A critical look at NetBSD’s installer

[New to Gemini? Have a look at my Gemini FAQ.] This article was bi-posted to Gemini and the Web; Gemini version is here: gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/kraileth/neunix/2025/installing_bsd_pt3.gmi The first part of this series was about FreeBSD’s installer and the second covered OpenBSD’s installation program. This is a longer article and it has the most images that I ever included in one. While writing the other two articles didn’t take me too long, this one has has occupied several evenings / nights over the course of about three weeks. NetBSD is an OS that I installed only a couple of times over the years, so I’m not very familiar with its installer, sysinst. This fact was actually what led to this article (or the whole series rather): Talking to a NetBSD developer at EuroBSDcon 2023, I mentioned my impression that NetBSD was harder to install than it needed to be. He was interested in my perspective as a relative newcomer, and so I promised to take a closer look and wri ... Read full article.