FreeBSD Screen Shots

First of all: disclaimer: I am not 100% sober at the time of writing... and having said that.. SO AWESOME to see this thread still being alive & active today!!

... I think I participated before, not sure, but I sure as heck am gonna do so now!

Question => How do you recognize a (former?) SunOS / Solaris user/admin on FreeBSD?

Answer => /opt is most likely propagated on the box ("It works, why do you ask?") , and when you boot it dtlogin may also show up:

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What's 'dtlogin' you may ask? "Only" the main way to log onto a Solaris box when skipping the console back in the days!

Providing us access to the Common Desktop Environment ("CDE"), and I just cannot help but mention how much the above means to me... see.. I took a personal interest in Sun / Sun Solaris; back in the day I even kept 3 (!) personal support licenses for Solaris => 2x Solaris x86 for my generic servers, and one for my Sparc Blade box (= true Sun hardware!). I still have that Blade box to this very day. I also have several Sun merch, amongst which 2 Java t-shirts and one Sun shirt (iirc: "The road to innovation isn't paved at all!").

You betcha this is personal!

When Oracle took over... I SAW what they were trying to pull: I saw my E 129,- personal license fee for Solaris/x86 (and SunSolve (!!)) go all the way up to E768,99 (<= NOT making this up!) "out of the blue". I hated ("disliked") Oracle ever since.

Given the above... can you imagine my "HOLY <self-censored>?!!!" when I discovered, long after the facts, that this thing called FreeBSD existed which... had adopted all of the "good stuff" of Solaris? I'm talking: ZFS, pkg_add, DTrace... even the SunOS firewall was (and still is!) part of FreeBSD. Yah... and then I discovered that Sun Microsystems themselves helped out with porting ZFS over to FreeBSD... and I was sold.

Even to this very day of writing it can still get to me a bit, because I love tech and fell hard for this "Unix thing". I had to give up on SunOS / Solaris but found a new home (and a much more inviting community!) right here!

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Sorry for the ramble but this isn't so much about the desktop and all for me... it's everythind behind the scenes as well. I lived SunOS, I loved every part of it. But with all due respect... I could never get behind Open Solaris, I also don't like OpenIndiana (I do admire all the effort people are putting into that mind you!).

Anyway... I found my place right here... and never looked back.

In my "not so humble (personal!) opinion" it's FreeBSD that is the spiritiual successor of SunOS.

Why? So... riddle me this: I've been out of the loop for approx. 5 years due to personal reasons. I have seen & experienced 5 years worth of updates and guess what? I picked up right where I left off! Sure I made a few mistakes as well, but ... I had my 14.2 box up & running within a day, I set up my source tree only 1 days or so later. Went "bleeding edge" 2 - 3 more days afterwards. Back on 13.5 (= my 2nd VM) it only took me a few more days to get all this going (all using binary packages).

... and yet I lost all touch with Linux ("MicrosoftCorporationII.WindowsSubsystemForLinux") and I just can't be bothered anymore. No respect left:
Code:
peter@PLWin11:/mnt/c/Users/lionp$ man man
-bash: /usr/bin/man: No such file or directory
Meanwhile, with the world of FreeBSD:
Code:
peter@bsd:/opt/jails $ ls
base.txz        gamma/          kernel.txz      lib32.txz       psi/
peter@bsd:/opt/jails $ tar tf base.txz | grep man | wc -l
   17248
peter@bsd:/opt/jails $
Knowledge is power, and if you ask me then Linux prefers you not having too much of it. Meanwhile most of the knowledge is a solid part of the FreeBSD base system, as seen above.

Anywhoo... that's my story ;) Hope you enjoyed.
CDE is seriously the stuff I was looking at in my college days! And it was a straight UNIX, Solaris 8, running on SPARC machines and using 17-inch boob tubes.
 
Here's FreeBSD 15 running on a Pinephone Pro with a default install of IceWM :) No network, no touch input, no USB, so it's pretty much useless at this stage, but hey! I got a legit screenshot 😁
 

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With a discussion from another thread, I thought I'd post up a quick screen shot of one of my VMs using TWM. I access it via RDP. I don't do a whole lot with this, just mainly seeing what I could do with a super light, minimal type setup. No compositing engine or anything right now, just xorg and twm. I'm using
/x11/bgs
for the background image. I did have /x11-wm/xfce4-panel
l running, but it has a few seconds delay before popping up onto the screen, so I've killed that for now.
 

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There were country-wide power blackouts in spain and portugal today, parts of france, even belgium.

It sure is sunny today...

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That is hilarious... Soviet-era power infrastructure can stand up to even missile bombing, y'know. It gets a little hot in Spain, and power gets knocked out over that? Even China would laugh at that.
 
Please continue to post your Pinephone screenshots here, they are definitely on topic and _immensely_ cool.
Here are screenshots of the desktop with touch support. This is a slightly customized version of what you'll see if you boot the current image from the code repository.
 

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That is hilarious... Soviet-era power infrastructure can stand up to even missile bombing, y'know. It gets a little hot in Spain, and power gets knocked out over that? Even China would laugh at that.
It was the wrong type of sun... I don't think they understand the cause, or if they do, they're not saying. Quite unusual to see most of western europe without much cloud cover.
 
IMHO it think the cause was more like "ooops I pressed the wrong button"
Not out of question that some mechanical component of the power infrastructure got overheated and failed. Car brakes, particularly on older ones, do fail in hot weather, I've had that happen to me. My thinking goes, if car brakes can (and do) fail in hot weather, it's not out of question that something similar happened to the electrical power infrastructure. Well, if you're interested, you can do some online research, watch the news, and see what happens. Maybe it's time to wrap up speculation on a topic where we're not experts.
 
So, I was listening to a Late Night Linux Family podcast a few days ago when I first heard of this "Undercut F1" project and it looked extremely cool to me. I tried installing on FreeBSD but they do not provide a precompiled binary and the installation process fails because one of the required .NET libraries is not available on FreeBSD (and I am not a developer, so I don't understand anything about .NET, NuGet, C# and so on).

So I fired up a bhyve PopOS VM running COSMIC Alpha7, installed the Linux X64 precompiled binary and here we are with Undercut F1 replaying the 2025 Suzuka GP. It's freaking cool if you ask me, I'm looking forward to this weekend race to see it performing in real time.

As usual with my setup, all this is running under FreeBSD 14.2, graphics are native Wayland with neither Xorg nor Xwayland running.

undercut-f1.jpg
 
freebsd-hyprland.jpg

Been messing about with Hyprland (non-tiling), after ~20 years or so of GNOME 2/MATE. The hardware is a Mac Pro 6,1 (Trash can) and I've been experimenting with PCI pass-through for network and graphics, also TPM emulation on bhyve with various guest operating systems. It also runs .NET SDK, Ruby on Rails, and MariaDB for work purposes.

I wasted quite a few hours trying to get the network bridge/tap to work before I realised I could just hand-over the whole ethernet device to the guest. The FreeBSD host uses wifi/WLAN.

It's still quite a rough UX but I'm happy enough with it.
 
So, I was listening to a Late Night Linux Family podcast a few days ago when I first heard of this "Undercut F1" project and it looked extremely cool to me. I tried installing on FreeBSD but they do not provide a precompiled binary and the installation process fails because one of the required .NET libraries is not available on FreeBSD (and I am not a developer, so I don't understand anything about .NET, NuGet, C# and so on).
For the sake of preserving my sleep times, going to pretend I didn't read that ;). However, I wrote a guide on how to install .NET SDK on this forum which still should work for .NET version 9 that the software requires. Or try to use the pkg lang/dotnet

Edit: Vezel.Cathode seems to be the failing requirement, hmm.
 
For the sake of preserving my sleep times, going to pretend I didn't read that ;). However, I wrote a guide on how to install .NET SDK on this forum which still should work for .NET version 9 that the software requires. Or try to use the pkg lang/dotnet

Edit: Vezel.Cathode seems to be the failing requirement, hmm.
Exactly.
 
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