grahamperrin

FreeBSD: pkgbase: major upgrades

A rough guide, for alpha testing on AMD64:

• tested with FreeBSD 15.0-ALPHA2 and ALPHA3
• things might be less rough with ALPHA4, with or without the next release of ports-mgmt/pkg.

Not intended to be comprehensive.

Update, December 2024

grahamperrin

A shortlist of FreeBSD packages

Packages that I often install on test systems.

pkg install --quiet --yes drm-kmod firefox gdisk gitup htop hw-probe kde lsblk lynx nano pciutils roxterm sddm stressdisk uclcmd usbutils virtualbox-ose-additions-72 xfce xorg

I normally omit:

• drm-kmod when installing in a VirtualBox guest
• kde when I want Xfce alone

grahamperrin

Using pkgbasify to repair a broken installation of FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE

Condensed steps

1. Use a memstick.img file to write a FreeBSD installer to a memory stick
2. boot from the stick in single user mode
3. /bin/csh
4. use gpart(8) to resize things
5. growfs /
6. mount -uw /

grahamperrin

FreeBSD: preferring ee (avoiding vi) for csh/tcsh and sh

Final changes when exiting FreeBSD Installer

Install ee (easy editor) and nano

FreeBSD 14:

pkg install --yes nano

grahamperrin

Package availability

FreshPorts provides tables, and more.

Desktop environments, display managers, Sway, X.Org

It's not unusual for a Tier 1 platform to have no package for a wanted desktop environment. Two platforms are at this tier:

• aarch64 – 64-bit ARMv8

grahamperrin

root@mowa219-gjp4-zbook-freebsd:~ # bectl list -c creation | tail -n 6
1500043-002-base         -      -          1.71G 2025-05-16 12:34
1500043-003-base         -      -          1.74G 2025-05-20 11:00
1500043-004-base         -      -          1.66G 2025-05-21 05:50
1500043-005-base         R      /tmp/down  240G  2025-05-23 18:45
1500043-007-base-firefox N      /          8.88G 2025-05-25 06:08
1500043-008-base         -      -          1.18G 2025-05-25 06:43
root@mowa219-gjp4-zbook-freebsd:~ # bectl umount 1500043-005-base
root@mowa219-gjp4-zbook-freebsd:~ # pkg iinfo gobject
gobject-introspection-1.84.0,1

grahamperrin

A concise comparison of operating systems. Some focus on root-on-ZFS, and on Plasma. Not intended to be comprehensive.

Describing availability is not necessarily a recommendation to install what's available.

The systems

• FreeBSD
• GhostBSD

grahamperrin

Seeking the best unofficial resources

I fed a forty-word paragraph to Google Gemini 2.5 Pro (Experimental) on the evening of Sunday 20th April. Twenty of the forty:

Where can I find general troubleshooting advice for FreeBSD? Emphasis on: general. … I'm looking for the best unofficial resources. Thanks.

Gemini offered a 508-word response. I:

1. reduced it to around 330 (not counting * or … as words)
2. added a link to the third edition (2018) of Absolute FreeBSD

grahamperrin

Script started on Sun Apr 13 01:59:44 2025
You have mail.
root@mowa219-gjp4-ghostbsd-14-vm:~ # echo $SHELL

/bin/csh
root@mowa219-gjp4-ghostbsd-14-vm:~ # date ; uptime

Sun Apr 13 01:59:52 BST 2025
 1:59AM  up 3 mins, 1 user, load averages: 0.14, 0.24, 0.12
root@mowa219-gjp4-ghostbsd-14-vm:~ # ghostbsd-version

grahamperrin

Script started on Sat Apr 12 20:16:09 2025
You have mail.
root@mowa219-gjp4-ghostbsd-14-vm:~ # echo $SHELL
/bin/csh
root@mowa219-gjp4-ghostbsd-14-vm:~ # date ; uptime
Sat Apr 12 20:16:19 BST 2025
 8:16PM  up 14 mins, 1 user, load averages: 0.34, 0.15, 0.08
root@mowa219-gjp4-ghostbsd-14-vm:~ # ghostbsd-version
24.10.1
root@mowa219-gjp4-ghostbsd-14-vm:~ # freebsd-version -kru