LincolnBlogs

For those of you who have followed me, it’s no secret I am a fan of Netbsd. I have been using it since v1.x and it’s not at v9.x. Anyhow, I have been playing around with putting it on a spare laptop lately and though this would be a good place to share some notes..

The Install:
The install itself is pretty straight forward, although I didn’t really try a usb install (did do a vm/iso tho) because I am using an older laptop, so I settled on burning a cd for it. One of the issues I faces during the install was I wanted to install pkgin (which is a binary package installer) but it wouldn’t download during the installer because the installer has no method of configuring wireless for wep/wpa/MSCHAP, etc.. I am sure you can install from a wired connection though.
Since I didn’t have a wired connection on this laptop (too lazy to dig for a cable and ports) I just decided to take care of it after the install.

Setting up wireless:
I have to say.. The worst part of NetBSD is the freaking online documentation. It took me forever to find this..
as root: wpa_passphrase *myrouter* *mypassphrase* > wpa.conf
This will generate a file (wpa.conf) that looks like this:
network={
ssid=”myrouter”
#psk=”mypassphrase”
psk=”myencryptedpassphrase”
}
And I changed it to:
network={
ssid=”myrouter”
psk=”mypassphrase”
#psk=”myencryptedpassphrase”
}
And then I rebooted and did an “/etc/rc.d/wpa_supplican onestart” followed by an “ifconfig” to verify that the network was connected and then:
/sbin/dhcpd
Which got me an address on my network.

Adding pkgin for binary package management:
$ export PKG_PATH=”http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/amd64/9.0_current/All/”
$ pkg_add -v pkgin

All the rest:
At this point you can add all the other goodies you like, for instance bash by doing a
$ pkgin install bash
and other great things to install like vim and screen and on and on. Enjoy!