Post #1799651

2026-04-12 01:40 UTC

OpenBSD doesn't support the 32-bit RPiZero (I haven't gone spelunking to find out if it ever did; the Zero 2 is 64-bit). So for the first time I installed the third major BSD, NetBSD. It's an SBC, so there's not really an installation. It just boots. X11 works. USB wifi over a hub works. There are only about a dozen processes running by the time you get to X. It was the first time since early 00s Slackware that 'top' didn't fill the screen. Also very responsive. Rust actually does support armv6, so I did eventually manage to compile my preferred editor (Helix), after 2 days of constantly restarting it because it kept overheating and crashing. I could have gone for better cooling, but I was also generally wary of running anything important off an SD card anyways. 4/n

Replies (1)

@csgordon@discuss.systems 2026-04-12 01:41

Overall this was interesting, but ultimately disappointing. The G4 Hardware *still works*. Well. After 20 years. It has actual removable memory, so I could bump it to the hardware's 2GB RAM, replace the old drive, and keep using it for a long time, in principle. It's still actually more powerful than many recent Chromebooks. In fact was so much more powerful than the Pentium III (256MB RAM) I initially played StarCraft and Diablo II on that I barely knew what to do with it. Needless to say, I did plenty of research on the Internet back then; wrote, compiled, and tested tremendous amounts of software; wrote lots of word documents and made a few slide decks. Email. All the things we do now, without any issues at all. 5/n

Open ##1799652