Occasionally I play with the NetBSD operating system, a system derived from 4.4BSD and Unix. I regularly cross-build the full system on FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Linux and macOS to test the build infrastructure - the live build page has the detail.

Below you can find VMs of every major release since 1.0. I downloaded the floppy images for 1.0 and installed the first VM using VirtualBox. After that I switched to Qemu, when I didn't need the floppy disc support of VirtualBox. After installation, I upgraded to each release by building from source using the compiler. This became much easier after 1.6 when build.sh was introduced. At some stage, I may write this up as a paper.

I would have started with 0.8 but it is not available in binary form.

For VMs up to version 1.3 use:

qemu-system-i386 -hda IMAGE -net user -net nic,model=pcnet \
	-boot c -display curses

For VMs from version 1.4 use:

qemu-system-i386 -hda IMAGE -net user -net nic,model=ne2k_pci \
	 -boot c -display curses

-display curses is optional

At 1.5.3, I moved everything to a larger disc image with a new filesystem. It was difficult to start with a large enough disc. If I was doing this again I might just use a separate disc for /usr at this point.

1.0 1.1 1.2.1 1.2 1.3.3 1.4.3 1.5.3 1.5.3.newhw 1.6.2
2.0 2.1 3.1 4 5.2 6.2 7.2 8.2 9.2 
Checksums

36d52abd6397f16fec708cb3527790af423b7593  amnesiac-netbsd-i386-1.0.img.bz2
21d1fe029470f536896442cd5f28c09c8c767b36  amnesiac-netbsd-i386-1.1.img.bz2
a7edb8fc206602b6bcffeca3fd1fafebbf319840  amnesiac-netbsd-i386-1.2.1.img.bz2
9a7c0b6c07af91acdd08cf528697e0d4f811771b  amnesiac-netbsd-i386-1.2.img.bz2
bde8396e024d047157ec32e060e963d06b542bc0  amnesiac-netbsd-i386-1.3.3.img.bz2
05adfc3a312c6f464813a7f3f90c96a44c5ce48f  amnesiac-netbsd-i386-1.4.3.img.bz2
0643941c40fc06f2efa801e3ee5caf119a7f264b  amnesiac-netbsd-i386-1.5.3.img.bz2
c44e167a9e9cd573c8eb53b19db7ddd3931b9fce  amnesiac-netbsd-i386-1.5.3.newhw.img.bz2
00169b0dea8d16db4745c8a85b489e7def6b12a5  amnesiac-netbsd-i386-1.6.2.img.bz2
932fe0031470e4ceea1aa33bf8a12733405a5e2a  amnesiac-netbsd-i386-2.0.img.bz2
a393c3abc27592bf5fa5445251d359528f4e3aec  amnesiac-netbsd-i386-2.1.img.bz2
42ea7878581a2eb50cb3a785830332f5b00d8789  amnesiac-netbsd-i386-3.1.img.bz2
513f52bd1a59eecd6cae7de71ee7a5f239f80757  amnesiac-netbsd-i386-4.img.bz2
979903530f1deaa93362129a59a76a386866722e  amnesiac-netbsd-i386-5.2.img.bz2
d4044bd34b1ba73aaa3d3e254ac399fbaef26d45  amnesiac-netbsd-i386-6.2.img.bz2
bf6bd85132d1f8d08b2b4a2cb1dad6e5fcb0578a  amnesiac-netbsd-i386-7.2.img.bz2
1246f3dc8ca6d15e48e6afcddbfa7f694e271ddf  amnesiac-netbsd-i386-8.2.img.bz2
22f0dce403ebd19e3fc3effc5483cf33290be9cc  amnesiac-netbsd-i386-9.2.img.bz2