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Hi Geminauts, the recent release of FreeBSD 13 fixed some bugs related with the VirtualBox "Guest Additions", if you don't know anything about them are a set of utilities that allow to use full guest screen resolution as well as sharing folders among the host and the guest; this made possible using FreeBSD again with all these features available and thus it is time to test intensively this
fascinating OS even though in a virtual environment.
Honestly VirtualBox has never been my favorite hypervisor but at least it is almost entirely open-source and probably one of the few, available on Windows, able to run FreeBSD with X11.
The reasons to run a virtual machine over a real computer are multiples such programming or testing; but mines are related to keep my internet surfing private while browsing at work. If, at your job, you are lucky enough to have the admins rights to install any software on your work-station, you may consider worthy following my tips and keep starting to browse on internet privately (from your employer) with FreeBSD rather than Linux.
> For experience I noticed that personal browsing at job is tolerate until your employer is looking for an excuse to fire you off; don't believe personal browsing at job as a safe activity: do it carefully!
I used to use Debian as virtual OS however recently I have been getting to start in having interest in the BSD world, for instance FreeBSD suits very well for my needs, some of the reasons to prefer FreeBSD instead of any GNU/Linux distribution might be:
Curiosity
Better modularity
Small footprint
Responsiveness
I generally used a custom, very minimal, Debian (unfortunately Devuan doesn't play nicely with VirtualBox because "systemd") but I have been looking forward to use FreeBSD since a very longtime. I also did a recent test with OpenBSD but because its nature it does not support the "Guest Additions" and thus the test was quite conditioned. I also tested GhostBSD but it looks like the installer was broken again during my tests.
However because its modular installation FreeBSD is a valid choice to build up a customized environment, enabling only what you need, dropping services you do not want to have active, and keeping only the strict necessary in order to have a system snappy and lean.
To keep your navigation separate from the internet of your work I will use the "Android USB Tethering" through my phone, but to fully use USB devices within VirtualBox it is important to install the "Extensions pack"; so far this is the only component that is not open-source.
> With the connection established through the USB Tethering your navigation is fully hidden to your employer.
I recently bought a 5G phone, not because the private browsing but because my previous one got simply broken for unknown reasons (maybe water spills, maybe something else), however I didn't notice any remarkable difference in the connection speed between my former 4G-LTE phone and the newer 5G; as a matter of fact the 5G thing is basically a marketing propaganda, real test confirm that you may gain a 30% more in speed in some circumstances but I didn't notice any particular improvement, it looks like just the same speed as I had before with 4G.
> My carrier is T-Mobile and what I noticed is this: if you use the USB Tethering through the "Developers options" seems as the network recognizes the use of the mobile data as it was made by the phone itself, hence I get my unlimited 4/5G data as my plan declares. In other occasions I used to connect to my phone through the WiFi hot-spot feature, in this case after exhausted the hot-spot data available the connection dropped automatically (and dramatically) to G3, with a very sluggish internet connection.
It is more than a month that I am working, learning and tuning FreeBSD to get better performance and to translate my usual workflow from Debian to FreeBSD. The amount of information collected was huge, also because this aims to be technical documentation and thus needs to be precise and reproducible as much as possible. For this reason I split this documentation in three parts:
Part 1: the one that you are currently reading; here are available: general considerations and final thoughts, links where downloading the files needed and the complete webography I used to prepare the documentation.
Part 2: this is basically a visual walk-through made by screenshots mainly; it is useful for people that have never installed FreeBSD or used VirtualBox in their life (also to remember all the steps I made).
Part 3: post-installation and tuning. The third and last part is dedicated to the post-installation stuff and all the tuning to make it flies!
You need the VirtualBox installer and the FreeBSD image to move forward, below the links to the files required.
FreeBSD 13 is available through this page:
I suggested to download the DVD image, this will allow a full installation without relying on the internet connection.
The online references for this documentation are the following ones:
Moving from Debian to FreeBSD is not so hard, and FreeBSD has the advantage to be more cohesive and consistent than any Linux distributions, although Debian is one of the best distro in terms of cohesion and consistency.
It is clear that you have to slightly modify your habits as well as you have to learn new commands. Some of these BSD commands are more intuitive or rational than the ones of GNU/Linux; for instance mounting a encrypted partition/disk with GELI is a breeze and does not require all the juggling as is required with GNU/Linux. Even though systemd is not available (and this is definitely a good thing) tuning services and other stuff is pretty simple and easy to understand.
FreeBSD has huge amount of software available as package or as port, and some of them are even newer than in Debian Testing, ports may also receive more recent version than packages (or at least bug-fixes). However all those packages aren't in the same shape, for instance installing Gimp caused me to read a long sequences of warning regarding packages without a maintainer anymore, this is not good. Since design and computer graphic is my main area of knowledge and expertise I acknowledged this fact with a bit of concerning. I would like eventually moving on FreeBSD but if my main software are mostly left in the oblivious this would be problematic for me.
> I am still wondering why image-magick is not available...
Coming from GNU/Linux other software that you might think are a now a standard on the *nix realm are not available at all. Most of those missing parts are mostly third party closed software that haven't arrived yet on BSD and probably will never do.
> The big missing in all the FreeBSD affair is the DRM/EME for watching video and audio. Despite the streaming on Netflix is delivered with FreeBSD there is any browser support yet. You might use Linuxulator to enable a compatibility layer between FreeBSD and Linux but I really dislike this kind of solution.
However, specifically for this case I am not really interested in having DRM, Spotifly, Zuum etc. The tethering connection is barely sufficient to have a mediocre internet experience, to speed up the connection you must use all the old tricks, starting to use a local email client since any web-mails you may use will be damn slow. I suspect the main reason is because those web-mails are receiving a mixed request from a mobile client network and from a browser setting up as PC desktop, this clearly creates some issues and weird delay, considering that mobile browsing is caching to delivery the fastest and best format for a mobile experience. Anyway without all the extensions to block ads, tracking and javacrap browsing is almost impossible, keep this in mind:
> My Firefox extensions to keep to connection acceptable are: Decentraleyes, Facebook Container, HTTPS everywhere, Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin.
This part is done, put your installation and image file in a, big enough, pen-drive so you can start with the installation and going to the part 2:
For comments or suggestion write me at:
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