The BSD Journal

Purpose
The purpose of this web site is to journal my experiences using BSD operating systems on a number of different hardware platforms. Historically, this site has been devoted almost entirely to NetBSD. That is changing for various reasons. Most of my core business servers are running FreeBSD. I have started transitioning some of my main business servers to OpenBSD for security and management reasons. I also have some servers running NetBSD.

The majority of my time is spent using Mac OS X on a 15-inch MacBook Pro and PowerMac G5 and using OpenBSD on an IBM Thinkpad X31 and Sharp Zaurus SL-C3100.
I am now adding regular entries over at The BSD Journal Blog.
News
May 10, 2007 - I have added entries over at the BSD Journal Blog about running OpenBSD on both a Thecus N2100B and a Sun Fire V100. Entries have been added below as well.
April 1, 2007 - It is time for some much needed updates. I added some OpenBSD/macppc entries in the OpenBSD ports list. These include three servers I am presently using. I also adding some new updates over at the new BSD Journal Blog.
October 4, 2006 - I have been reading up on the best supported laptops for OpenBSD for some time now and I finally decided to buy one. I already have a Toshiba Libretto L1 which is a great little laptop except for the fact that it uses ACPI which OpenBSD has little to no support for at this time. After reading about laptop support on the OpenBSD/i386 Laptop Page, I decided on an IBM Thinkpad X31 or X40. I scoured eBay and found an X31 that suited me quite nicely. Well, it arrived yesterday (Tuesday). I immediately set out to install OpenBSD/i386 4.0-current from the 20060930 snapshot. After some initial issues with the hibernation partition, things are running great. My X31 happens to have an em(4) interface instead of the typical fxp(4) ethernet interface. That was the one thing I was disappointed about in the X31 versus the X40. The thing that swayed me toward the X31 was its built-in compact flash slot. The X40 has an SD card slot instead which is not as useful for my projects. According to the auction, my X31 came with a Cisco 802.11b mini-pci wireless card but in fact it is the Intel ipw(4) 802.11b card. Oh well, at least em(4) was a pleasant surprise even if the wireless card is a disappointment.
September 28, 2006 - Good news on the Color Classic/LC 575. It is now running OpenBSD/3.9 very nicely. I used Booter 2.0.0 (which is included in 4.0) to set the Gestalt ID to 92 instead of the default 99. That fixed the booting issue and everything has been running smoothly ever since. This evening I installed OpenBSD on my Libretto L1. There are still several issues I am working on. I will post more about this later. The biggest issue at the moment is lack of support for ACPI. I understand that it is being worked on so maybe we will have good news on this front soon. I also discovered that OpenBSD is in need of an IBM Workpad z50 and an HP Jornada 728 for developing new ports to these machines. I am going to donate one of each of these to help out OpenBSD. I am looking forward to the fruits of those projects. The Quadra 610 has been compiling OpenBSD/mac68k 3.9-stable all week and still is not done. I hope to get the main Quadra 650 up and running soon. I finally got another hard disk for it.
September 20, 2006 - The SE/30 is up and running great and the Quadra 610 is running great as well. The SE/30 is a little slow but seems to work. I also tried installing OpenBSD/mac68k 3.9 as well as NetBSD/mac68k 3.0.1 on a Color Classic that has been upgraded with an LC 575 motherboard (with a 33 MHz 68040, not 68LC040). I just got a bus error both times. I am going to have to figure out another way to get that working. There is a hack you have to perform to the system software in order for Mac OS 7.5.5 to run (7.5.3 crashes). I am wondering if that same hack may apply to OpenBSD as well. It would require a patch. I'll have to see if it is possible.
September 18, 2006 - I have been having grief gettings some of the Mac68k machines up and running. I finally got the Quadra 610 up and running with OpenBSD. I was also able to get OpenBSD running on the SE/30. I have a Quadra 650 coming which will be my new OpenBSD/mac68k build machine. I am going to attempt to hook up an external SCSI disk to build on. I would rather not stress the internal drive too much since it is a bit on the old side. The last of my projects today involved installing NetBSD/hpcarm 3.0.1 on my Jornada 728.
September 13, 2006 - I have been working on getting some additional machines up and running. One of them is cvs. It is running OpenBSD/i386 3.9 and is serving up anonymous ftp as a partial mirror for OpenBSD 3.9 and my own OpenBSD/i386 3.9-stable builds. It is available at ftp.bsdjournal.net. This will also house packages I have built as well as any other relevant content. It also serves up bsdjournal.net and associated sites.
September 4, 2006 - I just did some minor changes to some of the entries. I am working on updating all of the entries to be fully current. I am going to be doing some work on my NetBSD and OpenBSD machines today.
June 1, 2006 - I have not updated this site for some time. Many things are now out of date. I have updated the purpose statement and added some more information. I have also created a new archived news page as well a new archived NetBSD ports page as well. This allows me to move forward on the main page of this site while still maintaining some of the old data for historical reasons.
Archived News
Resources on this site
Howtos for NetBSD
Links
Archived Information
NetBSD Ports that I am currently running
NetBSD/cobalt
NetBSD/hpcarm
NetBSD/hpcmips
NetBSD/macppc
Archived NetBSD Ports
OpenBSD Ports that I am currently running
OpenBSD/alpha
OpenBSD/armish
OpenBSD/i386
OpenBSD/mac68k
OpenBSD/macppc
OpenBSD/sparc
OpenBSD/sparc64
OpenBSD/zaurus
Copyright © 2003-2006, Bryan Carter Vyhmeister