Adventures with FreeBSD Week Four

This is really a summary of my month in FreeBSD so will be a little shorter than my previous posts. 

Well its week four and I have been using FreeBSD as my daily driver on my laptop for four weeks. Installation, configuring, re-configuring, installing software and general use. 

I have had allot of fun with FreeBSD and learned allot in the process. I have been a Linux user since the 90's and Linux users from around that time, will remember that Linux, even the out of the box distros, were still 'some assembly required' 

I am a Ubuntu user and have been since 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog and have had the luxury of an out of the box 'no assembly required' workstation for a long time, which I am not complaining about at all but, when you use something like FreeBSD you do realise that over the years, you have become a bit rusty and forgotten how to get your hands dirty. 

So there are two question to be answered.

1. Will I keep FreeBSD on my laptop ?
2. Will I continue to use FreeBSD on the desktop ?

Will I keep FreeBSD on my laptop ?

No. The reason for this decision is, my laptop is an everything computer. Work, home, cafe etc, so I really need a true 'no assembly required' OS and for me that is Ubuntu. I am actually writing this on my laptop with the Ubuntu drive back in. I was planning on keeping FreeBSD a little longer, but a work issue arose, that I couldn't do with out allot of configuring of FreeBSD. So work took precedent and I had to swap out the drives a little early.

I probably could have configured it to do the job but, in my line of work which is Information Management and digital preservation you never know what you're going to get sometimes, so I need something I can either use instantly or very quickly install software/hardware to complete the job and Ubuntu hit's the spot. 

Will I continue to use FreeBSD on the desktop ?

Yes I will continue to use FreeBSD, I am planning on installing it on a secondary desktop machine and continue to work and learn more about it. I really enjoy running FreeBSD it puts the excitement back into computing I think.

Hopefully at some point, I will be advanced enough to build true out of the box experience. 

Well that about raps up my month with FreeBSD. 

I wholeheartedly recommend that everyone have a go and try out FreeBSD, if you can install it on hardware it's a much better experience than vertualisation. but if you can't VertualBox works just fine.

R.

Adventures with FreeBSD Week Three

So on to week three. 

previously I've discussed installation, setup and installing applications.

In this post I will cover some of the issues I encountered and what I did to fix them, or at leased workaround them.

1. Audio.

I noticed that audio playback was not the best, it would pop and stutter when playing audio locally and streaming. I tried a few different media players, audacious, Parole, VLC and also Chromium and Firefox web browsers, they all seem to have the same issue with audio. 

My first thought was the wifi was interfering with audio playback. I've experienced this on Linux, where you are connected to a wired network, but you wifi card is still active and every now and again it pings the network, causing a cpu spike that causes the audio to pop and stutter. 

The solution to this, was to either use wifi instead of wired, or turn wifi off when connected to a wired network.

Since I am running FreeBSD on a laptop I am almost always connected to wifi and rarely connected to a wired network, but I may as well test it, so I connected to a wired network and disabled the wifi. No difference, still the same audio issues.

After a bit of research on the net, I found a few discussions from people with similar audio issues running FreeBSD. 

I found a post on the FreeBSD forums discussing a similar audio issue I was having and the steps taken to fix it. 

These steps involved editing a pulseaudio config file called 'daemon.conf', this file is located in /usr/local/etc/pulse/ 

I needed to uncomment the three lines below and change their values.

* ; avoid-resampling = false 'Uncomment and change to yes'

* ; default-sample-rate = 44100 'Uncomment and change to 48000'

* ; deferred-volume-safety-margin-usec = 8000 'Uncomment this line and change to 1'

Afterwards these lines looked like this.

* avoid-resampling = yes

* default-sample-rate = 48000

* deferred-volume-safety-margin-usec = 1

This fixed my audio problems on FreeBSD apart from audio playback in the Chromium web browser. I still get a few pops and stutters, but definitely an improvement from before.

Note: I only have audio issues with Chromium not Firefox, so this seems to be a Chromium related problem, not so much a FreeBSD audio related problem.

2. Mount and access external devices.

Out of the box FreeBSD doesn't have auto-mounting of devices configured, on a server this is of course understandable, but on a desktop where you are using removable media regularly, it is expected that when you plug in a device, it will be readily available.

Note: I am an advocate for referring to the FreeBSD handbook for configuring your system but, for mounting removable media on an everyday desktop, I was advised not to follow the setup in the handbook, but follow the setup from the following website.
freebsd desktop part 17 automount removable media 

Following 𝚟𝚎𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚍𝚎𝚗,s guide, I was able to setup auto mounting removable media and it works perfectly.

3. Wine.

Hmmm, At the time of writing this, I have not been able to get wine to work on FreeBSD. 

Wine installs fine, you can run the wine config application but when trying to install anything using wine it will result in errors. These are programs that historically install perfectly under wine on Linux based systems.

In defence of FreeBSD here, we must remember some assembly required, and also remembering FreeBSD is predominantly a server orientated OS not an out of the box ready to go desktop.

From what I can see with the Wine on FreeBSD, it's more a configuration issue than a bug and I am sure I will get it to work once I have figured it out. 

At the end of the day these really are the only issues I have had using FreeBSD as an everyday desktop, I'm sure there will be others in the future and I'm sure all can be sorted with a bit of time and configuration.

Next week. will I stay with FreeBSD as a desktop.

R.

Adventures with FreeBSD Week Two

So, after the initial setup, and the installation of a few essential packages (plugins and applications) I have been busy customising and creating my perfect desktop for daily use. Anyone who has used FreeBSD knows, it comes with the caveat of 'some assembly required.' Now this is fine, as it contributes to the growing of new neurons in the brain. Seriously it does!

A note on the generation of new neurons in the brain. over recent years we have seen big tech move us from type and text to point and click and now, endless scrolling where more than two lines of text is considered too long and too hard for the populous to understand. as a lover of text this breaks my heart, but also concerns me deeply that we are being steered slowly but surely into yes and obey mode and not into question-and-answer mode.

A quest for knowledge is the mode I default to. The three R's 'Research Research Research' and then research some more. Eventually you complete your quest, and you will be a better person for it.

I will write more on this subject in the future.

Back to the desktop.

I am presented with fairly default XFCE desktop, the first thing I do is turn off display icons on the desktop and turn off show applications in the right click menu this makes things look a little tidier. I also installed themes, icon packs and backgrounds as you do with XFCE to make it your own.

I took the top panel down to 24 and added a skin to it to give it just a hint of shading. I removed the bottom panel altogether and replaced it with plank. Usually with XFCE I keep the bottom panel and use it as quick launch for applications, but this time I decided to replace it with plank so it would act as a dock and launcher similar to MacOS.

So far, I have found everything I need in the FreeBSD repository including those below and have found that they are either the latest versions or very recent, maybe one version behind. 

•  Audacious
•  Dosbox
•  Hexchat
•  VLC
•  Firefox
•  Chromium
•  Thunderbird
•  FileZilla
•  Gimp
•  Inkscape
•  Nextcloud client.

This is not a complete list but it's a base to get things started. as I said some assembly required.

Installing applications on FreeBSD.

A quick overview of Installing Applications and Packages and Ports from the FreeBSD handbook.

'FreeBSD is bundled with a rich collection of system tools as part of the base system. In addition, FreeBSD provides two complementary technologies for installing third-party software: the FreeBSD Ports Collection, for installing from source, and packages, for installing from pre-built binaries. Either method may be used to install software from local media or from the network.’

If you are coming from Linux, you are probably familiar with Apt from Debian, Pkg works work in a similar way.

--------------------

pkg install ‘software package’
pkg search “search for software, can use wild cards * as well”
pkg delete “remove software package”

--------------------

There are many other options for pkg which can be found in the man pages.

I wont cover ports here as I haven’t used any on this install of FreeBSD, as I have so far found everything I need as a pre-built package.

So far, I have a very clean workable desktop on a robust stable foundation, FreeBSD.

Note: one of the great things about XFCE is that it is so customisable, and you can make and set it up just the way you want.

That’s about for now, there is probably more I should add here and I know I haven’t gone into detail on how to do things in FreeBSD, but this is more about my experience and to answer the question Can FreeBSD be my daily driver?

Next week I will be discussing configuration and trouble shooting.

R.

Adventures with FreeBSD

------------------------

Week one

• History
• Research
• Install

------------------------ 

 I've been around for a while and been involved in the nixes UNIX/Linux since around the late nineties. I first discovered Linux when I found a set of SUSE discs in the rubbish bin at my computer class. In an attempt to install SUSE, I proceeded to wipe my Windows 98 install and my precious games save, I had so much in my Diablo stash it was heartbreaking! 

 Anyway, even though at the time losing my precious games saves was devastating, It didn't kerb my interest in Linux. To cut a long story short, not long after the great event, Windows be came secondary to me and eventually extinct as I became a user of Linux. 

 So what has this got to do with FreeBSD and UNIX? I always new of UNIX but not really the whole history of the UNIX operating system, which as I have a passion for history I was intrigued and as I am a nerd who often dwells in the nerdsphare, it was natural I wanted to know everything about it. I won't go into the history of UNIX but you can find a fantastic text based history at KatolaZ, which I will add a link to at the bottom of this post. So, many Linux distros later I have again returned to FreeBSD UNIX or 'UNIX like' because we are not really allow to call it UNIX, trade mark issues and all silly stuff. 

 I have used FreeBSD as a desktop in the past but never very long and have always gone back to Linux for the desktop experience. 2023 rolled around and I need a change, so I decided to try FreeBSD again on the desktop and I would give it a good month of solid use and compare what I can do and what I cant do on FreeBSD. I installed FreeBSD in VirtualBox, following the Handbook and shortly had FreeBSD with the XFCE desktop up and running. I thought this is fine, but if I want to give this a good honest try it needs to be on hardware and my daily driver. So I slotted in a new SSD into my laptop and proceeded to install FreeBSD on my Thinkpad X250. 

The first attempt to install FreeBSD on my laptop didn't go so well, user error I should read the Handbook more carefully and not skip parts because I think I know better. The second attempt was a success! My DE of choice of course was XFCE and I chose LightDM as my login manager. During the install my wifi card was detected but couldn't find any carriers, but after logging into my newly install desktop I was able to connect to my wifi network just fine. 

Speaking of wifi, I installed a few extra packages that are not included in the default install of XFCE, these are as follows:

• networkmgr
• xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin
• xfce4-volumed-pulse
• gtk-xfce-engine
• xfce4-appmenu-plugin

Also a couple of applications needed.

• xarchiver
• xreader

The above plugins and applications I feel are needed to make your life in XFCE more pleasant. So this is the basic install. Oh, I also installed Audacious the greatest audio player ever created! At lease in my universe it is. That's about all for now, but will return with with week two, customisation's, extra software, quirks what ever else turns up.

KatolaZ home page

This is a re-post from my Gemini portal - Find out more about Gemini here

R.