I do love these new SSDs that I got over the weekend. They're soooo quiet, nice and fast, in particular with no latency when they spin up. That's all my toy budget for the month gone, but I think I'll buy the same again next month to replace the volume that stores my backups. That's still got oodles of space left, but the quiet is nice, and while spin-up time doesn't matter for my backups, having basically zero seek time will really help a lot.
re toots from a few days ago, I'm using #APFS instead of the much better #ZFS, because ZFS just didn't work very well on Mac OS when I played around with it a few days ago. So in the slightly longer term I'm looking for a cheap machine on which I can run #FreeBSD and ZFS, which will support at least 6 x 2.5" SSDs in its own chassis, all hot-swappable without opening it up and without tools, with at least two eSATA ports. Recommendations for something which will Just Work with FreeBSD please!
Big thanks go to @jan for making it possible to install a new dependency (python-isal) and to @stefano for hosting brew.bsd.cafe where the homeassistant rc script is now located.
Any comments, suggestions, or corrections - please let me know.
#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!
As a proud member of the open source community since 1995, as being part of the OSS revolution as a #RedHat, #Canonical and #SuSE employee, with regrets I have to admit @geerlingguy is not totally wrong:
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.
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).
Let's start with my most recent opensource dev-project:
#qXmoji is an #X11#emoji#keyboard. Although it uses #Qt for its GUI, the mechanism to "type" emojis is pure X11. This means any X11 client can receive them (whether that client can correctly display them is an entirely different issue 🙈) ... not even #XIM awarenesss is needed.
The mechanism to inject fake "emoji keyboard events" is quite hacky and dirty, but it works!
Also quite recent: #dos2ansi. This is a very versatile converter for #MSDOS#ansiart (and other "text") files to a format using #Unicode and only standard #ANSI#SGR escape sequences, so, suitable for today's terminals like #xterm. It includes an ansiart viewer which is "just" a shellscript, leveraging dos2ansi, xterm, less and some nice original #IBM fonts to do its job. So, maybe something for the #retrocomputing fans.
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.
> 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.
Need to see your routing table on #macOS or #FreeBSD or #Linux ? Type:
netstat -rn
The entry with the "G" flag is your gateway. #Linux users may want to use the ip command (look for "default" entry which is your gateway):
ip route show
I'm trying to figure out the best browser combination for my needs. Generally, Firefox covers almost everything I need, but it's slow on Android and drains a lot of battery. I've tried Vivaldi, Chrome, and Brave. Of these, only Brave has the features I need, like full history sync (not just typed URLs), and the ability to send tabs to other devices. However, with its focus on crypto and AI, it seems too hype-driven for me. Also, none of them work on FreeBSD without using a Linux jail.
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?
"There’s a multitude of Operating Systems to choose from. You may have been using something like Windows or MacOS and be perfectly happy with it. You can step up and use Linux, Haiku or even Amiga OS. So, why do I think a BSD system may be a great choice?"
Long story short: I have an important system failing to boot, and I've already broke something, and I would really appreciate someone giving some suggestions before I break it even further.
So I have a home server running FreeBSD, with a zfs-root SSD and a separate zfs volume with some spinning disks keeping all the data.
All of a sudden, the machine went down and failed to reboot. I connected a monitor to it and it was stuck with an error saying it was unable to boot an operating system, pressing a key got me to the "OK" prompt, and waiting for a reboot got me into the bios config.
It's been a while (and one upgrade to FreeBSD 14) since I installed it, and booting from the FreeBSD installer and using gpart to check the partitions shows that I have both an EFI and a freebsd-boot partition on there.
This brings several improvements, mainly in the build system, but the major change is support for localization, with translated Emoji names imported from #Unicode#CLDR. I added a German translation, see screenshot. Once again, I'd appreciate more translations, the process to translate is documented here: https://github.com/Zirias/qxmoji/blob/master/TRANSLATE.md