Hello, Yesterday I installed netbsd-8 on an ancient dell latitude x1. For the most part the installation went fine, and I booted to a working system, with both X and networking working. NetBSD runs very nicely on it and it is quite fast :-)
Alas, because of network policy on the wifi network, I needed to enter a code to access the network, and for that I needed a browser. We don't ship a browser in base. >From the looks of it, a text browser would suffice (and it did), so I decided to go with "links" as opposed to "lynx" for no particular reason. So I connected the laptop to my phone, and downloaded the 7.0 "links" package, since we don't have 8.0 packages yet. I used pkg_add, tried to run it and got missing shared libraries. After making a bunch of symlinks in /usr/lib to account for newer versions of shared libraries, I found it needed some other packages because of other dependencies. I downloaded and installed those, and I got it running. Using the text browser, I connected to the network and then using pkgin, I could install a bunch of packages that made my laptop usable. There are 3 things that would make my life easier yesterday: 1. A text browser in base. "lynx" or "links" come to mind, I don't mind which, both are GPL2. 2. Pre-built packages for NetBSD-8. 3. pkgin in base. Yes, it uses a separate database so store package info, but "pkgin update" syncs it with reality. Yes, it does not know which package directory to use (is available) for a particular NetBSD version, but that can be fixed. It surely beats running pkg-add "n" times to install firefox. Yes, it takes a single pkg_add to add it... Waiting for the perfect solution to come just makes us less popular to users. Implementing an imperfect solution and replacing it with something better can't be that bad. christos
