Stuart’s stuff

Stuart’s projects

0. BSD vs Linux

1. Looking for a full time OS – part 1

I wanted to switch Linux distro, and had settled on either Manjaro or FreeBSD as my OS of choice, and had finally got around to starting switching seriously rather than just playing with VMs under Kubuntu.

So I stuck a USB stick with FreeBSD on it into the Novatech laptop (around 6 years old), switched on and crossed my fingers.

Top tips:

1. READ THE HANDBOOK
2. READ THE HANDBOOK
3. Have second machine handy with the Handbook open on it.
4. Learn to love vi.
5. Have a second machine handy with a guide to vi on it.
6. As root set up X (BEWARE – you NEED to read the Handbook to pick up a couple of vital setup steps, using our old friend vi).
7. Install your desktop environment/window manager. I really like awesome but settled on XFCE as a nice balance of lightness and configurability without some of the headscratchiness of awesome or similar.
8. Install your global software as root – I just stuck to Firefox and LibreOffice using pkg_add -r.

One mistake I made was not setting the hostname as fully qualified (something.something.something) during installation which caused resolution timeouts on startup, but a bit of time with my good friend (now) vi helped resolved this in /etc/rc.conf

Make sure that you add yourself to the wheel user group, so that you can use su to install stuff:

#pw user mod username -G wheel and then you can add software to your heart’s content.

Overall, a slightly tense switch from Linux, as you start with a tabula rasa, but this is the beauty of a switch to BSD – YOU choose what YOU want from the off.

 

I’m really looking forward to getting this “just so”.