Discussion
The #NetBSD Project offers a live image for AMD64 that includes X11 and features persistence.
Why does nobody ever talk about this?
I put this image on a USB drive, booted it, logged in as root (no password needed), created a user account, started X, configured the network, and everything was still there after a reboot.
https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/images/11.0/NetBSD-11.0-amd64-live.img.gz
@passthejoe Mileages may vary; I installed NetBSD 11 on a VM last week to see if it's workable, and it decidedly did not allow root login without having set a password. No doubt I did something wrong... but that does underline NetBSD's user experience is not quite consistent yet.
@coolbean I was surprised to find it in the repo
@passthejoe It's probably one of the coolest things about linux, BSD etc. Booting off of a live image is a great noncommittal way to try a distro and I remember doing it a lot back in the day. (and I really should look into BSD, thanks for the reminder).
@passthejoe
thanks for the reminder. i will try this today. 💯
@passthejoe Great when you click a link expecting some kind of document and you end up with a complete installer. Just what I needed, so great :-)
It's a great way to find out how your hardware reacts to NetBSD. So far, this laptop (2017 HP Pavilion) is doing great.
I ran sysinst to configure the network. I expect you could also do a full installation from there.
During the first boot, the image did some resizing (??), then rebooted and was ready to use.
All in all a very nice surprise.
@passthejoe
nice. is there any documentation on how to flash a usb disk with this #netbsd image with #persistence?
searching for "persistence" on netbsd.org only leads to docs for dhcpcd...