A friend of mine asked me if I would like to try out developing stuff in NetBSD and I thought why not.

As with most things the first step you take towards participation in the development of a system is to try to build the system. And my frist attempt to do this was to download the source code from the NetBSD-current tree and give it a spin.

Unfortunately without any direct access to proper hardware to compile on, I had to restrict myself to the realms of a VirtualBox instance. The instructions on the NetBSD website were quite clear and I followed it, giving my frist attempt to build the NetBSD from it’s source.

Since the VirtualBox instance did not have much resources, it took it’s sweet time to compile roughly 13 hours and luckly I did not have to face any powerloss inbetween so I could complete the whole build without any interrupts.

Here is the output of the build.sh log

make release started at:  Mon Sep  8 15:12:28 IST 2014
make release finished at: Wed Sep 10 03:08:29 IST 2014
===> Successful make release
===> build.sh ended:      Wed Sep 10 03:08:29 IST 2014
===> Summary of results:
        build.sh command:    ./build.sh -T ../tooldir -D ../destdir -R ../releasedir -O ../objdir -U -r release
        build.sh started:    Mon Sep  8 15:11:31 IST 2014
        NetBSD version:      7.99.1
        MACHINE:             i386
        MACHINE_ARCH:        i386
        Build platform:      NetBSD 6.1 i386
        HOST_SH:             /bin/sh
        No $TOOLDIR/bin/nbmake, needs building.
        Bootstrapping nbmake
        MAKECONF file:       /etc/mk.conf (File not found)
        TOOLDIR path:        /home/fox/project/netbsd-current/src/../tooldir
        DESTDIR path:        /home/fox/project/netbsd-current/src/../destdir
        RELEASEDIR path:     /home/fox/project/netbsd-current/src/../releasedir
        Removing /home/fox/project/netbsd-current/src/../tooldir
        Removing /home/fox/project/netbsd-current/src/../destdir
        Created /home/fox/project/netbsd-current/src/../tooldir/bin/nbmake
        Updated makewrapper: /home/fox/project/netbsd-current/src/../tooldir/bin/nbmake-i386
        Successful make release
        build.sh ended:      Wed Sep 10 03:08:29 IST 2014
===> .

But this was no where near in getting to write actual code. But none the less this was the first step.