NomadBSD

[Member PDP-8]

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I’m going to fire up NomadBSD later today – if nothing else to pay homage to the pioneers and as a reminder not to take our software freedom for granted – be it gpl or bsd style.

I also tend to forget that aside from legal / freedom issues, the groundbreaking work Jolitz did was to actually get a port to the 386 working at all! Which compared to the previous generation of minis and workstations, that meant more or less “toy” or commodity PC hardware, where internal documentation and the circus of off-the-shelf hardware meant that unless you were Microsoft, you weren’t going to get any help. Or be privy to secret bios calls, or secret calls in assembler.

Which for various reasons morphed from 386BSD into Net and Free BSD – still facing the same challenge, unlike the others who spent their time on fully supported mini hardware.

I guess we are /still/ living with that spectre of commodity pc hardware secrecy and hoarding today in one form or another.

Yep – gonna’ fire up NomadBSD and spend some time with it. It fits exactly into FreeBSD’s original charter, which was to make installation and operation on commodity pc hardware easier to get up and running for the average Joe/Jill to explore and learn from.

[Member PDP-8]

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Well, that was pleasant. Big respect to the NomadBSD devs!

Yep – it is a respectable desktop for sure, but for best results, you’ll want to put some cpu and memory horsepower behind it. And use a quality fast usb stick. So no, it’s not antiX. 🙂 But I did test on a weedy little UEFI-ONly Intel-Atom box running only 2gb ram and um yes, stick to single tabs in the browser and get a cup of coffee for Libre-Office if you are planning on running low-end spec hardware. Most of my time was spent in the Sakura terminal looking around and realizing I’d lost my BSD knowledge over the years. Might be a good time to catch up.

Install was interesting as it was an automated multi-reboot process as it sets everthing up after choosing your defaults. Got a little freaked out when it dropped out of X to do some font-caching, but that was part of the initial process.

With a tip of the hat to Keith Bostic, I chose NVI as my standard command line editor, rather than vim.

I think it serves it’s purpose well, as a live-usb medium for FreeBSD with plenty of GNU desktop goodies thrown in for good measure. Used the OctoPkg gui front end to do some small updates, and all is well.

But again, don’t expect an AntiX experience. Apples and Oranges.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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Having recently read something about certain scheduler frequency range used for servers and a different one for primarily interactive systems actually explains clearly why some systems “feel” more responsive than others.

Minimizing the number of active daemon processes and fine tuning the scheduler frequency are two things that can affect interactive versus server response.

Systems used for both interactive and server use must clearly be a compromise; otherwise they will do one well and the other poorly.

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Brian Masinick

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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https://nomadbsd.org/download.html –
These are available:
NomadBSD 130R-20210508 (64-bit/x86-64/amd64)
NomadBSD 130R-20210508 (32-bit/IA-32/i386)
NomadBSD 130R-20210508 (Mac x86-64)

NomadBSD 1.4 (64-bit/x86-64/amd64)
NomadBSD 1.4 (32-bit/IA-32/i386)
NomadBSD 1.4 (Mac x86-64)

The 130R series is the most current; the releases were renamed to match the current FreeBSD 13.* series of releases.

To install them to USB:

Linux

# lzma -d nomadbsd-x.y.z.img.lzma
# dd bs=1M if=nomadbsd-x.y.z.img of=/dev/sdX conv=fsync

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Brian Masinick

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