So Linus showed his entire ass ( again, if you've been paying attention in the last twenty years, but for some reason this one really got noticed ), and now I keep seeing people talking about building weird #NetBSD / Debian hybrids, how Devuan was trying that, and
You know you can just run NetBSD right? No need to loot it for replacement parts, it's a stable modern OS that works fine exactly as it is.
Putting the GNU userland on top of it will be a lot of work to catch up with what it already is, and carries the reward of having Richard Stallman's slime on everything.
@netbsd@aaron I've been interested in trying NetBSD for a while in large part because of the anti llm policy :)
I can't install it on a 2006 core 2 duo macbook though; I can boot the amd64 USB installer but once I hit 1 to continue it freezes with a solid white rectangle in the top left corner. Works fine on other computers. Tried 10 and 11. Also tried 4 from the archives, but that doesn't seem to provide a USB image.
How do I send mail without subscribing to a list to get help with this, and what's the best mailing list to go to? Or what's the matrix room address? The matrix.to link on the community tab doesn't work for me.
@walnut@aaron@netbsd i wonder if this is a radeon GPU issue. i'm absolutely guessing, but if you get the boot prompt (i think '3' from the boot menu in recent releases), then use "boot -c", and if it does bring up enough of a prompt to disable radeon, type "disable radeondrmkms*" and then "quit". if it is radeon related, this should at least avoid it..
@mrgtwentythree Interestingly this freezes at a different point. boot -c spits out the same magic numbers (an integrity check hash maybe?) that boot normally does before changing to the installer prompt (or broken white rectangle), and then activity indicator on the USB stick stops and the screen freezes at the final hex number.
I tried userconf disable radeondrmkms* while in the boot prompt and then continuing, and that proceeded to the white rectangle. The drive indicator light is solid rather than blinking too, same as continuing to the installer without entering the prompt.
@walnut hmmm magic numbers. are they a list of hex numbers, eg [0x4000 - 0x40000, ..] or something? that comes from efiboot.. i wonder if your system, being from 2006, has a buggy UEFI. can you try the bios installer image? eg ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/images/11.0_RC7/NetBSD-11.0_RC7-amd64-bios-install.img.gz and maybe consider checking the BIOS if it has CSM or UEFI enabled, and turning UEFI off if possible.. again, i'm guessing here.
i wonder if it's not radeon GPU, but nvidia or intel? maybe try userconf disable on those? "i915drmkms*" and ...
@mrgtwentythree It is in fact a 32bit efiboot. I don't think this macbook supports BIOS boot, and I would be happy to blame Apple for being weird about booting even 20 years ago :). FWIW I did install refind and can boot grub and Debian, but not the NetBSD (Legacy) option in the NetBSD 10 or 11 image, or the i386 version of NetBSD (which doesn't have efi support in the usb image at all it seems). It seems NetBSD 4 also worked at one point, which is why I tried that before getting stuck at no USB image. Maybe I just need to find a way to burn a CD, but I'm not confident updating from 4 to 10 or 11rc will work if the kernel doesn't boot from the installer.
In Debian I gave lshw a go and it under display it mentions Intel 945, so I gave disabling i915drmksm* a go. It now freezes after the magic numbers (21368856+784744+1312408 [944186+1401072+1026750]=0x1b37ee8) and does not proceed to the white rectangle screen. USB indicator light is also solid, so that is different from boot -c. (the indicator light is always blinking while the magic numbers load up).
I also noticed you in the authors page of the i915drm man page on NetBSD, so that's cool :)
Not important, but I also tried using ipxe to boot pxeboot_ia32.bin either, and the error it gives is also related to UEFI. I think I tried i386, amd64, and different versions with the same result. So it seems that netbsd does not support netboot and UEFI? That seems kind of weird if so; I guess it's not a popular feature. ipxe.org/err/2e0080
If you are running a UEFI version of iPXE then only EFI binaries can be loaded. PXE binaries such as pxelinux.0 and memdisk use legacy BIOS calls and can never work on UEFI.
@mrgtwentythree I'm not confident I typed those magic numbers perfectly if they are somehow important, and I've not paid attention to if they change :)
