It seems NetBSD ports have tools that I need, and OpenBSD don't. And porting them is a major time sink; I've already spent 6+ hours on it. I mean, it is very fun, that's for sure. But maybe it'll be easier to fix my X11 on NetBSD, and accept that one of my USB ports is going to be taken by a WiFi dongle.

@nina_kali_nina replace the wifi card with USB port and plug usb wifi dongle in it's place /s

@elly I'm not sure it would fit, this laptop is very smol

@nina_kali_nina you can always decapitate the card by removing the USB plug and soldering it directly to USB data/voltage lines in miniPCIe

@nina_kali_nina @elly Is it worth replacing the WiFi card? Newer cards tend to perform better and I think use less power, I don't preemptively swap but enough of mine have failed that I've seen the difference even in pretty old laptops.

@elly that is an option, yes. I guess I could try and get a custom board for that

@nina_kali_nina

Not sure which model laptop you are using, so apologies if not possible:

Is replacing the WiFi mini PCIe card an option perhaps?

Though that might be a hassle in itself - as you'd need to find one that is supported, and affordable.

Either way, I'm glad to read you're having fun with computing (again) :)

@mirth @elly it might be, but finding the right one could be tricky.

@Aprazeth it might be possible, depending on the availability of supported network cards. NetBSD doesn't generally support new cards, and old cards for this form factor might be hard to obtain. A dongle is fine, if I'll use one port, I still would have as many ports as modern MacBooks

@nina_kali_nina @elly Possibly, many PC laptops can use just about any PCIe 2230 shaped card. Some have firmware restrictions on what they'll accept, but these things fail often enough that if so someone will already have complained on the internet. Intel AX210 cards should be pretty widely compatible even if the BSD drivers don't have support for the newest modes. Actually just ordered one for an old laptop here with failing WiFi.

@mirth @elly no, I'm serious, finding the right WiFi card is difficult.

@nina_kali_nina @elly oh! that’s an X131e! I didn’t know you went for that one

i have a couple of them, really fun machine to coreboot.. if you need more space inside, a good trick is to remove the case from the 2.5” SATA SSD you’re (presumably) using; most SSDs only use half of the space for the PCB, so you can reclaim the rest for whatever shenanigans you want!

i used this laptop as a daily driver for a while back in late 2023, but it was paaaaainfully slooooow. having multiple batteries was really nice however…

@nina_kali_nina you could use NetBSD's pkgsrc on OpenBSD

@aperezdc it wouldn't make programs magically work though :( especially when there are features not implemented in the kernel

So far no winners between OpenBSD and NetBSD for me. OpenBSD is rock solid and immediately useable. I have my desktop, my browser, hardware is fully supported without any snags. But it doesn't have audio software that I need, and I can't emulate things normally, because there's no hardware virtualization for Qemu and no Wine. It's possible to invent something with vmm, but I'll have to run a very custom Linux and pipe the audio through network, and I don't want to. No Linux please, thanks.

NetBSD, on the other hand, is full of snags. I managed to fix the screen resolution, but no hw accel yet (even though it is supposed to be supported). Even with the right resolution, the DE doesn't look right somehow. There's wine, but it crashes more easily than on Linux (I guess that's a start), Qemu is very fast (but my payload trips the hypervisor, but it is probably fixable). There's even Ardour that I always wanted to check out, but it, too, crashes on start. It's like in that joke, "carefully cut to shape and file"

@nina_kali_nina Are you running NetBSD 10.1 or 11rc3? There are some important fixes in 11 for hw accel (libdrm needed an ioctl(2) that wasn't implemented for the render nodes and would bail on clients trying to open the graphics device).

@overeducatedredneck@bitbang the sysupgrade procedure at the bottom of this page is fairly safe/easy, if you do feel like trying 11.0_RC3: https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-upgrading.html#using-sysupgrade @nina_kali_nina

@d6 oh, that's very helpful to know, thanks

@overeducatedredneck I'm in 10.1 but I thought just now that I probably should try 11rc/current. I wonder if I should reinstall or upgrade 🤔

@overeducatedredneck fwiw I'm not even on "libdrm isn't working" stage yet, I'm on "X -configure" errors out unless I'm forcing X to use fb

@nina_kali_nina This is where my NetBSD graphics skills turn out to be weirdly limited. I've done a ton of digging through the kernel, MESA and libdrm, but not X11....because all my work has been on getting a wayland compositor running. :doot:

@overeducatedredneck tbh I wouldn't mind trying Wayland on BSD 🤔

@nina_kali_nina Wayland-on-BSD is pretty solid on OpenBSD. There are a few compositors in ports. I'm whacking [my compositor] into shape to start getting it packaged for OpenBSD.

Wayland on NetBSD is still very WIP (although, someone has been adapting the OpenBSD bits in pkgsrc-wip, and they look like they're making progress). I'm going to spend some more time with it in the coming weeks.

@domi @elly that's an old photo from my pilot project; it's unfortunately too slow for regular rebuilding of the world, being a $50 Atom Chromebook... But it's quite alright in most aspects. I got myself an old Latitude that is supposed to fulfill all my computing needs, and that's still work in progress

@nina_kali_nina @elly ah! alright, nevermind then! :D

@domi @elly note that it's completely absolutely fully working with Linux, including all the exotic software I needed, and even FreeBSD would probably fulfill my needs. But I'm not looking for a simple solution for now, I'm looking for a political statement

@nina_kali_nina @elly yeah, i’ve been thinking about moving to BSD in places where I can for the same reasons. Can’t do it for servers (I keep them running through sheer willpower and experience, and it’ll fall apart if I attempt to redo it for with system that I’m not comfortable with) but locally.. why not

@domi what do you have on your servers that is difficult to migrate? Just asking

@nina_kali_nina it’s mostly about systems knowledge! I played with NetBSD a bit, with FreeBSD even less; I don’t know them very well, and they still tend to surprise me at every corner. It’s lots of fun to explore (reminds me of my early linux days) but a system I feel confident in this ain’t.

meanwhile you can ask me about a linux thing and there’s a chance that over the last 17 years i’ve done it at least once. If not, I understand things around it enough to be efficient at ddg-ing the problem.

(plus: I host a whole lot of shared infra for others, and I kinda want to limit the friction for them. see http://sakamoto.pl/ :3)

@nina_kali_nina ah, sorry then, I thought that you needed some programs that could be built from source and weren't available in the OpenBSD ports tree.

@aperezdc No worries! I'm sure there are quite a few programs like that, but not what I'm looking for

@nina_kali_nina what kind of laptop / graphics card do you have?

@d6 it's 11th gen Intel - Tiger Lake - with Iris Xe. I guess it's less the generation and more the fact it's Xe.

@nina_kali_nina @mirth @elly what's the wifi card in the top left? I've never seen that form factor before

@noisytoot @mirth @nina_kali_nina Form-factor looks like standard miniPCI, but pinout looks custom... probably removed from some ancient ISP-provided router/modem? I wouldn't stick that into a computer though

@elly @noisytoot @mirth @nina_kali_nina it’s just a normal miniPCI. I have a bunch of cards which look exactly like this, it was a common practice to remove pins that weren’t used (for some reason)

the reverse side probably looks a bit less barren (most notably, AFAIR it needs to have one contact behind the key)

@elly @mirth @nina_kali_nina @noisytoot btw i’ve seen a whole lot of routers with miniPCI slots and not one of them did anything custom with it, maybe beyond bringing the wifi status pin to an LED outside the case. some old linksys routers had literal PCMCIA cards inside (clabretro made a video about those), and they too, were just standard cards (albeit missing parts of the case

@domi @mirth @nina_kali_nina @noisytoot you're right, it's a Foxconn T60N871 (802.11g) from an Acer TravelMate 2700

@elly @noisytoot @domi @mirth hoooow! detective skills?

@nina_kali_nina @elly Looks like you already found it! 😬

@nina_kali_nina @elly @noisytoot @mirth we at Do Not Stare pride ourselves in the weapons-grade autism

@domi @noisytoot @elly @mirth you could've just asked :D

@nina_kali_nina @domi @noisytoot @mirth but that wouldn't have been fun :D

miniPCI was replaced with miniPCIe around 2006, so I was certain card was made between 2002 and 2004 (shield also looked old and inadequate for 802.11n).
Card also looked *humongous* and had a quirk of having both antenna connectors on the side, which was a dead giveaway that card was made by smaller vendor willing to accommodate OEM needs and that the laptop was especially bulky (even for the time period), and Acers were among the bulkiest machines back then.

(Shout-out to trash-picked Acer Aspire 5530G that I fixed by heating the iGPU with hairdryer and drilling ventilation holes in the chassis, which was destroying my back in high-school. It taught me how to install Gentoo and patch the kernel thanks to buggy radeon driver, sadly it died after 2 years of use when I played minecraft on a hot summer day. It was replaced by ThinkPad T420 with first cash I ever earned working as a waitress during summer job in the UK)

@nina_kali_nina

I thought that sndio with portaudio covered quite an extensive range of apps. I am curious about the missing pieces for your environment.

@ovalenti I'm kind of a musician so I need a DAW like Ardour and something for guitar like TuxGuitar or GuitarPro