General FreeBSD Setup (New User)

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smellysoph

Hi, I'm a new FreeBSD user, coming over from years of Windows and minimal user friendly Linux distro use. I realize that I am severally out of my depth here, and I'm having to ask ai for like 90% of things if I want to do anything lol which isn't good because sometimes it's just wrong. I asked it to help me do something in terminal to make DWM start without me telling it to and loading my graphics card drivers. Didn't work. I'm posting this because I need help with that specifically, but also general tips on how to make the most out of my FreeBSD experience such as making my volume and brightness keys functional etc. I would also love to know how to properly customize my DWM because mine if basic af. The only 'hard' thing I have managed to do on here is set up mullvad via wireguard tools and that's about it.

Yes, I know I could just watch youtube videos on the topic, or ask ai, but I think I'd actually get helpful tips from people who daily drive FreeBSD and have used it probably longer than I've been alive for lol. Any tips and pointers would be greatly appreciated!
 
Go through vermadens tutorials on setting up a minimal openbox configuration. You don't have to use Openbox but the process involved applies to almost any minimal WM. Really pay attention to all of the configuration files involved and where they're placed. Due to FreeBSDs well design file system hierarchy, you shouldn't get lost. Most things will be stored in your home folder or /usr/local/etc/ for customizing your WM experience.

If you don't understand FreeBSDs filesystem hierarchy (and basic permissions); you should read the Handbook and understand that first before anything.
 
smellysoph said:
I know I could just watch youtube videos on the topic, or ask ai
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Don't do either for the reasons you found. Either ask here or use the Handbook. 99% of the people who come here with installation issues didn't use the Handbook and didn't come here to ask questions.

Use the search at the top right of this page to see if your problem has already been asked and solved.
 
First at all, I know most of computer people are almost greedy for the very most newest version there is, no matter what, but for a beginner, especially the very start I wouldn't recommend to deal with some "still in development and not yet finished unreleased" state of the system, but chosing the newest RELEASE version, which would be 15.0.

Second, you need to learn a lot. AI is not useful when you don't know what you're using it on, because you cannot judge its results on your questions. You already figured that out.
Videos are very popular these days, because they are so comfy to watch. But they are no good to learn.
They can only deliver quickly a shallow overview over a new topic, but at the moment you want to dive a bit deeper - learn something really - you learn at least ten times faster when reading texts instead of wasting your time on watching videos. Apart from that only a small fraction what FreeBSD is all about and comes with it is covered by videos.

Your best friends are texts to be read, and things you learn by actually doing them with your system.

My advice was:
1. at least skim through the FAQs once - those are actually worth reading
2. read at least the first five Chapters of The Handbook - it's very good, very newbie friendly, and #1 docu on FreeBSD
3. the most important documentation on any unix[like] are the Manual Pages, which you will also find installed on your system (at least for the packages you have installed.) Those are very brief and a bit formal, so needing a bit to get used to them, since for some of the stuff you want to learn from them you need to read more than just one. They need a bit of knowing how to read them, but they are the full complete, and up-to-date documentation of the whole system, containing everything, which nothig else, no book, no video, no webpage can provide.
4. this forums are full of newbie and beginner questions and topics, and much more. It's highly unpropable you will not find your questions already answered here. Just dig it. It's a pure goldmine. Tip: using duckduckgo.com instead of the forum's internal search will deliver better search results most of the times.
5. Besides some FreeBSD user's webpages like others mentioned there are also a few books worth reading. When you click on my avatar you get to my profile, under "About" you will find some things that may be useful.
 
First thing you need is a reliable "forever" storage. I use lots of extermal disks and memsticks with my entire system and all programs on it.. It's not massive. 500GB for everything is enough by far.
The maintainance of such personal base is most important, to my experience.
Also have a few different computers with no dedicated function to try things that can destroy partitions and such. 😃
 
As others said:
Step 0, use a supported release version.
Step 1, read the handbook. Cover to cover. You can speed-read sections that don't apply to you, but you should afterwards have a general idea what is covered where.
Step 2, begin installation.
Step 3: never ever ask an AI. All they do is summarize text from the internet, without knowing whether the thing they're summarizing is right, wrong, or inapplicable. In particular, since Linux is much more common, the AI answers will be polluted with Linux knowledge. If you have a question, do a web search, and read the topmost articles or forum posts that are found. Evaluate each one to see whether it is trustworthy.
 
MG said:
First thing you need is a reliable "forever" storage. I use lots of extermal disks and memsticks with my entire system and all programs on it.. It's not massive. 500GB for everything is enough by far.
The maintainance of such personal base is most important, to my experience.
Also have a few different computers with no dedicated function to try things that can destroy partitions and such. 😃
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Unfortunately, I have none of those, all I've got FreeBSD on is my old laptop, not my main one which I'm not confident enough to install it on. As much as I don't know what I'm doing, I'd like to thing I have the logic in my head to not nuke my system or whatnot, but hey, I don't want to eat my own words lol.
 
I'm also extremely new to FreeBSD, so I thought I would share some of my experiences thus far.

As far as learning the very basics of FreeBSD, it seems that the best resources are the handbook, and this forum. In the past, I actually made my installation of FreeBSD completely inoperable by copying and pasting commands from an AI into my terminal. I quickly learned that relying on AI for solutions was a really a bad idea, but these little mistakes forced me to learn. For me, getting the most out of FreeBSD meant having as little down time (non-bootable, locked out, or unstable) as possible.

I realized that I needed to have a system that was stable and available for daily use , yet on the other hand, I also realized that I still needed to do some modifications to some of my configuration files, (rc.conf, fstab, and loader.conf) but there was always a chance that one of my amateurish attempts at modifying one of these files might leave my computer unusable.

So, the first thing I did was to adopt a policy of creating a backup copy of any configuration file before I modified it. So for example, if my plan was to modify a file such as, "gnome-keyring-pkcs11.desktop" I would first use the "cp" command to create a new filed called "gnome-keyring-pkcs11.desktop.old" within the same directory as the original file. That way, if I really managed to screw things up with my fat fingers, I could then reboot into single user mode, rm the bad file I had earlier mangled, and then remove the .old extension from the backup file, and things would usually be okay after that.

Another thing I did was to install a second physical hard drive into my machine, and to use the sade utility to add two UFS partitions to it. Next I modified my my fstab file so that these two partitions are automatically mounted at boot. After that I learned how to use rsync to copy certain directories to a partition on the second physical hard drive.

Today, if I were to encounter a situation in which my system has become unusable, the amount of time it takes to recover from a such a disaster is usually less than forty five minutes. This is still an inconvenient amount of time, depending on the circumstances, but it is still better than doing a complete fresh reinstall with all of the graphics and desktop installation. In my method, you only do a basic installation, without creating any users, use the rsync command to restore user and system settings, reboot, and you are back in business.

Well, for me, getting the most out of FreeBSD meant not having to spend hours trying to repair self inflicted fat finger disasters, and so far the above methods have limited the amount of time I must spend recovering from one of my own mistakes. I realize that others probably have much more advanced methods for recovering their systems, but for me, a newbie with little knowledge, the above method seems to work well enough for now.

The other thing is that I tried using both Gnome and Cinnamon, but some of my applications didn't seem to function as well as they did in Xfce, so for the time being I have given up on Gnome and Cinnamon, and for now I'm sticking with just Xfce. Maybe after I'm done trouble shooting all of thing I have within /var/log/messages, maybe then I will go back and give Cinnamon another try, but for now I want to keep things simple, and functional.
 
bakul said:
question and write down what you learned as clearly and without fluff as you ca
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I didn't print out the entire FreeBSD handbook, but I did print the sections on how to do the installation, and also on how to my video driver. I wrote my own notes onto the edges of the pages of my print out, and later on, doing so really saved from one of my own self created created disasters. Somehow I had managed to blank out my rc.conf file by accidentally over writing it somehow. Next, I stupidly rebooted, which didn't help things, because after that my desktop environment didn't want to load. So, I went back to my installation notes, and I re did all of the "sysrec" commands I had in my notes, and guess what? When I rebooted Xfce loaded as if nothing had happened. Well, I'm really good at screwing things up, and I'm so so at fixing my own mistakes.
 
Cedric62 said:
I'm so so at fixing my own mistakes.
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smellysoph said:
Unfortunately, I have none of those, all I've got FreeBSD on is my old laptop, not my main one which I'm not confident enough to install it on. As much as I don't know what I'm doing, I'd like to thing I have the logic in my head to not nuke my system or whatnot, but hey, I don't want to eat my own words lol.
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I would create a Virtualbox vm on the good laptop and let it share a directory on nfs so you can store everything remote. That's really a few commands...
create /etc/exports, rpcbind, nfsd -t -u, mountd -r. Tnen mount_nfs on remote system.
 
Cedric62 said:
I could picture me doing that.
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Once I blew up a Raspberry TFT screen. I had no power supply, so I thought let's connect both computer and display on 1 PSU and balance out the intake with a potmeter according to U=IxR. I didn't realize tat the device has to receive a signal from the RPI to power on from sort of standby mode. The situation made the display smoke like a bbq. I got a new 1 from the factory. 😄
 
MG said:
Once I blew up a Raspberry TFT screen. I had no power supply, so I thought let's connect both computer and display on 1 PSU and balance out the intake with a potmeter according to U=IxR. I didn't realize tat the device has to receive a signal from the RPI to power on from sort of standby mode. The situation made the display smoke like a bbq. I got a new 1 from the factory. 😄
Click to expand...
One time I tried to desolder the alarm from the motherboard of my uninterruptible power supply. It pretty much went the same way. Funny thing is that I had done exactly the same operation on another UPS a few years earlier, and I had success with that one. Guess my eyes aren't as good as they used to be.
 
My advice to the current MSO$ power users who want to take the quantum leap into the *nix or *bsd worlds:
1) Get familiar with Windows Hyper-V virtualization and wsl chroot services.
2) Practice ez installation and operation of *nix operating systems in wsl.
3) Practice installation and operation, of *nix and *bsd iso distribution(s), utilizing Hyper-V.
4) Learn how Virtual Network Switches work with Hyper-V and wsl.
5) Learn how to install vnc or xrdp server(s) inside *nix or *bsd, running in Hyper-V, so you can rdp from Windows to GUI desktops of those *nix or *bsd systems.

When you get comfortable utilizing all the above in MSO$, you shouldn't have any issues installing and running *nix or *bsd system(s) directly in your outdated desktop or laptop computer ;-)
 
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