There is a J720 compatible NetBSD/hpcarm pre-installed image available at
https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/jun/hpcarm/. It spots NetBSD 8.99
(which is a pre-release 9.0
). It's a basically a base system with a couple of tweaks so nothing close to the richness of JLime. Apparently it's compatible with the packages compiled for the first Raspberry Pi, hosted at
https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/earm/9.0/All/.
For 6xx, there is one from the same author
(Jun Ebihara
) at
https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/jun/hpcsh/ - it's a 8.0 image. I found that copying some libraries from the 9.x base sets
(e.g. libstdc++
) make most packages from 9.x working. NetBSD is quite lenient as it warns you about the packages having been built for the different OS version but still allows to install them.
I have been trying NetBSD out on a 680e. The latest version of the OS that boots is 8.2 which is what I am running. There is a bug with 9.x that prevents it from booting
(http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-hpcsh/2020/03/10/msg000902.html
). I don't think the bug applies to the 720
(hpcarm
). I ended up installing the 9.0 hpcsh packages and patching the base system with the above method. The nice part of NetBSD is the package manager. The pkg_add and other tools are almost blazing fast compared to the opkg speeds I experienced with JLime. The not so nice part is the fact that anything GUI is slow
(subjectively similar to Devuan on the J720
). Also the number of packages available is very limited compared to Debian so there is much less you can do. It should be possible to compile from pkgsrc on the device itself but I am struggling to imagine the speed of that process. I tried to cross-compile from a NetBSD/arm64 machine onto sh3el but the toolchain didn't work for me. Apparently the hpcsh packages in NetBSD are being built on a real Landisk machine
(https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/LANDISK
).
Another pre-built image for the 6xx can be found at
http://45.76.81.249/NetBSD/hpcsh/. It has a full ratpoison setup with Doom and Wolf3D pre-installed but runs on an older 3.0 base. The author runs a cool retro tech Youtube channel -
https://www.youtube.com/user/DoktorCranium/videos.