FreeBSD on only TTY as a Daily Driver

C

cndghm

Hello everyone, hope everyone is doing fine with the holidays.

I'm using FreeBSD for a years by now and something that I noticed for my usage is that I only use applications that works perfectly fine on TTY sessions, I don't like cluttering or using the mouse (yes, I could use a tilling window manager or something like that) but my work doesn't require me to do that. I can always power-on an simple Desktop environment on my Linux machine that is at my home. With that introduction, I would like to ask some suggestion (mainly if you use FreeBSD as a server or something that is somewhat align with I'm planing to do next year).

Currently I'm thinking on using Emacs (my main text editor), Tmux for handling multiple tabs (I don't really like the buffers that emacs make but I should get used to it, maybe it will less the need of Tmux) and the whole C/C++ dev tools.

I don't need to do calls, e-mails I read from my smartphone and when I need to do some research on the web I also use my phone. If anyone is interest in discussion such use case, let's start a conversation where.

The problems that I faced until now is: Playing music, reading pdf files (I know pdf wasn't desing to be read from a tty but the man pages for the c stdlib works fine) and submitting patches (setting in terminal e-mail client is something that I'm not currently knowing how to do) any adivces or information about this topics would be very helpfull and I think it's a good idea if you like to use just a black screen with your work.

Thanks in advance.
Best regards,
Candinho, G. A>
 
I intend to run freebsd in a tty session environment as well for a daily driver.

To be honest I am not confident that it works out of the box as a solution for desktop and mobile computing as many in this community fully know.

So currently I run a dual boot of freebsd and arch linux on 1 mobile workstation and windows on another mobile workstation.

At home I also run windows on a server-grade desktop workstation but it is designed for heavy storage so I can also dual boot freebsd here.

Maybe a suggestion for future FreeBSD development is a world class solution to connect to our smartphone and mobile devices
 
Stupid google AI answer,

Connecting a FreeBSD system to an Android device can be achieved through several methods depending on whether you need file access, internet sharing (tethering), or device control.

1. File Transfer & Browsing

To access your phone's storage from FreeBSD, you can use the Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) or network-based tools:

  • USB (MTP): Install sysutils/fusefs-simple-mtpfs or sysutils/fusefs-jmtpfs.
    • Load the FUSE module: kldload fusefs.
    • Connect the phone and set its USB mode to File Transfer.
    • Mount the device: simple-mtpfs /mnt/android.
  • KDE Connect: A powerful wireless option for syncing notifications, clipboards, and files. Install deskutils/kdeconnect-kde on FreeBSD and the KDE Connect app on Android.
  • Syncthing: For continuous background file synchronization over Wi-Fi, install net/syncthing on FreeBSD and the corresponding app on Android.

2. USB Tethering (Internet Sharing)

To use your Android phone’s data connection on FreeBSD via USB:

  1. Load Driver: Run kldload if_urndis to load the USB Remote NDIS driver.
  2. Enable Tethering: Connect the phone and enable USB Tethering in Android settings.
  3. Configure Interface: A new network interface (usually ue0) will appear. Obtain an IP address by running dhclient ue0.
  4. Persistence: To load the driver automatically at boot, add if_urndis_load="YES" to /boot/loader.conf.

3. Remote Control & Development

  • Screen Mirroring (scrcpy): You can view and control your Android screen from FreeBSD using comms/scrcpy. This requires enabling USB Debugging in your phone's Developer Options.
  • ADB Tools: Install devel/android-tools to use the Android Debug Bridge (adb) for side-loading apps or accessing the Android shell.
  • SSH Access: Install Termux on Android to run an SSH server, allowing you to ssh into your phone from FreeBSD or mount its filesystem via fusefs-sshfs
 
Ironically Apple and iOS is closer to us in the Unix tree than Android is with Linux. But both would be ideal

I haven’t setup email yet. The handbook and man pages look ideal for this venture. mali(1) piqued my interest because it was developed directly from Unix version 1

docs.freebsd.org

Chapter 31. Electronic Mail

This chapter provides a basic introduction to running a mail server on FreeBSD, as well as an introduction to sending and receiving email using FreeBSD
docs.freebsd.org docs.freebsd.org
 
The www/links browser is worth a try for text mode web browsing; I use it all the time. It has a graphical mode for use on X11 too (links -g).

Screenshot_20251231_154715.jpg
 
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