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by 1vuio0pswjnm7 1066 days ago
Many years ago, I remember a guy working for an ISP saw me using NetBSD, I must have made some comment about how I liked it, and he said "That's what Slackware was supposed to be." I knew relatively little about Linux at the time but I always remembered that statement. (Today I use both on a daily basis.)

What hooked me on NetBSD was that early on I had a experience with a laptop where audio was not working. After a small amount of reading, I edited a file, recompiled the kernel and voila I had audio. The fact I was able to do that as a total novice was what made me a loyal user for the ensuing decades.
1 comments
jmclnx 1066 days ago
> That's what Slackware was supposed to be

After many many years of using Slackware, I still believe NetBSD was used as inspiration for the design of Slackware.

BTW, I really like pkgsrc, I wish that ended up being a standard for Linux instead of all the multiple package/dependency managers that exist.

And NetBSD is really my favorite BSD, I only wish it worked without a minor hardware issue on the Laptop I have. I may end up putting in a PR for 10.0 BETA once I am sure of the issue.

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NikkiA 1065 days ago
More likely 386BSD than NetBSD back then, although the timeline between the two is only a year and a bit apart.

Back in '92 I was interested in 386BSD, but told to check out linux (which was at 0.12 at the time), back then it was the root/boot disk distro, then mcc, then slackware.

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exikyut 1065 days ago
What's the minor hardware issue?
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jmclnx 1065 days ago
I have a Laptop with 2 video Chips, Intel and Nvidia.

The Nvidia chip gets very hot, even when I disable it on boot. The CPU Temp stays low.

The Nvidia chip is in the lower left corner of the Laptop, and it cannot be disabled by a BIOS Switch. Since NetBSD has Nouveau support, I want to be sure 10.0 BETA supports that specific chip before deciding what to do.

FWIW, same thing heat issue happens with OpenBSD, but OpenBSD has no Nvidia support, luckily OpenBSD is able to ignore it. Slackware, no issue with Nouveau and heat.

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exikyut 1064 days ago
I see, interesting. Definitely sounds like a kernel thing, and I honestly wonder if it isn't a BIOS/firmware issue with the Nvidia GPU handling incomplete initialization sanely. I wonder what would happen if you just tried booting DOS or some other OS on the thing. Or just sat in the BIOS?

If booting into something barebones leaves everything cool, and depending on how long it takes for the chip to get warm, perhaps you could move a `for (;;);` further and further down into the OpenBSD kernel and find the point things get cranky that way.

Extremely hacky approach though, I'll definitely concede that point >.>

(But if you want to try it, I would wholeheartedly recommend looking into something like iPXE, which would let you download each test kernel over HTTP at boot time and make the iteration process tolerable. This assumes you have a second machine though...)

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