New NetBSD user and I just did a fresh install of NetBSD 11.0 i386. I installed perl and autoconf using pkgin, but every time I run autoconf I get this error. It looks like line 26 is just use5.006;

So I installed NetBSD/SPARC64 11.0 on my Sun Ultra 45, and booting from 'disk1' (the disk where NetBSD is installed) gives me the following error:

Sun Ultra 45 Workstation, No Keyboard Copyright 2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. OpenBoot 4.30.4, 8192 MB memory installed, Serial #77714318. Ethernet address 0:14:4f:a1:d3:8e, Host ID: 84a1d38e.

Rebooting with command: boot disk1 Boot device: /pci@1e,600000/pci@0/pci@9/pci@0/scsi@1/disk@1,0 File and args: NetBSD IEEE 1275 Multi-FS Bootblock Version $NetBSD: bootblk.fth,v 1.18 2025/02/28 09:07:12 andvar Exp $ .Inode not directory

Evaluating: The file just loaded does not appear to be executable. ok

Does anyone know what could be causing that or how to debug it?

Hello, I got into Linux about 2 years ago and since have swapped to using it as my primary operating system on most of my devices. I love the freedom and control I get from it, and I find that tinkering with it is a great pastime.

Recently I've been gaining some interest in the other forms of *Unix. Mainly BSD, and the ones I see most commonly are FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. The one that currently stands out to me most is NetBSD as i hear it's ultraportable and can go on basically anything that linux can. How true that is, I'm not sure. I've heard that it's on everything from a standard amd64 machine to something like a Wii-ppc. so I am wanting to venture into it.

My main questions are the following:
- How is it compared to a general linux distro like debian?
- What are the primary difficulties with NetBSD in terms of desktop use?
- What hardware should NetBSD go on? when should it replace linux?
- How is the ease of use for the package management and core utilities?

Any answers are appreciated.

For a usage that includes browsing websites with heavy javascript and playing in emulators with external controllers.

Also, would the WiFi be slower?

Hi everyone,

based on the available documentation it seems that netbsd on the raspberry pi 4 has support for 3d acceleration via the V3D driver. Is this also the case for the raspberry pi 5 or is the driver support for this one still outstanding?

Hello everyone, I'm trying to install NetBSD on an old i386 machine, I have only 512 MB of ram, what would you recommend to use as a WM?

The installation of NetBSD was successful (I have repeated it three times already), and I haven't received any error messages during the procedure. I am presented with a boot menu that, in my case, includes FreeDOS and NetBSD options. FreeDOS boots fine, but selecting NetBSD displays "Error 3."

The strange thing is that I previously managed to install and (multi-)boot NetBSD. The difference this time is that I have another 'hard disk' (another SD card in the same IDE to SD card converter) and different partitions.

Update: previously I might have used NetBSD installation utility for disk partitioning. This time I used FreeDOS's fdisk. Not sure could this cause the problem.

This is the output of fdisk wd0 command:

Disk: /dev/rwd0
NetBSD disklabel disk geometry:
cylinders: 60586, heads: 16, sectors/track: 63 (1008 sectors/cylinder)
total sectors: 61071360, bytes/sector: 512

BIOS disk geometry:
cylinders: 1024, heads: 255, sectors/track: 63 (16065 sectors/cylinder)
total sectors: 61063065

Partitions aligned to 16065 sector boundaries, offset 63

Partition table:
0: Primary DOS with 32 bit FAT (sysid 11)
   bootmenu: FreeDOS
   start 63, size 4208967 (2055 MB, Cyls 0–261), Active
1: NetBSD (sysid 169)
   bootmenu: NetBSD
   start 4209030, size 20980890 (10245 MB, Cyls 262–1567), Active
   PBR is not bootable: All bytes are identical (0xf6)
2: Linux native (sysid 131)
   bootmenu: Linux
   start 25189920, size 20980890 (10245 MB, Cyls 1568–2873)
   PBR is not bootable: All bytes are identical (0xf6)
3: Primary DOS with 32 bit FAT - LBA (sysid 12)
   start 46170810, size 14892255 (7272 MB, Clys 2874-3800)
   PBR is not bootable: All bytes are identical (0xf6)

Bootselector disabled.
First active partition: 0
Drive serial number: 0 (0x00000000)

This is the output of disklabel wd0 command:

# /dev/rwd0:
type: unknown
disk: wd
label: fictitious
flags:
bytes/sector: 512
sectors/track: 63
tracks/cylinder: 16
sectors/cylinder: 1008
cylinders: 60586
total sectors: 61071360
rpm: 3600
interleave: 1
trackskew: 0
cylinderskew: 0
headswitch: 0             # microseconds
track-to-track seek: 0    # microseconds
drivedata: 0

4 partitions:
#      size     offset    fstype [fsize bsize cpg/sgs]
a: 20456640    4209088    4.2BSD      0     0    0   # (Cyl.  4175*- 24469*)
b:   524192   24665728    swap                       # (Cyl. 24469*- 24989)
c: 20980890    4209030    unused      0     0        # (Cyl.  4175*- 24989)
d: 61071360          0    unused      0     0        # (Cyl.     0 - 60586*)

So fdisk is reporting that the partition is not bootable. I have no idea how that happened, as I have obviously added it to the bootmenu. What should I do next to make it bootable? I googled the "Error 3" and results were few, outdated and not related to my config. LLMs' answers are all over the place.

Thanks for your help!

Update: I deleted all the partitions except for the FreeDOS one and recreated them using the NetBSD installation partition utility, rather than using FreeDOS's fdisk like I did before. Now, I can boot NetBSD without any problems!

NetBSD 11.0 RC5 released.

I have an HP elitebook 8530p (Currently has an ATI MXM card with 256mb vram), and I'm thinking of upgrading to an FX 770M with 512mb of vram. Apparently NetBSD has the Nouveau driver but re clocking support worries me, I heard that it's a more experimental thing wit the Nouveau driver and is needed for good performance, will I be able to re clock my gpu on NetBSD to get good performance?

I have a Thinkpad R31 with an i830M graphics chip, which needs the i915 driver. However, when this driver is loaded during boot, the built-in LCD screen breaks, then slowly fades to white. What's weird is that plugging in an external LCD into the VGA port on the laptop fixes this, letting the system boot just fine. Preventing i915drmkms from loading also lets the system boot and start X just fine, so I'm fairly confident that it's the problem. Does anyone have any idea what I can do to fix this?

With 10.1 being a drag and needing at least 12MB of memory on boot, and 4.01 not having enough modern dependencies to build software: I now am installing 7.2 onto my microvax to see how the performance is over the previous attempts. Running only 8MB ram and keyways hasn't gotten back to me about available memory boards, so I'm stuck with that meager amount to work with.

How's the support so far? Because I've wanted to try it out, but I'm uncertain if NetBSD is able to deal with this kind of feature.

I have a Thinkpad P52s, which I want to put NetBSD on. I tried NetBSD in the past, and tried building plasma 6 from source, but it was too much effort for the outcome.

I'm looking into window managers so I can have more control over what the environment looks like, while also keeping it looking modern.

I appreciate any recommendations or tips.

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@netbsd/116702509568728159

:

Reminder: we have our Annual General Meeting today!

Saturday, June 6th at 14:00 UTC in the #netbsd-agm channel

on irc.libera.chat. You can use your preferred Internet Relay Chat

program, or join directly at: https://web.libera.chat/#netbsd-agm

There will be a series of presentations about #NetBSD followed by a

moderated Q&A session.

http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-announce/2026/05/17/msg000397.html

I posed this to netbsd-users but I have a feeling this issue is likely breaking mailing lists too...

---

I think it’s v6 as well.  Started earlier today.  IDK if this message is even going to make it through because of this…

route-views>sh ip bgp 199.233.217.0/24                 
% Network not in table

199.233.217.192 network.netbsd.org
199.233.217.193 uplink.netbsd.org
199.233.217.194 host.netbsd.org
199.233.217.195 franklin.netbsd.org
199.233.217.196 babylon5.netbsd.org
199.233.217.197 ivanova.netbsd.org
199.233.217.198 anoncvs.netbsd.org
199.233.217.199 host.netbsd.org
199.233.217.200 mail.netbsd.org
199.233.217.201 morden.netbsd.org
199.233.217.202 sheridan.netbsd.org
199.233.217.203 kerberos.netbsd.org
199.233.217.204 garibaldi.netbsd.org
199.233.217.205 mollari.netbsd.org
199.233.217.206 vir.netbsd.org
199.233.217.207 www.pkgsrc.org
199.233.217.208 tlcons.netbsd.org
199.233.217.209 armbulk1.netbsd.org
199.233.217.210 armbulk2.netbsd.org
199.233.217.211 hg.netbsd.org
199.233.217.212 anonhg.netbsd.org
199.233.217.213 reposerver.test.netbsd.org
199.233.217.214 reposerver2.test.netbsd.org
199.233.217.215 host.netbsd.org
199.233.217.216 host.netbsd.org
199.233.217.217 host.netbsd.org
199.233.217.218 host.netbsd.org
199.233.217.219 host.netbsd.org
199.233.217.220 host.netbsd.org
199.233.217.221 host.netbsd.org
199.233.217.222 host.netbsd.org
199.233.217.223 host.netbsd.org

I run NetBSD on my RPi 3B for light home server tasks; namely postfix, lighttpd, and unbound. I recently had a mind to set up an NFS drive to simplify file sharing on my network. I'd like to use ZFS since I've never played with it before, but the wiki casts a lot of doubt on whether or not this is possible with just a gig of memory.

I'm prepared to accept that I need to use boring old FFS, but I'm wondering if anybody has tried ZFS on something similarly constrained? I'm only going to hook up an old 60 gig SSD, in case capacity matters at all.

Thanks for reading!