With the release of Debian 12, I decided that - instead of my usual setup of Xorg + Openbox - I would explore Wayland and a different desktop environment.
After making the switch to Sway and using it on both Linux and FreeBSD I find myself liking it very much!
Sway quickly gets you 90% towards a usable desktop. Its that 10% where you're crafting your own desktop just the way you like it that takes some experimenting!
When I decided to install #FreeBSD and stick with it for 30 days, I was motivated by simple curiosity and a question: After years of using Linux, what was this entire parallel *nix universe of BSDs?
FBSD has proven educational and a real treat to use and to continue using.
I've come to appreciate the history of Unix and how these wonderful tools came about, and the community that keeps it going. Thanks to many of YOU for your comments and encouragement.
Installed Openbox and accessories and startx into the window manager is working.
Dynamic menu launcher rofi fails with message "Failed to set locale." I have ~/.login_conf configured with en_CA.UTF-8 and running locale confirms this. Hmmm ...
Next up: Configure fonts, sound, and fix all the little paper cut issues like non-working rofi.
For anyone interested in running the latest stable release of Firefox on Debian 12, its possible to use the FF tarball provided by Mozilla.
Download, unpack, and create a link somewhere in PATH to the FF executable, i.e ln -s ~/firefox/firefox ~/bin/firefx . Hint: I call the link something different so as to differentiate this manually installed FF from any FF installed by the Debian package manager.
An encrypted Linux system that include an unencrypted swap partition may experience all sorts of sensitive information that gets passed to swap that survives a reboot. Best practice is to encrypt the swap partition as well:
Straightforward install of 'FreeBSD-13.2-RELEASE-amd64' to my Thinkpad X230 with root-on-ZFS and encryption. Console-only for now. I'll setup X in a few days.
One feature I've come to love in the foot terminal: press ctrl+shift+o to enter URL mode, where all currently visible URLs are tagged with a label using a letter key that will open the URL in Firefox.
After performing a few installs of FreeBSD, these are my personal notes of steps taken and choices made. A distilled, short and sweet version of Chapter 2 in the FreeBSD Handbook.
Hardware used is a Thinkpad T480s with 24GB RAM, 1TB SSD, and Intel integrated ethernet/wireless/gpu. Architecture is 'amd64'.
There is always more than one way to do it. This is mine. 🙂
Stellarium is a open source desktop planetarium available for Linux, Windows, macOS, and a web version. It displays a three-dimensional map of the stars with an immense range of features.
I'm using and enjoying the Linux distro-agnostic AppImage packaged release. Exoplanets oh my! https://stellarium.org/
Learn about the distinction between (binary) packages and (source) ports. Installed a few extra console applications courtesy of the pkg package manager. Apparently you are not supposed to mix using packages and ports on the same system? I'll dig into that a bit deeper when the issue arises where I want to compile something from the ports tree. https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/ports/
Day 95 of 100DaysOfCode - HarvardX CS50 Python: Problem Set 7 - Finished 3 of 5. Working with regular expressions ... either that, or my cat just walked across the keyboard. Pretty cryptic stuff! 🐱
For a Linux user to try out a BSD is to reap the great benefit of traveling to a foreign country: you not only learn new things, but you also see old things in a new light.
Debian 12 aka "Bookworm" is the latest stable release of the popular Linux operating system. I use Debian's live install image to create a minimal, console-only base configuration using the OpenZFS filesystem with native encryption.
Backups are an easy task to put off but WOW do you feel the pain when a file is mistakenly deleted or a storage device fails!
I use a combination of rsync + ssh + rdiff-backup + cron to perform an automated daily backup of my desktop home directory to my home server. HOWTO: https://www.dwarmstrong.org/backups/
