FreeBSD Notes

Context

These notes bias initially towards building a desktop on FreeBSD. I used a ThinkPad X1 Carbon, but the screen was already shot on it and doing this made it already worse. So, I swapped hard drives on my ThinkPad x220 instead, which I don't use as much and tried it there.

Initially, running FreeBSD on the x220 worked much better, up to setting up KDE5 and playing around with it.

Installation issues

It really helps to read the handbook through all of this. :P

• Had to dig up a USB stick.
• UNetbootin was really flaky - what happened? :( I tried other ones, but I realized my x220 was not booting it from one of the USB ports
• The last thing I tried though was sudo dd of=/dev/sdb if=/path/to/freebsd.iso bs=4M status=progress. Ooo - *D*isk *D*estroyer ...
• dd gobbled up CPU, running it on Debian
• Had to set regdomain to ETSI and country to Norway for the wireless driver.
• All the regdomains can be viewed in /etc/regdomain.xml

Root mount waiting for : usbus0

• Seems like there is an issue of getting the device descriptor for the webcam.

Should install

SUDO

• pkg install sudo
• EDITOR=ee visudo and change the line that allows all users to use it who are in the sudo group
• pw groupadd sudo && pw groupmod sudo -m $USER
• Remember to use a new login shell before using sudo.

Xorg

• pkg install xorg drm-kmod
• Add to rc.conf : kld_list="i915kms" (can load it immediately with kldload i915kms)
• pw groupmod video -m $USER && pw groupmod wheel -m $USER
• User must be in the video group to use the drm-kmod.
• X11 would not work in framebuffer mode after installation. Kernel modules are not available by default.
• Needed to install drm-kmod: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/x11/#x-config. It recommends the Port Collection, but I used pkg for this instance.
• Need to add users to the video group.
• Installing the drm-kmod turns text into tiny text on the x1 carbon HiDPI screen.
• However, after installing drm-kmod, x now loads
• Micro-text in Xorg? xrandr to get resolution details and output device. I did this: xrandr --output eDP-1 --mode 1920x1080. Sort of better, but have to make it permanent.

Extra Programs to install

• sudo pkg install firefox terminator git nextcloudclient zsh ohmyzsh keepassxc tmux emacs dig
• cp ~/.zshrc ~/.zshrc.orig && cp /usr/local/share/ohmyzsh/templates/zshrc.zsh-template ~/.zshrc

Sleep issue

• https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/DEPRECATED-freebsd-base-graphics/issues/145 Maybe? This only affected the X1 Carbon, not X220.

Some things:

• sysctl hw.ncpu
• sysctl hw.realmem

Goods and Bads

• slow to resume
• Sound and function keys all worked out of the box. :)
• KDE widgets missing: wifi (using wifimgr, KDE one requires NetworkManager on Linux), the memory widget doesn't report things correctly. discover doesn't work.

Questions

• For desktop: can I run closed-source Electron applications? If not natively, can Linuxulator work out, maybe in a jail with Debian/Devuan in it?
  • I read that systemd has too many Linux-isms to make it work under Linuxulator.
• Is running something like udev necessary for USB key?
• Can I run