First look at NetBSD 7 RC 3 and XFCE

The NetBSD team released RC 3 of NetBSD 7 this week and I was just too curious about its progress, so I downloaded both the i386 and x86_64 ISOs. I set it up in a virtual machine that I virtualised using Qemu 2.0.0 on my Xubuntu 14.04 system. First I had some trouble with the installer. I unaccidently selected a wrong option and then cancelled with Ctrl+C. Although I finished the installation normally, the system didn't boot correctly but dropped me on a shell with the hint, that /etc/rc.conf would contain RC_CONFIGURED=NO. I had no clue at that time how to solve that, especially how to mount the root filesystem read/write. In the meantime I found out that it isn't that hard: "mount -u -w /" would do the trick.

However, I just started the installation again (which is really fast and takes just a few minutes) but I had yet another problem: When trying to setup pkgin, that failed because it said it couldn't download something from "http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/amd64/7.0_RC3/". In fact, that directory doesn't exist. I realised that there is path to "7.0" (without the "_RC3") and changed the path accordingly. The installer warned me that at least one package was build for RC 2 rather than RC 3 but I decided to accept this and the installation went fine.

After installing the "usual suspicous" packages (bash, nano), I installed XFCE and was very delighted that it made a huge jump from version 4.6 in NetBSD 6 to 4.12 in NetBSD 7. A first trial was a little bit disappointing: The performance was quite poor, the mouse pointer disappeared and appeared again continuously and there was a background with vertical black and white stripes in contrast to what was set up in the settings dialog.

Figure 1: XFCE 4.12 in NetBSD 7 RC 3 with wrong background

To demonstrate this, I made a short, two minutes video.

If I have the change to do it, I will try installating NetBSD 7 RC 3 inside VirtualBox and see if it performs better there.