Adventures with BSD Episode 1 (AKA:Hello from BSD)
So back in November I won a small little HP laptop from my work Christmas party. First I figured I would just distro hop around on it for fun. Then I decided that since I always wanted to try out BSD I would do so on it.
So first order of business was to pick a distribution of BSD to try. I settled on GhostBSD as a first go for no real reason other than it's a Canadian distribution.
Booting into live environment and performing the install went smooth. I went with all the defaults to have a higher chance of success.
First boot things started looking bleak. The touchpad was not working at that point I was not sure if the whole system froze or if it was just the touchpad. I stole the wireless mouse from my desktop and to my delight the cursor started moving. YAY!
Got logged in and started looking around. Really if you did not see the system boot or if you don't run uname -a from terminal you would have almost no clue it's not linux.
So i launched a terminal and did just that:
marcg@marc /u/h/marcg> uname -a
FreeBSD marc.ghostbsd-pc.home 12.1-STABLE FreeBSD 12.1-STABLE GENERIC amd64
I was also quite pleased to see fish as the default shell it's what I use on Linux and I love it (maybe a post for another day).
So next I ran dmesg just to see how the output differs from Linux and I was greeted with this:
So even tho the system seemed to be running just fine I would not have that error constantly spamming system logs.
A quick google search turned up that the issue was because the emmc in the laptop does not support the trim command and offered a solution. Add the following to /etc/sysctl.conf:
vfs.zfs.trim.enabled=0
So I did that and rebooted. But after reboot the error still repeated. Now during boot I noticed systemd complain about something so I did ctrl+F1 to see what was up and caught something about how the above directive should be in /boot/loader.conf so I moved it to that file and rebooted again. Either things differ between FreeBSD and GhostBSD or the info on placement under FreeBSD was outdated. Either way No more error! Yay!
I will keep using it for a while. Things to fix/For future posts:
Get WiFi working. Not much of a laptop if I have to be plugged in. Hopefully this is doable
Fix touchpad. Otherwise I'll have to get a new mouse since going back and forth is annoying.
Get sleep working properly. It goes to sleep good(like when i close the laptop lid) but it does not wake up. Screen stays black.
Get yubikey working.
Tried using it and even tho the software is available something must be missing kernel side or something as it is never detected by any of the yubi apps. Not as big a deal since I can use my phone.
That's all for now.
G
Until next time. Stay safe!