So I was feeling feisty and felt like trying out a different OS and wanted to try out a tiling system as I'm Kinda sick of Traditional Windows GUI's as I can't really stack exactly what I want on one screen. So I bought a External HDD and downloaded FreeBSD 14.3.

Bootloader blues

To be safe and not accidentally bugger up my Linux install, I decided to install it using qemu on a QCOW2 image. which went perfectly fine....till I needed a bootloader because I also wanted to try HaikuOS(BeOS clone) on bare metal. So I tried to install GRUB but there was no package in the repository, however it was in Ports. The problem with the one in ports is...it compiles it from source AND IT DECIDED TO COMPILE THE ENTIRE GNU TOOLCHAIN! Took me days and it failed. So grub was out.

So with grub and FreeBSD bootloader not wanting to boot other things in a friendly way. I decided to download rEFInd and installing it was shockingly simple. All I had to do was run a script and copy things over. I rebooted and it worked. I was able to boot into FreeBSD and Haiku. Haiku was a case of moving a loader to the EFI folder on a EFI partition. Turns out EFI is "simple." The UEFI looks for boot file which then takes the CPU into the OS kernel of your choosing. With my image ready to go. I plugged in my External and imaged the QCOW2 file to it which turns out is something you can do. Once it was done it was time to get ricing.

X Marks the pain.

Rebooting into FreeBSD went well. However upon boot it was struggling to find the disk and mount swap. because in QEMU it was basically installed on ada0p2 which is the FreeBSD equivalent of sda2. But since its on a external the correct drive is da0p2. so it took me to a prompt asking where FreeBSD is so I wrote ufs:da0p2 and it booted. One thing I know I won't get fixed is the fact my laptop using a broadcom chip for it's wireless shenanigans and broadcom is a not the greatest firm in terms of compatibility. So I do what I always do and use my phone as a WIFI dongle via USB tethering which essentially allows you to use it's connection, WiFi or mobile. Which worked...but I need to rerun DHCP to fetch an IP address for the device. Now I was ready to set up Xorg.

So I did what anyone would do and follow the manual so I followed it and....xinit wouldn't init. turns out the wrong driver was installed. In my case when I installed drm-kmod it installed the wrong drm-xx-kmod. which had the wrong driver.ko file. so I installed the other file ran kldload and...BOOM suddenly I had a picture on both monitors The driver was working however xinit wouldn't init so I installed....wayland. Wayland actually worked so I installed sway.

So if you get a error about no devices or windows in Xorg try and run kldstat to make sure that driver is loaded, if its not loaded, load it and if it errors you probably have the wrong driver for your FreeBSD kernel.

Finally Windows

So with sway installed it was time to try it out, turns out my mouse didn't work because it needed a driver installed, Installed that. installed Firefox, a terminal emulator called alacritty and got to ricing out my install. I be honest I actually really like it. I'm definitely more focused using a WM like this. however I can definitely see it's not built for all programs like programs that designed with MS Windows style guis. They work, but feel a bit weird.

BSD Opinions

I like BSD seems like it's 'Standardised' as everything's in /usr/local and it's only the really really necessary or sample stuff that is in /etc. On a Linux install there is a standard called the LSB but no one follows it. BSD feels closer to the RedHat style of distros. But I like BSD's package manager it's simple as APT. Adding repos is a JSON file and it comes with clang already installed. If my productivity truly improves I'll probably move to FreeBSD, or at the very least, move to sway/i3.

This post was written on FreeBSD via emacs.

Kind Regard, Jason Lees