Starting again with FreeBSD

I used to run FreeBSD back around the time of version 5.x. The problem was I also ran at the time

• Mandrake/Mandriva
• Gentoo
• Windows 2000
• IPCop firewall
• QMail

Each of those had their own PC on 24/7 and the heat and noise got to me. I had bought my 2 week old daughter a PowerBook laptop¹ and I was impressed by the BSDness of OSX 10.3 so I resolved to ditch all my noisy PCs and cut down to one or two Macs. So for a large number of years I fiddled with iMacs and Mac Minis.

Roll forward to a few years ago and OSX had jumped the shark, so I bought myself a quiet tower and put Ubuntu on it. A few years later we come to this year. I moved my laptop & desktop over to Pop_OS but it was still lining up on the waterskis at the shark tank. My main irritant with it was snap/flatpak/apt all being a mess. I disliked how the ouput of ‘mount’ was generally a screenfull of nonsense, or how the app store app would randomly lock up and become non-responsive.

At this time, a number of people I respect on Mastodon started talking about FreeBSD again. I was disappointed to find my laptop had unsupported Wifi, but my desktop had an unused 0.5Tb SSD in it, so a quick change of boot order and I slapped this on it. This is First Post! from FreeBSD.

It’s not without its problems, but it’s a learning curve and I’m enjoying the trip. Here is my current list of wrinkles

Printers

I have a Brother HL-L8260CDW on the LAN. It should work ‘driverless’ but I think I’ve messed it up somewhere trying to use the PPD file I use under Linux.

Atuin

Superb history management, but default install instructions give

ERROR: there isn't a package for x86_64-unknown-freebsd

(which isn’t too surprising), and

cd /usr/ports/shells/atuin
sudo make install

fails with error: could not compile 'time' (lib) due to 1 previous error; 84 warnings emitted

TunerStudio

A proprietry Java application that I use to talk to the ECU in the Stupid Car when I’m not using MSDroid. The problem is around the library used to access the serial port. Probably not a huge problem, but down on the list of things to sort out later as I still have it on my laptop.

EXT4 sensitivities

I have 4Tb of spinning rust in the case that Linux uses rsync to take daily snapshots of $HOME to. I can mount it fine (albeit with all the UID/GUID mapping to different values) but a couple of times I’ve hit the power button and it becomes very unhappy. I’ve had to boot back into Linux to get fsck to recover if (BSD fsck doesn’t fix it). This is teaching me to not be so cavalier with the power button, but it is an irritant.

Keyboard wierdness

Sometimes Alt and Super are swapped. Numlock is not on by default, and I need to get the volume keys working

Anyway, I’m off to fight the good fight with my printer. Wish me luck…..