Gregory Nowak wrote: > On Sun, Sep 21, 2008 at 02:33:23AM -0700, Tony Baechler wrote: > >> Getting back to BSD installation, I can't comment on anything but >> FreeBSD but it uses a text installer so perhaps it would be possible to >> install via an emulator such as Bochs with a curses interface. >> > > Unless things have changed since the last time I used bochs (which > isn't likely, given the goal of bochs), it's very slow. If you don't > want to put freebsd/netbsd on a physical box, use something like > qemu/vmware/virtualbox/one of those programs. The only draw back here > would be the lack of guest additions, but you can still run without > them. As for your comment about freebsd having an installer with a > text interface, and therefore being possible to install on bochs, > because it has a curses interface, I don't follow your line of > reasoning here. The interface used by an emulator, and the interface > of a install program for a specific os have nothing to do with each > other. That's like saying you can dump coal in a car, because it > burns, and so does gas, or is there something else you were getting at here? > > Hi, OK, I was unclear obviously. What you say is correct in most cases that an emulator interface has nothing to do with the guest OS. However, at least when I played with Bochs a long time ago, Bochs was different. If you didn't need graphics, you could set it to only use a curses interface for the emulated OS and it worked. It comes with a sample 10 MB Linux disk image. If you tell it to not use a GUI but to run the image with the curses interface, you have a very minimal emulated Linux system. There isn't a lot you can do with it, but I verified that it in fact worked. I tried with other images but didn't get anywhere. Maybe that has changed but it used to work. Being that there was no GUI, I don't think it was that slow but I don't remember. >> NetBSD >> claims to run on anything including the Vax so I'm sure it has a text >> installer that could run in an emulator. >> > > Yes, when I compared the list of architectures supported by nebsd, and > by linux the last time I ran netbsd, it was certainly true that netbsd > ran on lots more archs, and I wouldn't be surprised if it still > does. Again, regarding your comment on the text installer, see above. > > Again, see above but I would also add that I know of at least two Vax emulators which are text-based and do in fact work great with ssh. I played a demo version of Zork for mainframes which told you to buy the commercial series now available from Infocom. I don't remember the date on that particular Zork but it was from 1980-ish, clearly after the Apple II version was published. It also had Adventure. It was tops10 I think. Now I'm not remembering the name of the emulator but it was specific to the Vax arch. I found instructions for getting NetBSD working on it. If this is something you're interested in, you can of course use Google or apt-cache search, but I could try to find the name of it. I know there are at least two that work great from a console and at least one is in Debian. > The thing that turned me off netbsd was that you had to build > everything from source, other than the base system, which you could > get as binaries. At the time, I was running it on a 133 MHz pentium, > with 64 megs of RAM, so you can imagine how long it took to build > stuff on it, especially if you wanted to customize the netbsd kernel > to your hardware, which I did, just for the experience. Another thing > Huh? Yes, the ports collection builds everything from source but you can download precompiled packages as well, at least on FreeBSD. The dependency tracking isn't the best but it wasn't that bad. I would check ftp://ftp.XX.netbsd.org/ again, replacing XX with your country code. I'm sure you'll find installable packages. There is pkgsrc (or pkg-src, not sure which) which builds from source but you should also see a packages directory with a ton of installable software. I know OpenBSD and FreeBSD do provide packages, but perhaps NetBSD doesn't because of the number of arches it supports. I've installed FreeBSD packages before. Yes, I used Gentoo first and I did like it, so it was no adjustment when I tried FreeBSD. Gentoo is based on the BSD ports collection as you can imagine. I never tried building a custom kernel. > that turned me off netbsd is the lack of dependency tracking when > installing software, this was true even for the binary base > system. What I'll say to those using gnu/linux who want to try out > netbsd is that if you've used gentoo, and like it, then you'll > probably fall in love with netbsd as well. However, if you've used > gentoo, and don't like it, then I'd say the chances are high you won't > like netbsd either. >
