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How to Install NetBSD in VirtualBox

Written by Chris Jones on November 8, 2012. Posted in Linux tutorials, Software, Unix Tutorials

NetBSD can often be the forgotten Unix distribution. Forgotten to the popularity of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, PC-BSD and others. In truth, NetBSD has been around a very long time.

NetBSD originated in the early 1990′s, founded by four former members of the 386BSD project. Due to internal dispute between developers and generally not satisfied with the direction of 386BSD, the members formed NetBSD with a clear focus toward clean design and “code done right”.

NetBSD has a very loyal following of users and developers. Almost cult like! All history aside, you may want to know how you can give NetBSD a try. Well, you can using Oracle VM VirtualBox.

There is a small trick with getting NetBSD to boot correctly in VirtualBox. By default, it will halt and present a kernel error message and not boot.

Assuming you have correctly installed VirtualBox, create a new virtual machine called NetBSD. You must then launch the machine via a terminal with the following command:

vboxsdl --norawr0 --startvm NetBSD

NetBSD should now boot as normal and without any error messages. I have tested this on NetBSD 5.1.2 and the latest 6.0 release(s) without issues.

For questions please refer to our Q/A forum at : http://ask.unixmen.com

NETBSD

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1 Comment(s)

Chris Jones

Chris Jones is a Staff Writer and the Editor of Unixmen.com. He is a long time Linux user, tracing all the way back to SUSE Linux 8.0 from the early 2000's. Chris has worked for many different FOSS Projects and has founded many of his own in recent times, including several Linux distributions, programming languages and FOSS Licenses. chrisjones@unixmen.com

flx

‘–norawr0′ is only needed (and a dirty work-around) when hardware virtualization is not possible (VT-x/AMD-V not active) with your “crappy”/old CPU! It will be a noticeable slow-down. You can check this in your VM properties’ “System” -> “Acceleration”.

Enable hw virt. whenever possible.

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