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Running NetBSD on IBM ThinkPad 380Z

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Re: Running NetBSD on IBM ThinkPad 380Z

#21

Post by gorgonical »

donquichotte wrote: post #9

I recently installed NetBSD on a Thinkpad T430s, it is surprisingly snappy and usable, except when firefox is running. With i3wm, tmux and helix with clangd it is a capable development machine with a surprisingly modern feel, only the compile times give away that the machine is from the early 2010s. Even WiFi is working, and pkgsrc is fast and well-stocked with the newest software.

It's funny to hear someone describe my daily driver personal laptop in the same way as a 380Z. I use Slackware with Xfce4 and except for the lower screen resolution (1360x768) I have never noticed that it's not "modern." I even have a new battery so it gets 6-9 hours of use again.

Like you said, the giveaway is the poor performance, but if you're a systems developer that usually isn't a problem anyway. Emacs, C, assembly, some Chisel and Forth are all that I write on it.

Re: Running NetBSD on IBM ThinkPad 380Z

#22

Post by Aldipower »

In my basement are quite some old but for the time powerful unix machines. SGI Indigo2, Sun Fire, a Pentium II with Knoppix Linux or my Samsung Laptop from 2010 with Ubuntu 16.04. They all boot up quite fast into a nice looking and snappy X Window system. Fantastic machines. Until.. You try to open a web browser, if there is even a modern one available. If you try to open a modern web browser on those machines, you suddenly get a feel how bloated our modern software and web is! Although the SGI has the original Netscape Navigator installed, that is quite some fun in terms of historic reasons.

Re: Running NetBSD on IBM ThinkPad 380Z

#23

Post by prmoustache »

bch wrote: post #4

> It may not be mainstream enough for a daily driver Horses for courses - it's my daily driver for development and administration. To be fair though, I relegate the vast majority of consuming the web to a mobile device.

Firefox is in pkgsrc so I don't see it couldn't be used for general web consumption.

I think the only blocker might be the stuff requiring DRMs like streaming video services but since netbsd now supports VMs you could still run a linux vm for that.

Re: Running NetBSD on IBM ThinkPad 380Z

#24

Post by likeabatterycar »

Aldipower wrote: post #22

In my basement are quite some old but for the time powerful unix machines. SGI Indigo2, Sun Fire, a Pentium II with Knoppix Linux or my Samsung Laptop from 2010 with Ubuntu 16.04. They all boot up quite fast into a nice looking and snappy X Window system. Fantastic machines. Until.. You try to open a web browser, if there is even a modern one available. If you try to open a modern web browser on those machines, you s…

Pepperidge Farm remembers running Internet Explorer on SPARC Solaris until it was committed to the dustbin of computing history.

Re: Running NetBSD on IBM ThinkPad 380Z

#25

Post by reidrac »

> It may not be mainstream enough for a daily driver, but I think it's the ultimate UNIX to put on a spare, underpowered machine.

Kind of my feelings when I run OpenBSD on an old desktop back in early 2000. It was a Pentium 133MHz IIRC and I had it as a text only (although it run X11 with WindowMaker just fine), for text things, learning, tinkering with services, and things like that.

It felt UNIX, whatever that really means.

Re: Running NetBSD on IBM ThinkPad 380Z

#26

Post by luke8086 »

BSDobelix wrote: post #14
Borg3 wrote: post #13

I wonder if that memory usage is with X running. If yes, then Im very impressed. 32MB with X is very decent result.

It's even less, as you can see 18 of those 32MB are cached stuff, but this is without X.

On the other hand, note it only shows 133MB of total mem, rather than 160MB that is installed. I believe the missing 27MB is used by the kernel (the kernel file itself is 23MB) and its data structures.

That being said, I suspect 64MB could be enough for console-mode work, and if you recompiled the kernel without any unused drivers, perhaps you could make it under 32MB.

Re: Running NetBSD on IBM ThinkPad 380Z

#27

Post by 1n4007 »

donquichotte wrote: post #9

I recently installed NetBSD on a Thinkpad T430s, it is surprisingly snappy and usable, except when firefox is running. With i3wm, tmux and helix with clangd it is a capable development machine with a surprisingly modern feel, only the compile times give away that the machine is from the early 2010s. Even WiFi is working, and pkgsrc is fast and well-stocked with the newest software.

The T430 is a modern machine with a Core I (and modern Lenovo keyboard...). The S variants are always a bit slower with their low power cores, but it's still very much a modern thing - you'd expect it to all work.

Re: Running NetBSD on IBM ThinkPad 380Z

#28

Post by reidrac »

likeabatterycar wrote: post #20
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #10

> In general it's safer to use a smaller root partition and a separate one for /home. However, NetBSD worked just fine off a single full-disk partition. Right until there is an update or anything and a bootloader or one of its required files gets written past the 8GB barrier, rendering your system unbootable.

Better or worse than OpenBSD and its ridiculous baker's dozen partitions and mount points? You know __for your protection__ meanwhile they fill up if you install more than a few packages or heaven forbid build a custom kernel when 80% of /home and /var is free and you realize you're screwed and have to start all over.

Been there, done that. Feels painful, but that's because you're learning. My favourite, too small /boot in Linux that prevents updating the kernel if you keep more than 3 versions, and autoremove doesn't seem to happen automatically.

I had to install a new Debian last night. Manual partitioning and I'm quite happy with the results. I couldn't do that without all my past mistakes.

Re: Running NetBSD on IBM ThinkPad 380Z

#29

Post by ofalkaed »

gorgonical wrote: post #21
donquichotte wrote: post #9

I recently installed NetBSD on a Thinkpad T430s, it is surprisingly snappy and usable, except when firefox is running. With i3wm, tmux and helix with clangd it is a capable development machine with a surprisingly modern feel, only the compile times give away that the machine is from the early 2010s. Even WiFi is working, and pkgsrc is fast and well-stocked with the newest software.

It's funny to hear someone describe my daily driver personal laptop in the same way as a 380Z. I use Slackware with Xfce4 and except for the lower screen resolution (1360x768) I have never noticed that it's not "modern." I even have a new battery so it gets 6-9 hours of use again. Like you said, the giveaway is the poor performance, but if you're a systems developer that usually isn't a problem anyway. Emacs, C, asse…

A T42 with slackware and notion wm was my daily driver until around 2015, never really felt a need to get something newer and only did because I wanted something smaller/lighter for portability so I get a cheap $250 11e Thinkpad. Used the T42 regularly until it finally died in 2021 or 22. Miss the 4:3 screen and tiny trackpad. In just shy of 20 years the only issues I had with the T42 was a dead fan. Now I have an X13, 16 cores and NVMe still running slackware and notion, it flies. That $250 11e is still going strong, has survived 3 bike crashes and it shows.

Re: Running NetBSD on IBM ThinkPad 380Z

#30

Post by int_19h »

dejv wrote: post #11
CodeCompost wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the FreeBSD sources also readable?

Well, yes. Kinda. You need to know a bit about high level organization and structure of OSes first as the codebase is not particularly small.

For FreeBSD specifically there's a book about it that is written by the very people who designed most of it: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.5555/2659919
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