Unfortunately, I haven’t had much personal luck getting NetBSD (or OpenBSD, for that matter) to run well with networking and a GUI on any of my computers. FreeBSD I can only get working if it’s a distro with GUI included, like helloSystem. It makes me feel like part of my brain is missing. ._.
If you ever want to give it a shot again, feel free to ask me for help. Trying them out in virtual machines is a great way to get used to them before installing on an actual computer.
For all of them, just check that your hardware is supported before. Slightly older thinkpads are the stereotype across all BSD’s. OpenBSD on a thinkpad, everything just works.
With OpenBSD I found wireless easy to setup as long as it’s supported hardware. You just edit a text file and you’re on your way. OpenBSD also has good documentation; they do a great job keeping it up to date. Free and NetBSD use wpa_supplicant, which is on many linux distros too.
Check out this page if you want a decent up to date tutorial for OpenBSD:
During install of Open/Net, you should be able to select to install the X11 sets. That should allow you to have a gui when you finish the install and reboot and login. From the console just login and type “startx” and it should go. NetBSD has ctwm as a default, Open has both CWM (my favorite) and FVWM as defaults. Obviously you can install what you want after install.
FreeBSD has a handbook. If you follow that you should be able to get a GUI working. Also on youtube search “robonuggie;” it’s a yt channel dedicated to FreeBSD and he has good tutorials.
Unfortunately, I haven’t had much personal luck getting NetBSD (or OpenBSD, for that matter) to run well with networking and a GUI on any of my computers. FreeBSD I can only get working if it’s a distro with GUI included, like helloSystem. It makes me feel like part of my brain is missing. ._.
If you ever want to give it a shot again, feel free to ask me for help. Trying them out in virtual machines is a great way to get used to them before installing on an actual computer.
For all of them, just check that your hardware is supported before. Slightly older thinkpads are the stereotype across all BSD’s. OpenBSD on a thinkpad, everything just works.
With OpenBSD I found wireless easy to setup as long as it’s supported hardware. You just edit a text file and you’re on your way. OpenBSD also has good documentation; they do a great job keeping it up to date. Free and NetBSD use wpa_supplicant, which is on many linux distros too.
Check out this page if you want a decent up to date tutorial for OpenBSD:
https://sohcahtoa.org.uk/openbsd.html
During install of Open/Net, you should be able to select to install the X11 sets. That should allow you to have a gui when you finish the install and reboot and login. From the console just login and type “startx” and it should go. NetBSD has ctwm as a default, Open has both CWM (my favorite) and FVWM as defaults. Obviously you can install what you want after install.
FreeBSD has a handbook. If you follow that you should be able to get a GUI working. Also on youtube search “robonuggie;” it’s a yt channel dedicated to FreeBSD and he has good tutorials.