Legends start at 1.0! – FreeBSD in 1993 (pt. 2)

[New to Gemini? Have a look at my Gemini FAQ.] This article was bi-posted to Gemini and the Web; Gemini version is here: gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/kraileth/neunix/2022/fbsd1_pt2.gmi Happy FreeBSD day everyone! 🥳 In part one I covered a little bit of general information and preparation work before detailing the first part of the installation of FreeBSD 1.0 on …

Advance!BSD – thoughts on a not-for-profit project to support *BSD (1/2)

[New to Gemini? Have a look at my Gemini FAQ.] This article was bi-posted to Gemini and the Web; Gemini version is here: gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/kraileth/neunix/2021/advance_bsd_pt1.gmi There are multiple reasons why I am a BSD user and enthusiast. For one thing I enjoy using systems where the design benefits from the holistic approach (whole OS vs. "kernel …

Retreat… and reboot! Is there life outside of the Web?

Dear readers, the time has come for some fundamental re-organization of my EerieLinux blog. The impact of this year's pandemic as well as family matters (a new family member that demands quite a bit of care!) have forced me to post-pone many of my posts that I usually published at least monthly. Right when I …

FreeBSD on SPARC64 (is dead)

This was originally my January article that I decided to postpone for another one. So it's really the February one - except for myself not getting around to publishing it before August due to... well, the world going crazy. So this is the January state of affairs for the most part. On the plus side …

Illumos (v9os) on SPARC64 SunFire v100

Over the last month or so I've written a couple of articles on an old SunFire v100 machine that I own for a while now. First I took a look at the hardware of the machine and the LOM (Lights Out Management). Then I installed OpenBSD 6.0 from CD and updated all the way to …

Running OpenBSD on SPARC64 (HTTPd, packages, patching, X11, …)

In my previous post I described the process of installing OpenBSD 6.0 on a SPARC64 machine and updating it all the way to 6.5. Now it's time to actually do something with it to get an idea of how well OpenBSD works on this architecture! OpenBSD's base system The OpenBSD team takes pride in providing …

OpenBSD on SPARC64 (6.0 to 6.5)

Earlier this year I came by an old SunFire v100 that I wrote about in my previous article. After taking a look at the hardware and the LOM, it's time to actually do something with it! And that of course means to install an operating system first. OpenBSD OpenBSD, huh? Yes, I usually write about …

A SPARC in the night – SunFire v100 exploration

While we see a total dominance of x86_64 CPUs today, there are at least some alternatives like ARM and in the long run hopefully RISC-V. But there are other interesting architectures as well - one of them is SPARC (the Scalable Processor ARChitecture). This article is purely historic, I'm not reviewing new hardware here. It's …

Building a BSD home router (pt. 8): ZFS and jails

Previous parts of this series: Part 1 (discussing why you want to build your own router and how to assemble the APU2), Part 2 (some Unix history explanation of what a serial console is), Part 3 (demonstrating serial access to the APU and covering firmware update), Part 4 (installing pfSense), Part 5 (installing OPNsense instead) …

Building a BSD home router (pt. 7): Advanced OPNsense installation

Previous parts of this series: Part 1 (discussing why you want to build your own router and how to assemble the APU2), Part 2 (some Unix history explanation of what a serial console is), Part 3 (demonstrating serial access to the APU and covering firmware update), Part 4 (installing pfSense), Part 5 (installing OPNsense instead) …