20 Jun
2006
20 Jun
'06
10:06 a.m.
After watching an 800MHz P3 system build Gnome (and its dependent packages)
on a NetBSD system, I got to wondering how usable NetBSD is on older slower
hardware, such as MicroVAX II.
If you want to build Perl or X or the kernel, what do you do? Start the
make and come back in a week?
Cheers,
Chuck
20 Jun
20 Jun
10:12 a.m.
It was thus said that the Great Chuck Guzis once stated:
After watching an 800MHz P3 system build Gnome (and
its dependent packages)
on a NetBSD system, I got to wondering how usable NetBSD is on older slower
hardware, such as MicroVAX II.
If you want to build Perl or X or the kernel, what do you do? Start the
make and come back in a week?
If I was real concerned about speed, I would use a modern PC (read: over 3GHz)
and set up GCC for cross-compilation to the target architecture. Probably
not for the feight of heart though.
-spc (Or, take the box into work for a week ... let them pay for the
electricity 8-P
10:57 a.m.
On Tuesday 20 June 2006 13:12, Sean Conner wrote:
It was thus said that the Great Chuck Guzis once
stated:
Actually, NetBSD makes cross-compiling really easy. I've set this up by
hand before, and it's way more complicated than the NetBSD build system
makes it. I did this while compiling test kernels for a Sun3 box,
using an Netbsd/x86_64 system.
Pat
--
Purdue University Research Computing --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/
The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org
After watching an 800MHz P3 system build Gnome
(and its dependent
packages) on a NetBSD system, I got to wondering how usable NetBSD
is on older slower hardware, such as MicroVAX II.
If you want to build Perl or X or the kernel, what do you do?
Start the make and come back in a week?
If I was real concerned about speed, I would use a modern PC (read:
over 3GHz) and set up GCC for cross-compilation to the target
architecture. Probably not for the feight of heart though. 
1:02 p.m.
If you want to build Perl or X or the kernel, what do
you do? Start the
make and come back in a week?
Well, yeah ;) when my IIci was my "primary" server in the apartment, kernel
builds took about 8-10 hours.
--
--------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ ---
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
-- Why is it you can only trust short, dumpy spies? -- Hogan, "Hogan's
Heroes"
1:27 p.m.
New subject: NetBSD and old hardware curiosity; sliding off to Linux on Indy
On Tue, 20 Jun 2006, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
Reminded me of building things on my first SGI - an Indy R4600 133mHz.
I built X manually, which took a rather remarkable twenty-two hours to
finish the make. Out of sheer masochism I then built Qt and KDE, which
took a little longer.
Boy does that 195mHz R10k SGI Indigo2 seem quick.
JP
If you want to
build Perl or X or the kernel, what do you do? Start the
make and come back in a week?
Well, yeah ;) when my IIci was my "primary" server in the apartment, kernel
builds took about 8-10 hours. 
1:49 p.m.
New subject: NetBSD and old hardware curiosity; sliding off to Linux on Indy
On 6/20/06, JP Hindin <jplist at kiwigeek.com> wrote:
Reminded me of building things on my first SGI - an
Indy R4600 133mHz.
I built X manually, which took a rather remarkable twenty-two hours to
finish the make. Out of sheer masochism I then built Qt and KDE, which
took a little longer.
Boy does that 195mHz R10k SGI Indigo2 seem quick.
JP
That's about how long it took my first 2.0 kernel compile on a
386SX-16 with 4MB of RAM (an old Packard Hell desktop toy). I quickly
switched to my 5x86 after that. ;-)
(I won't mention how long compiles take on my DECstation 5000/120...
They're almost as bad, even with 32MB of RAM!)
Josef
--
"I laugh because I dare not cry. This is a crazy world
and the only way to enjoy it is to treat it as a joke."
-- Hilda "Sharpie" Burroughs,
"The Number of the Beast" by Robert A. Heinlein
2:50 p.m.
New subject: NetBSD and old hardware curiosity; sliding off to Linux on Indy
That's about how long it took my first 2.0 kernel
compile on a
386SX-16 with 4MB of RAM (an old Packard Hell desktop toy). I quickly
switched to my 5x86 after that. ;-)
(I won't mention how long compiles take on my DECstation 5000/120...
They're almost as bad, even with 32MB of RAM!)
Josef
I downgraded to a 386SX-16 laptop w/4MB RAM and a 387 coprocessor from a
486DX-33 w/20MB RAM when I went back to sea. I wasn't brave enough to
compile the .9x-1.x Linux kernels on it, though I did run X-Windows for a
couple of apps (mainly xdvi). I've never run the 2.0 kernel on either
system (I think the 486 still has a 9.5 year old version of Slackware on
it).
BTW, I'm threatening to start using that old Twinhead 386sx-16 laptop again,
I realized it's perfect for hooking a C-1541 drive up to with the X1542
cable I have :^) Just need to make room for setting a C-64 up. Don't know
why, but I've really been wanting to play with a C-64 again.
Zane
4:03 p.m.
New subject: NetBSD and old hardware curiosity; sliding off to Linux on Indy
Josef Chessor wrote:
On 6/20/06, JP Hindin <jplist at kiwigeek.com>
wrote:
Interesting - circa 1993 it used to take me about 2 hours I think with the
486/33 that I had then. Kernel was 0.99 I believe, and the machine had 8MB of
memory which I suspect made a huge difference.
I'm quite surprised that the R4600/133 Indy was so slow - I'd be tempted to
point my finger at the compiler rather than the hardware there.
Reminded me of building things on my first SGI -
an Indy R4600 133mHz.
I built X manually, which took a rather remarkable twenty-two hours to
finish the make. Out of sheer masochism I then built Qt and KDE, which
took a little longer.
Boy does that 195mHz R10k SGI Indigo2 seem quick.
JP
That's about how long it took my first 2.0 kernel compile on a
386SX-16 with 4MB of RAM (an old Packard Hell desktop toy). I quickly
switched to my 5x86 after that. ;-) (I won't mention how long compiles take on my
DECstation 5000/120...
They're almost as bad, even with 32MB of RAM!)
Funny how things that used to seem fast/reasonable now seem slow. It never
used to be a big deal - you *knew* the compile was going to take hours, so you
scheduled it at a time where you didn't need the machine for anything else,
kicked it off and went to do something productive until it was done.
Takes about 10 minutes for a kernel compile on this box (and it's by no means
the latest and greatest PC or anything), and I can quite happily do other
things whilst it's compiling with no noticeable slow-downs.
cheers
Jules
3:18 p.m.
New subject: NetBSD and old hardware curiosity; sliding off to Linux on Indy
On Tue, 20 Jun 2006, Jules Richardson wrote:
I believe the R4600 came with 16KB of L2 cache. Or perhaps it was 32KB?
Either way it was abysmally small for the processor. I later swapped the
processor out for an R4400 with 1024KB of cache, and the difference was
astounding.
JP
That's
about how long it took my first 2.0 kernel compile on a
386SX-16 with 4MB of RAM (an old Packard Hell desktop toy). I quickly
switched to my 5x86 after that. ;-)
Interesting - circa 1993 it used to take me about 2 hours I think with the
486/33 that I had then. Kernel was 0.99 I believe, and the machine had 8MB of
memory which I suspect made a huge difference.
I'm quite surprised that the R4600/133 Indy was so slow - I'd be tempted to
point my finger at the compiler rather than the hardware there. 
2:18 p.m.
New subject: NetBSD and old hardware curiosity; sliding off to Linux on Indy
And thusly were the wise words spake by JP Hindin
On Tue, 20 Jun 2006, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
Reminded me of building things on my first SGI - an Indy R4600 133mHz.
I built X manually, which took a rather remarkable twenty-two hours to
finish the make. Out of sheer masochism I then built Qt and KDE, which
took a little longer.
I bet the hard drive was happy - when it was finished!!
Cheers,
Bryan
If you
want to build Perl or X or the kernel, what do you do? Start the
make and come back in a week?
Well, yeah ;) when my IIci was my "primary" server in the apartment, kernel
builds took about 8-10 hours. Boy does that 195mHz R10k SGI Indigo2 seem quick.
JP
2:32 p.m.
New subject: NetBSD and old hardware curiosity; sliding off to Linux on Indy
On Tue, 20 Jun 2006, Bryan Pope wrote:
And thusly were the wise words spake by JP Hindin
You know, it's funny you mention that - during the X build it developed a
bad case of the Barracuda Bearing-itis, where it squeals almost constantly
once it gets warmed up. Disk runs great, zero errors, but it sounds like
someone threw a handful of gravel into it.
I used to run a simple "AI" chat bot that I had written on it, but
eventually turned it off forever because the noise of that damned disk was
giving me migraines, and when I woke up in the middle of the night I could
still hear it.
JP
On Tue, 20 Jun 2006, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
Reminded me of building things on my first SGI - an Indy R4600 133mHz.
I built X manually, which took a rather remarkable twenty-two hours to
finish the make. Out of sheer masochism I then built Qt and KDE, which
took a little longer.
I bet the hard drive was happy - when it was finished!! If you
want to build Perl or X or the kernel, what do you do? Start the
make and come back in a week?
Well, yeah ;) when my IIci was my "primary" server in the apartment, kernel
builds took about 8-10 hours.
2:59 p.m.
You know, an 800 MHz P3 isn't exactly state of the art, but it's not a
slouch either. I did a fresh installation of NetBSD, transferred the
pkgsrc stuff and then chdir-ed to /usr/pkgsrc/x11/gnome-desktop and did a
"make".
That was yesterday. Granted, it's had to go out and grab some packages
and updates off the net, but it's not spending any appreciable time online.
At some point yesterday, things started getting slower and slower, so I
killed the make and shutdown and restarted. It's still cranking, but it
doesn't look stuck like it did yesterday. Memory leak somewhere, perhaps?
During this exercise, I just kept thinking "...and guys with a MicroVAX do
this?!!?"
Cheers,
Chuck
3:17 p.m.
You know, an 800 MHz P3 isn't exactly state of the
art, but it's not a
slouch either. I did a fresh installation of NetBSD, transferred the
pkgsrc stuff and then chdir-ed to /usr/pkgsrc/x11/gnome-desktop and did a
"make".
That was yesterday. Granted, it's had to go out and grab some packages
and updates off the net, but it's not spending any appreciable time online.
At some point yesterday, things started getting slower and slower, so I
killed the make and shutdown and restarted. It's still cranking, but it
doesn't look stuck like it did yesterday. Memory leak somewhere, perhaps?
During this exercise, I just kept thinking "...and guys with a MicroVAX do
this?!!?"
Cheers,
Chuck
I should hope that no one is running a pig like the Gnome Desktop on a
machine such as a MicroVAX. Not even taking the fact that a MicroVAX should
be running DECwindows if it has a GUI, I would think that the requirements
for running Gnome Desktop would prevent it from being run on a MicroVAX (RAM
strikes me as the largest issue).
Personally I try to keep Gnome off of my systems, unless I need a specific
application (which I typically don't). It is far to much of a resource hog
for my tastes.
Zane
8:57 p.m.
On Tue, Jun 20, 2006 at 03:17:40PM -0700, Zane H. Healy wrote:
Depends on the VAX. I do have a VAX 4000/700 with 384MB of ram, and a
4000/100 with 128MB.
Still, I'm not sure I'd want to try to run Gnome on them.
Pat
--
Purdue University ITAP/RCAC --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/
The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org
During this
exercise, I just kept thinking "...and guys with a MicroVAX do
this?!!?"
I should hope that no one is running a pig like the Gnome Desktop on a
machine such as a MicroVAX. Not even taking the fact that a MicroVAX should
be running DECwindows if it has a GUI, I would think that the requirements
for running Gnome Desktop would prevent it from being run on a MicroVAX (RAM
strikes me as the largest issue). 
10:30 p.m.
On 6/21/06, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
During this exercise, I just kept thinking
"...and guys with a MicroVAX do
this?!!?"
I've installed Ultrix 2.x on a MicroVAX many times - it takes all day,
since Ultrix is of the vintage that a kernel rebuild is part of the
install procedure. More than 8MB of physical RAM helps. So does a
free terminal on a different machine and the game of your choice ;-)
-ethan
21 Jun
21 Jun
3:52 a.m.
"Chuck Guzis" wrote:
After watching an 800MHz P3 system build Gnome (and its
dependent packages)
on a NetBSD system, I got to wondering how usable NetBSD is on older slower
hardware, such as MicroVAX II.
If you want to build Perl or X or the kernel, what do you do? Start the
make and come back in a week?
last time I tried, which was admittedly a year ago, you could build netbsd on
any posix machine using a cross compile.
i.e. you could build everything for a vax using an x86 linux box.
The kernel would not boot on an 11/730, however. It was close and I
almost got it to work but gave up and went to 4.2bsd/quasijarus, which
booted right away.
[I did manage to make a boot loader which would load kernels via a qe ethernet,
if anyone wants that]
I have not tried an MVII, however, but I bet it "just works".
-brad
22 Jun
22 Jun
6:25 a.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
After watching an 800MHz P3 system build Gnome (and
its dependent packages)
on a NetBSD system, I got to wondering how usable NetBSD is on older slower
hardware, such as MicroVAX II.
If you want to build Perl or X or the kernel, what do you do? Start the
make and come back in a week?
Or longer.
I tend to cross-build. NetBSD's cross-build environment is pretty robust.
Peace... Sridhar
23 Jun
23 Jun
9:42 p.m.
After watching an 800MHz P3 system build Gnome (and
its dependent
packages) on a NetBSD system, I got to wondering how usable NetBSD is
on older slower hardware, such as MicroVAX II.
If you want to build Perl or X or the kernel, what do
you do? Start
the make and come back in a week?
I have a collection of NetBSD machines (eight ports, six different CPU
architectures - SPARC, 68k, VAX, x86, alpha, ppc). The VAX, alpha, and
ppc machines are normally turned on only when I want to build something
for them.
I've never tried to build perl on anything. But I do irregularly bring
them all up to date and do builds of the world on them. My slowest
machine is the MicroVAX-II which I run diskless (because I do not have
any disk interface for it for which I have a nontrivial amount of
working disk), with 9M of RAM (someday I hope to scare up the boards to
up it to its limit of 16).
And, basically, the answer is "yes". When I start a build of the world
on the ?V2, I don't expect it to complete in less than a week. (The
kernel takes more like a day.)
/~\ The ASCII der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca
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24 Jun
24 Jun
8:44 a.m.
On 6/24/2006 at 12:42 AM der Mouse wrote:
And, basically, the answer is "yes". When I
start a build of the world
on the ?V2, I don't expect it to complete in less than a week. (The
kernel takes more like a day.)
Well, on the aforementioned 800 MHz P3, building the gnome meta-package is
well into its second day (just started making "evolution").
Cheers,
Chuck
4 Jul
4 Jul
3:20 p.m.
On 6/24/06, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
On 6/24/2006 at 12:42 AM der Mouse wrote:
But *why*? Why not just pull down binaries?
Are you trying to do a really demanding soak-test on it or something?
Merely curious...
--
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And, basically, the answer is "yes".
When I start a build of the world
on the ?V2, I don't expect it to complete in less than a week. (The
kernel takes more like a day.)
Well, on the aforementioned 800 MHz P3, building the gnome meta-package is
well into its second day (just started making "evolution").
3:43 p.m.
On 7/4/2006 at 11:20 PM Liam Proven wrote:
Are you trying to do a really demanding soak-test on it
or something?
Merely curious...
Precisely--I'm not at all certain about the operational status of the
hosting hardware. Best to have something to wring it out on. Building
from the pkgsrc involves lots of different types of
activity. But watching
the slowness of the process got me to wondering about folks
with the older
much slower hardware.
BTW, anyone tried WINE on NetBSD lately? Netbsd.org seems to be strangely
silent on the topic.
Cheers,
Chuck
5 Jul
5 Jul
5:52 p.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
BTW, anyone tried WINE on NetBSD lately? Netbsd.org
seems to be
strangely
silent on the topic.
I can verify that both Wine and Cedega work well on all the i386 boxes
I've tried them on.
Make sure you use "options INSECURE" though.
Peace... Sridhar
10:45 p.m.
On 7/5/2006 at 8:52 PM Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
I can verify that both Wine and Cedega work well on all
the i386 boxes
I've tried them on.
Make sure you use "options INSECURE" though.
I looked at WineX/Cedega, but the following item in the FAQ scared me off:
"9) Does Cedega work on BeOS? BSD?
TransGaming actively accepts patches from the BSD community in order for
Cedega to run on FreeBSD, however Cedega is currently available for Linux
only. "
Which makes it sound like "if BSD has a problem, don't act like we're
supposed to care".
Cheers,
Chuck
10:56 p.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 7/5/2006 at 8:52 PM Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
That's pretty much what that means. What it doesn't mean, however, is
that help is unavailable. There are a significant number of people
(myself included) out there who are running Cedega under BSD and are
willing to help.
Peace... Sridhar
I can verify that both Wine and Cedega work well
on all the i386 boxes
I've tried them on.
Make sure you use "options INSECURE" though.
I looked at WineX/Cedega, but the following item in the FAQ scared me off:
"9) Does Cedega work on BeOS? BSD?
TransGaming actively accepts patches from the BSD community in order for
Cedega to run on FreeBSD, however Cedega is currently available for Linux
only. "
Which makes it sound like "if BSD has a problem, don't act like we're
supposed to care". 
4 Jul
4 Jul
4:13 p.m.
Liam Proven wrote:
On 6/24/06, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com>
wrote:
I always build from pkgsrc. I've learned that the quality of
many packages is not anywhere near the same caliber as the
core NBSD distribution. Often, looking through the 'make
configure' output, I will spot things that aren't quite right.
Or, options that the package builder has decided not to
include (that *I* might want!). And, looking through the
'make build' often turns up warnings that are suspicious
enough to merit further exploration -- and turn up outright
errors (that someone will eventually report and have to
track down).
If you just want to be a "user" and aren't concerned about
fixing things, then binaries are the way to go. :-(
On 6/24/2006 at 12:42 AM der Mouse wrote:
But *why*? Why not just pull down binaries?
Are you trying to do a really demanding soak-test on it or something?
Merely curious... And, basically, the answer is "yes".
When I start a build of the world
on the ?V2, I don't expect it to complete in less than a week. (The
kernel takes more like a day.)
Well, on the aforementioned 800 MHz P3, building the gnome
meta-package is
well into its second day (just started making "evolution").
6744
days inactive
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24 comments
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participants (15)
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bpope＠wordstock.com -
brad＠heeltoe.com -
cclist＠sydex.com -
dgy＠DakotaCom.Net -
ethan.dicks＠gmail.com -
healyzh＠aracnet.com -
josefcub＠gmail.com -
jplist＠kiwigeek.com -
julesrichardsonuk＠yahoo.co.uk -
lproven＠gmail.com -
mouse＠Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA -
pat＠computer-refuge.org -
ploopster＠gmail.com -
spc＠conman.org -
spectre＠floodgap.com