Just some light Sunday afternoon entertainment: Printing from NetBSD on the dotmatrix printer by dumping data to /dev/ulpt0. The netbook doesn’t have a parallel port, so this must be done over USB. NetBSD.escp was created by a little custom ESC/P converter written in C. 🥳

https://movq.de/v/14b09c47a5/print-small.mp4

Video description:

Video begins with a view of the netbook’s screen: 3 windows are open, one of them showing the typical NetBSD logo to print, the other one shows the commands I ran in preparation:

magick /usr/X11R7/include/X11/pixmaps/NetBSD.xpm -depth 8 -alpha set /tmp/NetBSD.pam
./pam2escp /tmp/NetBSD.pam /tmp/NetBSD.escp

The other terminal shows a root shell with this command:

cat /tmp/NetBSD.escp >/dev/ulpt0

I hit Enter, the printer starts printing.

Camera pans to show the printer, an Oki ML 3390. Continuous paper. Once finished, I manually feed the paper a little bit to better show the result.

(If you turn up the volume enough, you can hear “Leaving” by “Chill Carrier” from 2008.)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Cool shit! I also just read your report on installing NetBSD. What a journey. So, you still need to know what you’re doing. But if you make it foolproof, the world invents a new idiot. :-)

I also use an ethernet cable everywhere. It’s just what I’m used to for decades and I don’t carry around my laptop in the house anyway. It stays on the desk.

So, next up FreeBSD? ;-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, the partition stuff with disklabels is what I’m absolutely not used to. I need to invest more time learning this. Not just using it, but how and where is it represented on disk and all that.

I carry my notebook/netbook around a lot. 😅 Watching movies in bed, for example.

I think I’ll stick with NetBSD for a while. It works surprisingly well, it’s new stuff to explore, it’s fast, and then there’s this:

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@netbsd/112446618914747900

Gentoo (https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council/AI_policy) might be another idea, but I’m afraid that the little netbook might be too slow for that? Or are there binary packages? No idea, it’s been ages since I touched this distro.

(Regarding Linux in general … we all know what Linus said. I’m not sure where this project is heading.)