Crash! More machines? No, fewer. A new/old laptop with NetBSD 11.0

 Other than 1 homebrew machine I built and installed NetBSD, much of my experience is taking an old Windows machine and running BSD, or using Raspberry Pi units that aren't very portable. I found one laptop in a cleanout, but the battery would not kick in, and repairs weren't worth the hassle. Then I got a slightly less dinged machine and tried to put NetBSD 11.0 on it.

Sigh, stuck with an inability to partition the drive, I went to my local PC shop. They had not prior specific experience with NetBSD but were game enough to give it a go. Took a few days, and then they said it's ready. Here are notes on what worked, and what didn't during the first few days of my new used car, er, computer.

A critical test was whether the battery would work at all, given the machine age and peculiarities of power switching. Yes, the machine kept running without being plugged in (later I found out how short the battery life is).

The first fright was X Windows opening with a small black rectangle, and nothing else on screen. Never seen that before in decades of "startx" running. Not sure what happens, but there must be some kind of synch or init happening for up to a minute before ctwm shows a terminal, and xclock, and a process list. Whew.

Sadly, no recognition of internal wifi, so back to the USB dongle world. Slow but it works. 

I got the ByteBench package and will eventually run some speed tests. It's a 4-core/8-thread Intel machine, and 16GB, so totally adequate for what I do (QGIS is a maybe).

A few packages installed and everything generally worked as expected.

neofetch screen 

 

multimedia

VLC works, but I've lost the DLNA media servers. It worked on another NetBSD machine for a few months, and then I must have installed or deinstalled a package that pulled that function out from under. Drat. And sound seems to only come out the HDMI on the laptop, not on a secondary monitor. And the internal headphone jack is seen but not available to VLC.

Again, a USB dongle would work around this, if not the most elegant look.

Power 

The battery power is weak; once I added a template to Zabbix I could see how fast it drains. I think it's the battery, not the OS, that's weak.

 

The charge level dropped from 60% to 10% in about 2 hours. Again, used machine. Good news, the OS shut down gracefully when the power reached low tide, as the reboot didn't need to fsck.

I installed "okular" which I found to run slide shows from PDF and it worked fine; "gaupol" for creating sub-title files would start up but not show an MP4 video, just the text subscreen.

External monitors, both HDMI and VGA, work great, doubling the already decent screen size.

$ xrandr

Screen 0: minimum 8 x 8, current 1920 x 1080, maximum 32767 x 32767

eDP1 connected primary 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 340mm x 190mm

1920x1080 60.02*+ 59.93 48.03

1680x1050 59.88

1400x1050 59.98

1600x900 60.00 59.95 59.82

1280x1024 60.02

1400x900 59.96 59.88

...

xscreensaver 

I put xscreensaver on, and ran a few test cycles. One saver would SEGV, others worked ok, until I was wakened by the fan noise when one app just hit the roof. I have found you can chart the screen saver impact on a machine by looking at the CPU temperature. The change cycle is 20 minutes or so; the most graphics-intensive (or inefficient code) cause heat spikes.

At one point I had a shell script that would annotate the strip chart with the xscreensaver code cycling info. Should dig that up. 

Partial dmesg output:

  

[     1.000000] NetBSD 11.0 (GENERIC) #0: Thu Jul 30 15:23:12 UTC 2026
[     1.000000] 	mkrepro@mkrepro.NetBSD.org:/usr/src/sys/arch/amd64/compile/GENERIC
[     1.000000] total memory = 16242 MB
[     1.000000] avail memory = 15682 MB

 good ... 

[     1.000004] cpu0: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8350U CPU @ 1.70GHz, id 0x806ea
[     1.000004] cpu0: node 0, package 0, core 0, smt 0
 also good ...
[     1.000004] cpu7: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8350U CPU @ 1.70GHz, id 0x806ea
[     1.000004] cpu7: node 0, package 0, core 3, smt 1
... yes
[     1.044421] Atheros Communications product 003e (miscellaneous network, revision 0x32) at pci2 dev 0 function 0 not configured
... not so good.
		
[     1.044421] wm0: Ethernet address []
[     1.044421] wm0: 0x6a4080<FLASH,PCIE,ASF_FIRM,AMT,WOL,EEE>
[     1.044421] ihphy0 at wm0 phy 2: i217 10/100/1000 media interface, rev. 6
[     1.044421] ihphy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, 1000baseT, 1000baseT-FDX, auto
... fine	
[     2.284418] urtwn0: MAC/BB RTL8188EU, RF 6052 1T1R, address []
[     2.334418] urtwn0: 1 rx pipe, 2 tx pipes
... wifi USB dongle, whew

[  2444.159851] pckbport: command timeout
[  2454.328638] autoconfiguration error: pms_enable: command error 35
... (much later, not sure what this is from)	
 

Now just to wait until 11.1 comes out and makes this oldie even better.