Gourd

It is amazing how without fail search engines respond to searching for #NetBSD resources with pages related to FreeBSD. Also it's hilarious how bad slop pages for NetBSD are. Just referring to Linux and FreeBSD commands, configuration, and packages that do not exist on NetBSD.

Wrote up the steps I had to take to disable an NVIDIA Optimus card (a secondary discret NVIDIA GPU in addition to the main intergrated graphics) on a laptop to save power and generate less heat under NetBSD, where Optimus isn't supported with a guide on the UnitedBSD forums here: https://www.unitedbsd.com/d/1690-how-to-disable-nvidia-optimus-cards-on-netbsd-a-guide #NetBSD

#NetBSD trip report: This reminds me highly of setting up Arch Linux in the mid-late 00's. Including being very confused how to get PulseAudio to work. On the plus side, the wifi card in this laptop works (an Intel one) although the speed is maxing out at 54 mbits/sec. Graphics performance is pretty good as well given the Intel onboard GPU from a Broadwell CPU. Just need to figure out how to get sound to work... (Intel HDA audio. audiocfg test has worked, but so far nothing else has...)

Finally got my old 2015-era laptop's NVIDIA Optimus card to disable under #NetBSD by following the instructions here by @bkrawczyk@fosstodon.org ! Had to change out the ACPI methods being called to the ones used by my laptop (in my case, \\_SB.PCI0.PEG0.PEGP._OFF and _ON) which I found by running a Linux live USB, blacklisting the nouveau module with modprobe.blacklist=nouveau installing the bbswitch module, reading the kernel log of the ACPI device found by it, unloading bbswitch, building and installing acpi_call, testing with that a bit, and then rebuilding the NetBSD kernel module with the new ACPI method. Also I had to compile the NetBSD kernel without Nouveau built in. I really should write this up on the NetBSD wiki or something... (Or port bbswitch properly. But that runs into the problem of my test cases being a grand sample of one.)

@netbsd@mastodon.sdf.org looks like it was in fact just changing the default sound device to get it to work

Running #NetBSD 11.0 (from this year) on my 1997 Pentium MMX 233 MHz system out of curiosity, and it's facinating how the OS can boot relatively fast, text mode applications still usually launch snappily, but it takes five minutes for fontconfig to update the cache. It also fails the "can this play Doom" test amusingly with Chocolate Doom: Chocolate Doom's setup program is too much for it to handle under Xorg between the S3 Virge GPU, 128 MB of RAM, and CPU. Still really cool it works as well as it does on a system this old and supports all the hardware in it, though. And it can even touch the internet without me being worried of it being killed by long-lasting internet background malware radiation from the 90's! #retrocomputing

@netbsd@mastodon.sdf.org Firefox, MPV, VLC. Good question on the second.