Tux Machines

A fresh look at FreeBSD

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 10, 2022

today's howtos

Today in Techrights

It went easier than I expected, so I thought I'd have a go on my sacrificial half-decent Thinkpad.

(It is only a Core i5, it has a wobbly screen hinge, and until recently it had a tiny decade+ old SSD. Recently, I pulled the SSD that was giving errors from my X220, replaced it with a new bigger one -- that's only been waiting for a couple of years -- and bunged the old, possibly-flakey one into the sacrificial T420. I tried it with Ubuntu Kylin, the international remix. Worked well although there are glitches.)

This machine's primary SSD has ChromeOS Flex on it. I rather like it. It's slick, it's fast, it does its one job very well. I am using a Debian container to run Firefox 'cos I am perverse like that. Slow to start, issues with maximisation, but works well.

Tonight, because the radio has gone Very Very Solemn And Dull And Worthy, I spent a while faffing with DR-DOS VMs and then I decided on something that might be more educational.

I nuked Kylin and put FreeBSD 13.1 on it.

Now recently I tried GhostBSD on my multiboot testbed. It was a nightmare. Hard, fiddly, falls over in its own install process, and the end result has an ugly theme. Not impressed.

So I went with the vanilla version.

First boot: it finds the wifi card, but can't see any WLANs. That is not much cop.

Tried again. Found a hint online on my phone, switched vconsoles, did `ifconfig wlan0 down` and then `ifconfig wlan0 up`. Went back to the installer, and lo! It sees WLANs! Pick mine, connect, and now I can install stuff.

So, violating the recommended process, since it's booted off a DVD image via Ventoy, I figure that if I reboot, I won't be able to readily mount and install stuff off that. So let's do it while I'm booted off the install medium. It leaves you in a `chroot` console so it should be installing stuff onto the hard disk.

Read on

↺ Read on

gemini.tuxmachines.org