@mms That's super funny 😃 I'd love to go full in BSD, however many of the libs/langs I use are either not available or in a very specific version and I don't want to compile them all by myself.
BSD clearly has some momentum in the end-user area and that's great.
Alas, I have to consider some other hardware that is more BSD friendly than what I currently have for my main laptop. Wifi worked great on NetBSD, whereas it was flaky on FreeBSD, but the audio input was the flaky one.
A ThinkPad, maybe? I'll gladly accept hardware recommendations for BSD-friendly models from at least a decade ago (read: cheap).
Current status: Deciding between Void and Alpine for the next episode of The Main Machine Trials®
@greggyb@jutty Sadly most from Lenovo have BIOS whitelists by default, forbidding you from changing the card, though there's the option of getting an X230 with Coreboot pre-installed from various vendors.
I've been using an X260 for the past years, though I use an USB WiFi device (urtwn) or ethernet for reliability.
@netbsd@jutty Yeah, that is a pretty lame part about Lenovo machines. I loved my x260 and its dual batteries, but I've recently moved to a #FrameworkLaptop and I couldn't be happier.
Just a thought… Wouldn’t it be nice if capsicum in #FreeBSD could be used in such way that you didn’t need to alter binaries, but from e.g. daemon(8) which would jail your binaries with the restricted capabilities
@mpts@rvstaveren if you just want to use jails for all services you can modify rc.subr to add a new jailing feature where it just shares the same root filesystem but all the services you specify are in a jail with some lowered capabilities and it behaves like a cgroup in that fashion
I wish some people took this seriously and pushed it as a core feature because it would rule
@feld@mpts yes definitely! The reason I mentioned capsicum was that the jailing could even go deeper than that and keep processes unprivileged right from the start
"As Arm expands its reach into new technology domains, it is important to understand FreeBSD's role in this journey to gain insights into broader industry trends."
Would be a free public shell account service based on #FreeBSD/#OpenBSD systems interesting for you? If yes, what would you run on it?
Please provide feedback, so @gyptazy can check if it makes sense to provide such a service (this is already available in a limited beta).
What to expect:
A free user login to a FreeBSD or #OpenBSD based system where multiple users can access it at the same time. You can do everything in your own home directory, run processes, open sockets, compile stuff etc. System is managed in general for you.
What you cannot do:
Make changes to the system in general, use low ports, install or modify things system wide.
My laptop running FreeBSD 14.0-R-p6 locked up during resume - it's been years since I had this issue. Power cycled it, and now my wireless device won't show up. I think I'm too tired to debug now, will look at it in the morning. Bummer though, hope it's not a hardware failure due to resetting the laptop while the wireless device was being initialised.
@vermaden removed laptop battery, waited 10 minutes, put it back. wlan0 is back! Thank you :D
(Follow up edit: suspended again, resumed okay, but the wifi device keeps disconnecting and reconnecting, a reboot later it has again vanished. I'm suspecting this is hardware failure)
@harshad@vermaden if there’s a separate WiFi card inside, try reseating it, cleaning contacts. Could be a thermal issue if it worked after cooling down?
Puh, after almost 20 years (when version 1.1 got released in 2005) I switched from #ezjail to #cbsd. Feels strange because I always refused to use any other jail manager. But I guess it's time to move on... Btw, also like the TUI if #cbsd.
Have a nice weekend #FreeBSD fans (and of course also everyone else).
Are you a versatile problem-solver with a knack for operating system development? Do you thrive working in an open source development environment with a diverse team? If so, the FreeBSD Foundation is searching for a software developer with varied interests and skills and a passion to perfect the user experience on FreeBSD.
@winterschon I installed #KDE Neon on a #Thinkpad P14s and everything worked out of the box including WiFi, power management, the printer, and the fingerprint reader. Fantastic experience
@winterschon The wifi connects, but it runs at 1/10 the speed of the same device under Linux, and it won't connect at all if you try to configure IPv6.
I'm posting this from my IBM Thinkcentre m90q running Freebsd 14.0p6, and I can't wait for the work on the iwlwifi project to finish so we do get the same performance as Linux.
Also noticed that #DNSCrypt provides a large amount of binary distributions for #FreeBSD, #OpenBSD, #NetBSD, #DragonFlyBSD, #Solaris, among several other OSs, plus many architecture-specific binaries. That is really nice! Next thing will be deploying it on the beastie server.
#Podman has been ported to #FreeBSD. And it can run Arch Linux for me.
Linux containers in FreeBSD can start through the old good #Linuxulator - which does not support complex features like cgroups or namespaces, which means I probably can't run a container inside a container. Yet.
But this Linux layer is actively supported in FreeBSD for almost 20 years and is rock-solid! It started in 2006 at Google, based on Linux kernel 2.6 and today it shows up as 5.15-compatible!
I finally did it and moved to a more appropriate "home realm" for a #FreeBSD enthusiast. Thanks @stefano for offering this!
Moving followers worked flawlessly, restoring all my settings was pretty quick, but of course all my old toots are left on https://techhub.social/@zirias 🙈
So I guess I'll introduce myself here by writing a little thread, adding a few of my works that someone might find interesting. But first a bit of "who am I":
I'm a "professional" software architect/developer (mostly #dotnet platform in the day job), FreeBSD hobby-admin and ports committer, #C64 fan (and occassionally coder and even musician), and apart from computers also interested in music (playing a few instruments myself), traveling, cooking, sometimes sports, sometimes politics ... but probably won't toot about any non-technical stuff (or, very very rarely).
One of my "dream projects" (maybe after retirement 🙈😁) would be to create yet another :commodore: #C64 OS. One that works on a vanilla unextended machine.
There are quite a few around of course. To make something meaningful, you have to think about what could give #retrocomputing enthusiasts an excuse to use their breadbin once in a while 😏
I think it should just support very basic #Internet service clients, like Email, IRC, BBS (via TCP), ... of course this means to require one hardware extension (apart from your obligatory floppy drive): Some #ethernet (or wifi) hardware. There are a few around, so "drivers" for those would be needed.
This sets the baseline of features required. Multitasking will probably be unavoidable (clients need to be able to do stuff "in the background", like e.g. respond to IRC PING messages). There's already a LOT of complexity attached to that requirement. You'll need an executable format with relocation info, and a program loader doing the relocation on startup of a new process. You'll need a concept how to deal with the tiny hardware stack (partition it, relying on apps not to overflow? copy it around on each context switch?). You'll need a concept how to dynamically allocate memory (probably just page-wise). And so on.
A windowing system IMHO makes no sense at all on that machine. The UI should focus on text (maybe a set of virtual consoles?). Support for GUI apps might be possible, but then only "full-screen". 🤔
How can I be up-to-date with current developments of all #bsd without following their mailing lists? I'd love to know what they are cooking (got or graphical installer for example) but without following dev discussions, as those are too low-level for my needs.
> FreeBSD is working on a graphical installer. Finally.
"finally" what? like, what is the actual benefit to users here?
bsdinstall could definitely do with some improvements to its workflow (which people are working on) but it's already pretty intuitive and easy to use.
if you install FreeBSD with a graphical installer, you finish the install, and then... you end up with a "login:" prompt on a text terminal. so you didn't gain anything from having a graphical installer.
if the idea here is to make FreeBSD easier to install/use, then the focus should be on the post-install system (e.g., installing DRM/X/Wayland/etc. by default), not on the installer itself.
@lw and they could even take an inspiration from Linux in this point. Debian's installer works text-based (graphical is basically the same thing, but with a mouse) and offers clear and easy options to add popular DEs and other goodies post base install (which again I tend not to use). Just a matter of marking and pressing Enter.
Recently got a cheap 128 GB SSD to see how BSD would run on my main machine, and this weekend threw FreeBSD on it. I'm sending this toot from the working system, and aside from the general configuration joy of being an Unix nerd, finding almost everything I need to know in the FreeBSD Handbook is a great perk on the second joy: reading docs and being able to flow acting on them.
Jim ported your FAT filesystem driver to Haiku here https://review.haiku-os.org/c/haiku/+/7660 using a compatibility layer, to replace the previous driver we had inherited from BeOS sample code that was not working great.
I appreciate your input on how to handle this, maybe you're open to making/upstreaming some changes to the driver to make it easier to port? Maybe your driver is as bad as ours and you already plan to rewrite it? Anything else we should check?
