx for the vid. I think NetBSD needs way more attention. It is a beautiful system and definitely has its place in between Free- and Open- BSD.

[@NCommander]

Yeah, I kinda wish I had gotten more involved with the BSDs awhile ago.

[@karlchen81]

@@NCommander my dream is to (be able to) rule modern (big iron) servers with pretty old NetBSD machine running 389 directory server. Only the imagination of this makes me smile…

[@pmc_]

I love that portability to esoteric systems is a real goal of NetBSD. I'm excited to get my PowerBook 180 running NetBSD once some parts come in - what other modern OS could you even dream of running on a 68k laptop with 14MB of RAM?

[@jordan.ellis.hunter]

"That way everyting in the stack would be DEC tested, DEC approved..." you could almost say... fully DECed out ;D

[@Wzeyisbacklmao]

Netbsd : DECed out edition Coming in DECember

[@EirikrTinkerTries]

NetBSD on everything!! Would love to see it on a Nokia Communicator 9110 and various Windows CE 1.0 and 2.0 handheld PCs, old OG POWER1 and POWER2 and POWER3 IBM servers and workstations, OG PowerPC 601-604 Macs. NetBSD 68K for Macs and Amigas and more, even?! Super cool to see you work through your troubleshooting process, and then work through the fix/patch development. Beautiful video overall. Definitely the step-by-step process therapy needed today! (If you could lend your brain to the ELKS embedded Linux project to get X windowing and SSH working that would be swell too… and show it off on various 8086, 80186, 80286 hardware and NEC V20 and other 16-bit NEC CPUs? That would be super cool)

[@thegsprank]

laughed out loud at watching neofetch running at a glacial pace in the background

[@pauldunecat]

It's a good life, making sure NetBSD boots on old Vaxen, and that Nethack works as proof of function. ❤

[@pc6ghz]

Genius glimpse, you brought them down

[@JonathanMcCormack]

In the video some of the code mentions “VLC” models. I used a 4000 VLC Workstation for years in the 1990s, the VLC was rumoured to be short for “Very Low Cost” as it was the cheapest workstation you could buy then.

[@stonent]

And I am assuming LCG was "Low Cost Graphics"

[@aloneer0529]

I really love your content, even tho I don't understand what's going on sometimes!

[@NCommander]

I feel like I need an NCommander explainer.

[@c462-]

This video was awesome, i had a blast watching it. Thank you for making it so enjoyable :) Also, i'm every day more and more blown away at how readable NetBSD codebase is, i really want to start getting my feet wet with it on my main pc or my retro-gaming one

[@NCommander]

Glad you enjoyed it!

[@clehaxze]

You have sold me on your channel. Hardcore OS hacking on KZbin? Yesssss

[@NCommander]

Not the first time a kernel got patched on this channel either :)

[@Wzeyisbacklmao]

​@@NCommandersolaris flashbacks

[@Nono-hk3is]

2:49 Shout out to Ultrix, the first Unix I had root on, back on 1994.

[@kanalnamn]

@17:30 this is the exact reason why I prefer BSD (and some older "real" Unixes, like SCO) over Linux.

[@stonent]

I ran OpenBSD and a website on a 50Mhz Sparc Classic with 48MB of ram for a couple of years.

[@StephenSpencer1972]

Nice work! I ran NetBSD on an old Sparc Classic (originally a controller system for a printing press). It wasn't quite as pokey as the microvax, but getting a kernel compiled for it was an interesting experience. It had a good second life as an smtp host until it blew a cap 3 years later. 😊

[@gregwtmtno5437]

Love your content. Doing stuff like this is how I hope to spend my retirement. But for now, I gotta live vicariously through you!

[@pc6ghz]

Genius glimpse

[@regeneric928]

One another great video!

[@AnonyDave]

I seem to recall dropping into one or two of the streams for a short time. Good to see what became of that all 😌 Now I really need to drag out some of my old vax and alpha gear just to bring it back to life

[@WesBrownStories]

I've got a microvax 3100 sitting right behind me and a wise terminal to go with it. It's running vms. good times.

[@symtexxd]

such an entertaining video. thank you Ncommander!

[@mikepartin571]

YOLO debugging 🤣 Oh that gives my heart a happy

[@HalianTheProtogen]

VMS-tan: “Somebody toUCHA MY SPAGHET” Alternatively, when the address extensions are _even more_ virtual

[@Darkstar2342]

Some years ago I netbooted and installed NetBSD on a MicroVAX ... it was a real learning experience, but I remember mopd under Linux working quite nicely back then...

[@NCommander]

I suspect it's a debian/Ubuntu driver as I had similar problems with rarpd when jumpstartingy sun boxes

[@tommythorn]

Oh I liked the lowlevel driver details and might like more. I have a maxed out Macintosh SE/30 that I’m still trying to get booting NetBSD 10. I would love a video about that :)

[@andyburns]

Hmmm ... I wonder if my VAXserver 3300 could run this?

[@NCommander]

It should.

[@JayJay-88]

Great as always 😊

[@dudemcdudeski6085]

Use X with this? Find modern uses for the old hardware? And please support! Excited to use with my 3100! What does everyone think about using with Lightweight DIY office suite? Can you port Rust to this - to use various rust TUI launchers and command line programs?

[@DECcomputers]

Thanks for that interessting video and a different perspective on the topic. I've used MOP for VMS satellites and the configuration of some DECservers, but that keeps you in the DEC world. I hope that you can run Ultrix on that offical unsupported machine :)

[@NCommander]

It largely comes down if I can either reconstruct locore.s and add a KA45 identifier

[@BollingHolt]

I want a VT-220, and possibly an early-90s VAX as I was introduced to these (and VMS) when I was 11 in the summer of 1992.

[@kq6up]

Really cool. Your code rot comment really stood out to me. I was trying to run packet radio (1k2 baud AFSK AX.25 over ham radio) with the compiled ports in NetBSD. Unfortunately, code rot has got to the BBS software, and it crashes when a new user connects and tries to register their home BBS. This stuff seems right up your alley, but not sure if you are a ham radio/packet radio guy. I am not really a programmer, so I am not sure how to go about debugging and fixing the source. I started with GDB, but it's socket simply goes away in a crash and does not seem to do anything in GDB. I am also not sure if the binary is stripped. That is about as much as I know about this process.

[@NCommander]

I’m a licensed ham (kd2jrt), although I haven't been able to be on air in awhile. There's an amateur radio channel in my discord server which can help of you want to drop by

[@kaitlyn__L]

Oh, I recognise that terminal emulator :) whether you picked it just for the video, or use it all the time, kudos haha

[@NCommander]

It depends on my mood, but I think it looks nicer on stream than just a random terminal window floating in the void.

[@n8chz]

My first exposure to UNIX was original recipe BSD on a VAX.

[@n8chz]

BSD 4.2

[@GameStarUK06]

The VAXstation 4000 VLC was introduced in 1991, not 1985

[@NCommander]

That might be a mistake on my part. I know I looked this up, but I didn't save a source in my notes. NetBSD's list of VAXen doesn't have a release date, so I might have gotten the wrong number written down, but it would be good to know for sure.

[@GameStarUK06]

@@NCommander Yeah it's hard to find exact dates. I think in 1985 the MicroVAX II and VAXstations like the II/GPX (seems to be December 85) were current. The service information manual for the 4000 VLC is dated November 1991. That fits in with what I know from my dad who worked at the factory that manufactured many of the 3100 and 4000 VAX models here in Ayrshire when they were current. My own VLC came from there in mid April 1992 according to the serial number.

[@sterlingphoenix]

I'm still trying to get a version of VMS/OpenVMS I can install somewhere ):

[@Nono-hk3is]

Hell yeah

[@markramsell454]

Well, that was painful. Couple things I enjoyed on the VAX were DCL and .obj files were linkable in multiple languages. Once wrote a program in Basic, Pascal, Assembly, and linked it all together because I could. What we programmers think is fun can be questionable.

[@NCommander]

DEC had a lot of weird one off languages like Bliss, and they specifically coded parts of the system in each language so they couldn't be cut later.

[@official-obama]

what music is playing in the background?

[@perpetualcollapse]

Certified Hood Classic™️

[@justinnamilee]

Neat.

[@NJRoadfan]

Now run a netatalk 2 server on the VAX to serve vintage Macintosh computers with files...... in theory it should work if the dependencies are available on VAX. Murray Hilll UNIX purist...... now that's a new one.

[@NCommander]

Look, one doesn't live next door to Murray Hill without side effects.

[@NJRoadfan]

@@NCommander I should know, I grew up next door to the place. I think they even donated an AT&T UNIX PC to my high school.

[@thorpejsf]

*nice*

[@beepyshenanigans]

netbsd runs on anything, in 5 years it will have ports for toasters and fridges lol

[@hummel6364]

BSD IS UNIX. It shares like 0% of the code but it can be traced straight back to the original OS/Kernel.

[@NCommander]

Legally, it isn't, and that was something determined in a court of law. This was what caused the lawsuits with USDI originally, and why Linux got popularity.

[@brettbump9491]

Congratulations (you get the A). This was the hardest project I assigned to one of my students in a senior level college class some 20+ years ago (he didn't complete it). But the easiest project was to connect up 2 dial-up modems and get communications going between 2 machines (she didn't complete that one either). lol This is a complex project to get done as you need to understand MOP, then Netparms and BootP just to get a kernel running. Then while working from memory, get nfs running and mount the rest of your operating system (on another machine). Then you can format the drive, install NetBSD and hopefully it will boot it (using only a network connection and a hard drive). It can be done. I left my VaxStation 3600 at the college in case anyone wanted to attempt the feat in the future (that is a MIPs based machine anyway). I still have my AlphaServers and a MicroPDP-11/53 which were more valuable in my mind. Let me know if you want to try some DEC 16-bit projects. ;-)

[@activelow9297]

A MicroVAX is not really a "VAX" in the sense that the actual minicomputer VAX systems of the 70's/80's were.

[@NCommander]

Sure, but netBSD actually is known to work on the VAX-11/780, the first model, you could theorically run NetBSD 10 on one although I dunno if anyone has tried. You can more say the MicroVAX is what happens when you just make everything way smaller.

[@framebuffers]

its always the fault of the framebuffer

[@NCommander]

Nobody knows the struggles of the pour GPU, none aside from NVIDIA ...

[@b3ans4eva]

But does it run Doom?😂

[@NCommander]

Very very slowly

[@itsasecrettoeverybody]

But does it runs Doom?

[@NCommander]

Slowly. Very slowly.

[@itsasecrettoeverybody]

@@NCommander maybe it's better to play wolf 3D then. 😂