It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single distro in possession of a good live USB experience, must be in want of a homegrown and severely limited partition manager built into the install experience.
Literally going to lay out my next three partitions in advance in GParted because the AntiX installer's "layout builder" is baffling and opaque, two traits that of course you'd want while dual(or more)-booting between operating systems. Existing partition data worth preserving? Oh that's just the spice of life. You need a little risk and ambiguity to warm the blood.
Alright, I have #AntiX Linux installed on partition #2, with full screen resolution and working audio. Quite nice. Would have been nicer if it didn't fuck up my boot partition by not recognizing NetBSD, so some tinkering will be necessary to be able to boot that again. You'd think this wouldn't be a problem anymore, it was probably a decade ago that I was making contributions to `os-prober` - actually, apparently you look that up and my fork is the first thing that comes up anymore, so I bet it's deprecated in Debian upstream, and that was 12 years ago. I should archive that repo so people don't try to use it, as that's probably dangerously out of date now lol
Anyway. Getting back into NetBSD is, ironically, probably my immediate next thing to care about.
God but I did miss Conky, actually, and I realize that seeing it on my wallpaper.
Okay. I have rEFInd installed, which is a step in the right direction, but it can't detect NetBSD at all. I need to fix the EFI from a NetBSD live image. Which means downloading the ISO and putting it on a drive again lol, the fuckery here
Confirmed that I can launch NetBSD from the live USB in a manual way, which saves a lot of chrooting, but is definitely not something I want to accept as a normal workflow.
Also it's not recognizing my meta key for whatever reason, which really fucks with my ability to use i3, even to fix i3. Thank god for USB keyboards.
OKAY! Fucking finally. It was like pulling teeth to figure out where the EFI stuff for NetBSD even was. I knew if I could find that, I could copy it where it needed to go for rEFInd to detect it.
Well it was in `/usr/mdec/`, so if you're trying to multi-boot #NetBSD, hot tip to look in there for the stuff that needs copying into your EFI partition. Good grief.
Looks like the latest NetBSD updates broke the mod key on my keyboard. And once again, finding useful documentation in this era of search is an exercise in:
1. Going, and immediately thereafter,
2. Fucking myself.
If it was showing up in `xev` that'd be one thing. But the lack of even wrongly-labeled `xev` events leaves me at a loss for useful guidance.
Well, I don't have this key working in AntiX either. So either it's a hardware issue (feels unlikely, this button was JUST working earlier today), or it's some fucked layout choice at the NVRAM or rEFInd level, which I expect to be very fun to diagnose.
So, while I don't intend to main any Linux in 2026 (AntiX is just the best option, for when you need a Linux for something), I think I'll stay here a little while, tweak the system, and get set up for development. I already have a couple #Moonshine fixes to publish, having got that working again already.
Fixes published, which means I've got my new SSH key in Sourcehut. I also have my basic stuff set up in vim. That's pretty much everything I need to get by!
I can also confirm that the upstream fixes to `madon` have not been picked up in `madonctl`, so you still need a custom build to have individual notification dismissal work. Just as well, I have at least one more thing I need to contribute, but quite the annoying situation.
I also notice some breakage in Prone, but it will probably go away soon in the massive refactor, so I'll hold off fixing it.
Technically the breakage in #pronelang here comes a previously-correct .gitignore that, now incorrect, prevented the committing of a file I really don't want to recreate (2 lines active, many lines of docs).
Follow-up: I was able to use the new Linux partition on the same computer to fix the keyboard map, create a dump of it, and upload that config to the home server. Next time I'm on NetBSD, I can download the dump and apply it and have working meta key again. See, even if I try not to use it often, it's handy to have a Linux on here.
Oct 11, 2026, 9:57 PM@MaddieM4 does it have to be a rule?
@cyberquixote I don't know about a prescriptivist one, but it certainly feels like a cold bath of descriptivist accuracy in my experience.
Oct 11, 2026, 10:08 PMHopefully you can at format them from the live image. I'm never completely sure which filesystem the distro I'm testing supports. Why they don't all just at least just include GPartEd is beyond me.
@jrdepriest Yup, the image contained GParted, which saved me.... several steps. I did have to launch it from the terminal because running GUI apps as root doesn't quite work otherwise. It's all a bit jank, but I can live with that.
I was a bit more surprised that native screen resolution and hardware audio don't work OOTB on this computer because "modern Linux" - I have different expectations than for, as a very concrete example, NetBSD. But I do still strongly expect those issues to be solvable here without too much blood sacrifice. Because modern Linux.
EDIT: Nevermind, the install actually has native screen res and working audio! It was just missing on the live experience.
Oct 11, 2026, 11:50 PM@MaddieM4 can you do a live boot of NetBSD? Im not saying its practical but im just curious
@cyberquixote That is literally the plan, and it might involve chrooting into my existing install. Probably will tbh.
I hate UEFI.
@glitzersachen Okay, that sounds great for you. Very useful thing to say right now, and I am loving it, bestie.
Somehow I have the feeling I have some decoding to do, to get this reply ;-).
Any chance it's in your git-stash?
@401matthall Oh man, I wish. No, I know exactly where it is. Sitting on my NetBSD partition, on the same machine I'm typing on (but I'm on AntiX Linux at the moment). So I'll need to reboot, plug my USB keyboard in for an unrelated hardware reason, fix the .gitignore, commit `src/platform.c` and push. I guess I can do that now, I just finished up the other task I cared about.
@401matthall Update: It took a couple reboots - I committed my fixes but forgot to push. It'll be good to go to bed soon. But I got the test suite working on Linux again, and gosh darnit, that's a thing!
That's progress! Good! Hope you got some rest!
@401matthall I did. Feeling quite good this morning!
@MaddieM4
Hi, you are working on something related to Mastodon. I am always afraid that my internet will be blocked out and I will go into darkness. I mean, without the internet. I want to have the posts of some accounts offline. Can you guide me and tell me some points for having posts without internet on my own server, which is tiny?
I could ask Claude, but I am afraid of hurting the instance of Mastodon.
I know that without the internet I can read books 😁 but Mastodon is cool for me. Thank you.
@miladj I haven't tried it yet, but it sounds like you probably want to look into something called "snac" - it's a Fediverse server written in C, which can talk to other servers when it's connected to the internet, but is still totally usable on a small disconnected network. There are lots of server options, but snac is small and - from what I've heard - easy to manage. I've been planning to run my own instance for months, I just had other priorities!
/usr/mdec does get a whole 3 words in hier(7). (-:
Is there no mention of mdec in the #NetBSD Guide?
Hmmm.
This looks like another thing in chapter 22 that needs fixing.
If you pass a NetBSD person at all, please tell them that someone has some improvements to the Guide for them.
* http://jdebp.info/FGA/BSDs-for-Linux-users/guid-partition-table.html
/usr/mdec is, where traditionally boot code is found. I suspect that NetBSD devs are so steeped in tradition that nobody ever stepped back and asked themselves if this shouldn't be explained.
> http://jdebp.info/FGA/BSDs-for-Linux-users/guid-partition-table.html
Thanks for this. That will come handy when (in the next months) various BSD VMs go onto my VM server.
In fairness, it is explained. It is explained in boot(8). The fun part is that the explanation there is as out of date as the #NetBSD Guide is. And of course there's no clue even to look at that manual page in the Guide.
@JdeBP @glitzersachen it's worth volunteering that boot(8) is one of several man pages I was scrutinizing to try to figure out how any of this worked, and it did help me eventually figure it out, but slower than it probably should have. There's several bits of NetBSD terminology (like primary vs secondary boot programs) that weren't obvious in how they mapped to terms like EFI.
Would reading some proposed #FreeBSD doco help?
* http://jdebp.info/Proposals/freebsd-boot-manual-page.html
I wrote that for someone who observed that man boot was xyr goto, and it didn't exist on non-x86 architectures in FreeBSD.
I also wrote it up in a different way. The boot(8) manual for non-x86 was written to be an overview and pointers to other manual pages. The FGA is a slightly different approach.
http://jdebp.info/FGA/freebsd-boot-process.html
There are similar ideas on #NetBSD , although the names of things aren't the same. The FGA touches on the multiple stages thing. The reality of course is tha most of that goes away with #EFI.
Good heavens!
That is amazing.
I'll see what I can do likewise for the first section on "installing the boot manager", then. (-:
In case you didn't spot it with diff, there are a handful of lines at the top that are there to define a non-standard character entity that the #NetBSD Guide has that WWW browsers do not. They make it viewable on the WWW with a plain browser, and aren't meant for the #NetBSDGuide.
Now I have to update the Proposals page!
As threatened, I've started on that section. It turns out that it is secretly two sections. Who knew? (-:
@MaddieM4 , would this have helped? I've tried to get the primary/secondary thing in and some clues to where the relevant manual pages are.
http://jdebp.info/Proposals/NetBSDGuide/chap-misc.xml#chap-misc-bootmanager
@MaddieM4
AntiX is an enemy of Elon Musk.😂
Oct 11, 2026, 10:49 PM@MaddieM4 I keep telling people that netbsd's installer is perfectly fine
I just realised that the only reason I think that is because I've been able to select 'delete everything and use recommended partitions'
@river I do think it was probably the right call to install NetBSD first on the blankest of slates. Haiku and 9front will be interesting later.
Oct 11, 2026, 10:53 PM@MaddieM4 haiku's partition manager is really good! Although as far as I can tell it wants you to use befs so no dual booting (my knowledge is very limited here that might not be true at all)
@river Well I'm happy to use BeFS for the Haiku partition, but I can't imagine why that would affect your other partitions or ability to dual boot. Mind you, I'm not expecting to directly mess with OS A's files from OS B - I'm sharing files via other means, like the home server that's also acting as a backup for copies of things.
Oct 11, 2026, 10:56 PM@MaddieM4 Wow I was right I really don't know what I'm talking about!
Oct 11, 2026, 10:56 PM@MaddieM4 I guess I have somehow mixed up "can share files between the OSes" and "can dual boot"
@river Ohhhhh that makes sense, yeah. I'm thinking about also creating a FAT32 partition with the remaining disk space since I'm down to leftovers, and FAT32 is one of the rare things with solid support across the whole menagerie of operating systems I want to use, but I'm not sold on that yet, so I'm just saving that disk space for a rainy day for now. You never know!