I travel all across America.  And on this trip, I've decided to take an older
Dell Latitude with me.  I like the older machines which had the ability to
switch OFF UEFI - which I hate UEFI.

This old laptop has a nice keyboard and trackpad.  The DVD is broken on it
and needs replacing.  It has 8gb of ram and an I5 processor in it.  It has
three usb ports and an eithernet jack as well as a plugin for a
headset - conventional pin jack - RCA.  And it has a conventional 1tb disk drive
platter.  No SSD or NVME on this box.

I like Slackware Linux and also Trisquel and had been using Triskel on this
machine for a couple of weeks when I decided to install NetBSD 10 and have a go
at the new release using this laptop.

Out of all the BSD's, NetBSD 10 was the only one which did usb tethoring to a
cell phone without having to screw with things.  It just gave me a working
connection out of the box.  All of the Linux's have cell phone tethering working
but out of all the BSD's, NetBSD was alone in a working -out of the box- tether.
This is important because in all the BSD's you have to install kernel drivers
to get Wifi to work.

I also wanted to put the Extended Attributes {EA} filesystem to use in a real
life test on this laptop.  So, I installed NetBSD 10 using this option {EA}.
I had made an EXT2 filesystem on an 800gb partion on a plugin usb hard drive
which I wrote 620gb of data on it so I could transfer my Linux data to the new
NetBSD install.  

I could not get NetBSD to read the disklabel from that drive properly.  It seemed
to work differently from OpenBSD.  I could not mount the ext2fs on NetBSD.  I
played with disklabel on NetBSD, trying to straighten out the problem but failed.

I then booted up a usbstick with FuguIta 7.5 on it, which is based on OpenBSD 7.5
and read the data drive's disklabel properly and mounted the ext2 file system easily.

I remembered from a FreeBSD spin a few years ago that in order to read a Linux ext2
filesystem, you needed to load a kernel module on boot to get that to work.  I began
researching the man pages to find this driver on NetBSD but could not find anything
on this subject.  

Perhaps if I made my disklabel using NetBSD 10 and formatting the ext2 file system
from NetBSD 10 before I took it over to Linux to populate the data,,, then this
would have worked just fine.  But NetBSD and OpenBSD are two different animals when
it comes down to handling foreign file systems on gpt partitioned drives.  OpenBSD
is far easier to use on this score than NetBSD.

I'm sure there is probably some highly technical thing you could do on NetBSD to
get it to use a Linux ext2 filesystem which was partitioned and created on a Linux
system using gpt, but the man pages I went though don't really get that deep into
the system.  

With OpenBSD, opening a foreign Linux created filesystem is very easy to do.

I remembered somebody up on the SDF's com telling me that he had to put his data
in ISO files to transfer it to NetBSD.  So, other people have had to deal with this
issue and have come up with their own life solutions to handle this data migration
issue.   I could have just used rsync over ssh but that would take days to do,
and being mobile, I just don't have the bandwidth or the weeks time to do this.

I've been running an OpenBSD server/router at home now for over a dozen years had
found OpenBSD easy to upgrade over the years.  OpenBSD is very easy to use.

I decided to move on and install the Wifi firmware and intel-firmware on NetBSD 10.
Using 'pkgin search firmware' provided me with a page to read through of available
firmware drivers for NetBSD.  I selected the intel and wifi firmware I needed and
quickly install both of them using pkgin.   When this operation finished, another
message appeared with an example of an rcctl command I need to run and two rc.d
files I need to copy into the init and activate.  The note explicitly warned me
that I need to provide the command with the firmwares path.  

Well, I didn't know where the firmware was?  What was the path?  What should
I put in here for a path?  Did they also mean I needed to put in a path somewhere
in those init files also?  I was lost.  

I began to research the man pages again and came up with nothing.

I would have to search around on NetBSD's website and probably find the answer
there.  Of perhaps on some forum somewhere, giving examples of what should be.

In the meantime, I'm using OpenBSD to reformat and rewrite the data drive using
an OpenBSD native disklabel and filesystem and try that with NetBSD later.
This process will probably take 2 days to do, then I will reinstall NetBSD
and see if it can still read from an OpenBSD created filesystem and disklabel...