State of accessibility on BSD systems

[Tony Baechler]

Gregory Nowak wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 21, 2008 at 02:33:23AM -0700, Tony Baechler wrote:
>   
>> Getting back to BSD installation, I can't comment on anything but  
>> FreeBSD but it uses a text installer so perhaps it would be possible to  
>> install via an emulator such as Bochs with a curses interface.
>>     
>
> Unless things have changed since the last time I used bochs (which
> isn't likely, given the goal of bochs), it's very slow. If you don't
> want to put freebsd/netbsd on a physical box, use something like
> qemu/vmware/virtualbox/one of those programs. The only draw back here
> would be the lack of guest additions, but you can still run without
> them. As for your comment about freebsd having an installer with a
> text interface, and therefore being possible to install on bochs,
> because it has a curses interface, I don't follow your line of
> reasoning here. The interface used by an emulator, and the interface
> of a install program for a specific os have nothing to do with each
> other. That's like saying you can dump coal in a car, because it
> burns, and so does gas, or is there something else you were getting at here?
>
>   
Hi,

OK, I was unclear obviously.  What you say is correct in most cases that 
an emulator interface has nothing to do with the guest OS.  However, at 
least when I played with Bochs a long time ago, Bochs was different.  If 
you didn't need graphics, you could set it to only use a curses 
interface for the emulated OS and it worked.  It comes with a sample 10 
MB Linux disk image.  If you tell it to not use a GUI but to run the 
image with the curses interface, you have a very minimal emulated Linux 
system.  There isn't a lot you can do with it, but I verified that it in 
fact worked.  I tried with other images but didn't get anywhere.  Maybe 
that has changed but it used to work.  Being that there was no GUI, I 
don't think it was that slow but I don't remember.
>> NetBSD  
>> claims to run on anything including the Vax so I'm sure it has a text  
>> installer that could run in an emulator.
>>     
>
> Yes, when I compared the list of architectures supported by nebsd, and
> by linux the last time I ran netbsd, it was certainly true that netbsd
> ran on lots more archs, and I wouldn't be surprised if it still
> does. Again, regarding your comment on the text installer, see above.
>
>   
Again, see above but I would also add that I know of at least two Vax 
emulators which are text-based and do in fact work great with ssh.  I 
played a demo version of Zork for mainframes which told you to buy the 
commercial series now available from Infocom.  I don't remember the date 
on that particular Zork but it was from 1980-ish, clearly after the 
Apple II version was published.  It also had Adventure.  It was tops10 I 
think.  Now I'm not remembering the name of the emulator but it was 
specific to the Vax arch.  I found instructions for getting NetBSD 
working on it.  If this is something you're interested in, you can of 
course use Google or apt-cache search, but I could try to find the name 
of it.  I know there are at least two that work great from a console and 
at least one is in Debian.
> The thing that turned me off netbsd was that you had to build
> everything from source, other than the base system, which you could
> get as binaries. At the time, I was running it on a 133 MHz pentium,
> with 64 megs of RAM, so you can imagine how long it took to build
> stuff on it, especially if you wanted to customize the netbsd kernel
> to your hardware, which I did, just for the experience. Another thing
>   

Huh?  Yes, the ports collection builds everything from source but you 
can download precompiled packages as well, at least on FreeBSD.  The 
dependency tracking isn't the best but it wasn't that bad.  I would 
check ftp://ftp.XX.netbsd.org/ again, replacing XX with your country 
code.  I'm sure you'll find installable packages.  There is pkgsrc (or 
pkg-src, not sure which) which builds from source but you should also 
see a packages directory with a ton of installable software.  I know 
OpenBSD and FreeBSD do provide packages, but perhaps NetBSD doesn't 
because of the number of arches it supports.  I've installed FreeBSD 
packages before.  Yes, I used Gentoo first and I did like it, so it was 
no adjustment when I tried FreeBSD.  Gentoo is based on the BSD ports 
collection as you can imagine.  I never tried building a custom kernel.

> that turned me off netbsd is the lack of dependency tracking when
> installing software, this was true even for the binary base
> system. What I'll say to those using gnu/linux who want to try out
> netbsd is that if you've used gentoo, and like it, then you'll
> probably fall in love with netbsd as well. However, if you've used
> gentoo, and don't like it, then I'd say the chances are high you won't
> like netbsd either.
>