I recently installed NetBSD 4.0.1 on an old 20GB hard drive which previously had been used for some Damn Small Linux-related work. The good news: NetBSD was able to install with USB keyboard and has no trouble with my crappy old BIOS and ACPI. The bad news: like the other BSDs, I have to use a powered USB hub to share the lone port through which the keyboard and ethernet adapter will function — neither will work in any other port. And this retarded computer only has USB ports and no PCI slots to insert a real NIC. At least the port works.
I did a very slim install — base, development, and man pages — and I’m adding some stuff from source. I updated SSL and SSH and perl. I’m using emacs for the time being. I also installed thttpd and blosxom. That’s about it for now.
I wanted to automate blog post naming so I wrote a little script:
#!/bin/sh # wrapper to open emacs for posting new blog entry named blog-$datestamp.txt BLOGDIRECTORY="/path/to/blogposts" TIMESTAMP=$(date +%Y%m%d%H%M) emacs -fg cyan -bg blue $BLOGDIRECTORY/blog_$TIMESTAMP.txt
I chose emacs at least as a temporary measure because a lot of what I’ve been posting are outlines and I really like org-mode better than some of the vim outlining plugins. Now I can shell in and just enter “blog” and I don’t have to deal with random names. This works out fairly well because it’s unlikely — at least right now before I automate more stuff to post to the blog — I’ll make more than one blog entry in any given minute. If and when I start scripting things to add content, I’ll probably use a different naming convention like “autoblog” as a prefix before the time stamp.
No immediate plans to go -current but I like what I’m hearing and reading about NetBSD 5.0.
