NetBSD, day 3

Eight years ago, when I first installed Linux it was not unlike everything I had used before. I had used computers with MS-DOS and every day I read my email on an Unix system over ssh. So I was familiar with the basics of Unix and the command line. But I had a lot to learn.

In many ways, moving from Linux to NetBSD is similar to my jump from Windows 98 to SuSE. The system is familiar enough to be somehow understandable but still I don't know everything I should know.

Today I learned to make the keyboard encoding permanent. In case you are not using an English keyboard, you should add a line to /etc/wscons.conf:

encoding sv

The abbreviation sv stands for a Swedish keyboard (it is exactly the same as a Finnish keyboard, but there is no encoding fi available!). At the moment I use a console screen with 80x25 characters. It will probably take a few days before I have the courage to even consider configuring the console for 50 lines.

In NetBSD, only those users who are members of the wheel group are allowed to su into root. Thus, I added myself (as root!) to the group:

usermod -G wheel mikko

Now I can finally use su like in most Linux systems I've used during the last years.

I have not yet decided whether I should continue using vi or should I install something I am more familiar with. For years, I've known that I should learn to use vi but I have always had nano or emacs installed.

I suppose I'm too lazy to be a real geek.

One more note before returning to my books: unlike some modern Linux distributions, NetBSD's default install includes locate. The database for locate had to be created as root with /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb - unlike in Linux where the command is updatedb.