I don't get it - how can I use FreeBSD 12 effectively on my notebook?

S

SF6

Hello there,

I'm a moral convert to FreeBSD from Linux. However, there are some things I didn't get to work on my fresh install and that's the reason I went back to Linux for the time being.
I have an old Haswell based Panasonic CF-SX3 notebook. I managed to install FreeBSD with Gnome 3 on my notebooks. But here the problems started:

  1. WiFi wouldn't work. After some online search and editing of a config file I managed to get it to work, but that's very inconvenient. What if I want to connect a mobile hotspot that does not have a password but relies on a login page? How would I connect to that type of WiFi? Is there a network manager that works the same way as in Linux?
  2. I also managed to get my external XFS formatted SSD to be mounted. But after trying to transfer all my files to my fresh FreeBSD install I noticed it was running at USB 2.0 speeds only? How can I get USB 3.0 to work? What would be the best filesystem that works both on Linux and FreeBSD both read and write?
  3. Gnome 3 is at version 3.28. Is there a release plan for future Gnome releases? It would be nice to have the latest 3.30 or even the upcoming 3.32.
  4. I heavily rely on Latex. What's the recommend way to install Latex/Texlive in FreeBSD? Also I require a fairly recent version, at least Texlive 2017. Is there an update plan for the officially provied texlive distribution in FreeBSD?

Thanks for your help :)

SF6
 
I know nothing about WiFi and Gnome, since I only use FreeBSD as a server.

For using the same disk with the same file system under two operating systems, you need to find a file system that has first-class support on both operating systems. That's hard. Most file systems are OS-specific: ext2/3/4 and XFS is Linux, UFS and FFS is *BSD, JFS is AIX, VxFS is mostly HP-UX, and so on. Today, both Linux and FreeBSD have non-native tools to use the other's file system, but I would not use those for production, and I would stay away from writing to a file system from the "wrong" host (so write ext2/3/4 only from Linux, read it from FreeBSD). The problem with all the non-native file system support is that file systems today are very complex, the two OS families can't share source code (because of licensing problems), and the black-box implementations of non-native file systems tend to be buggy.

That leaves two options for file systems that have high-quality implementations for both OS families, but they are at the opposite end of the spectrum. One is to use FAT or MSDOS, but those are slow and annoying (for example problems with short file names). That file system is so simple that non-native implementations tend to be very good. The other option is to use ZFS, because the two implementations actually come from common high-quality source code. You just have to be a little careful to look for ZFS features and version numbers, and configure your ZFS file system in the common overlap of features.

USB: I can prove that USB 3.0 works perfectly fine on FreeBSD in general: I have it at home, and it works at excellent speed; for fun I just measured my external disk, and it gets 105 MByte/s on large sequential reads. Look around this forum for hints of how to configure USB 3.0 to work. The problem is often broken BIOS implementations; on my machine, I had to go into the BIOS config, and disable USB storage devices, and disable "XHCI handoff" (whatever that is), then FreeBSD started working excellently.

For TeX: I don't have it installed on my FreeBSD machine (I use TeX only on Macs and Linux machines), but according to the documentation TeXlive 2017 has full support for FreeBSD. There was recently some discussion of TeX installation here on the forum (with some rather outrageously silly opinions), you should be able to find some knowledge there.
 
There are GUI's for the wpa_supplicant file. I settled on net/wpa_supplicant_gui/ for my recent install but you also have the options of net-mgmt/networkmgr or net-mgmt/wifimgr.

I've recently read something about connecting to wifi networks that have a login page using FreeBSD so I'll dig that out and post the link here.

Thread 60709/

USB 3 working fine on my Thinkpad T480

No clue about TeX but I'm sure there'll be something written up somewhere editors/gnome-latex? print/texlive-base?

I'm glad I've made the move over to FreeBSD. There's a huge amount of resources to assist you in getting your system up and running. You just need some patience and an enquiring mind.
 
SF6 said:
I heavily rely on Latex. What's the recommend way to install Latex/Texlive in FreeBSD? Also I require a fairly recent version, at least Texlive 2017. Is there an update plan for the officially provied texlive distribution in FreeBSD?
Click to expand...

TexLive is a monster and a hell to update, but you could use THIS WIP port of Miklatex; however the ports system assume TexLive, and so several TeX related ports like editors/texstudio will install some TexLive stuff anyway.
 
For Latex I use print/texlive-base along with some other packages. It is not as heavy as the full texlive install and saves 1GB of documentation. But if you rely on newer versions of texlive you have to install it from source.

If you are looking for a linux-like, fancy networkmanager I would recommend net-mgmt/networkmgr.

For a filesystem which works on both FreeBSD and Linux use zfs. It should be possible to import ZoL pools in FreeBSD and vice versa. Im not sure how Linux handles ufs and ext4 can just mounted read only in FreeBSD via sysutils/fusefs-ext4fuse.
 
Thanks for all your helpful comments.

I think most of my problems boil down to my notebook (CF-SX3) not being very compatible with FreeBSD. I'm planning to buy a new notebook soon anyway, and I will make sure to double check compatibility before my purchase.

One more question about installing KDE.
During my previous test installation I have used the following recommendations to get a minimal KDE desktop:

Code: 
pkg install plasma5-plasma-desktop sddm

pkg install kde-baseapps

It worked and I got a fairly minimal KDE up and running. However, I'm having trouble finding out if it's really safe to install it this way? Certain packages were missing (power manager) and I couldn't find a detailed explaination what was included in plasma5-plasma-desktop and what was missing.
Also, I've found another meta package called plasma5-plasma which confuses me even more? What's the difference between the two?
Apart from that there is the kde5 meta package which for my taste is way too bloated. It also included akonadi and PIM which I don't use.

So the question is, how do I get a minimal KDE which does not compromise on the functionality of the DE?

I will keep these hints in my mind and once I have my new notebook install FreeBSD 12.1 once that one is released as well.
 
SF6 said:
Thanks for all your helpful comments.

I think most of my problems boil down to my notebook (CF-SX3) not being very compatible with FreeBSD. I'm planning to buy a new notebook soon anyway, and I will make sure to double check compatibility before my purchase.

One more question about installing KDE.
During my previous test installation I have used the following recommendations to get a minimal KDE desktop:

Code: 
pkg install plasma5-plasma-desktop sddm

pkg install kde-baseapps

It worked and I got a fairly minimal KDE up and running. However, I'm having trouble finding out if it's really safe to install it this way? Certain packages were missing (power manager) and I couldn't find a detailed explaination what was included in plasma5-plasma-desktop and what was missing.
Also, I've found another meta package called plasma5-plasma which confuses me even more? What's the difference between the two?
Apart from that there is the kde5 meta package which for my taste is way too bloated. It also included akonadi and PIM which I don't use.

So the question is, how do I get a minimal KDE which does not compromise on the functionality of the DE?

I will keep these hints in my mind and once I have my new notebook install FreeBSD 12.1 once that one is released as well.
Click to expand...
This is what I use for a less-bloated yet fully functional KDE Plasma 5 install:
sudo pkg install plasma5-plasma kde-baseapps kdeadmin kdegraphics kdemultimedia kdenetwork kdeutils upower sddm plasma5-sddm-kcm
 
SF6 said:
I think most of my problems boil down to my notebook (CF-SX3) not being very compatible with FreeBSD. I'm planning to buy a new notebook soon anyway, and I will make sure to double check compatibility before my purchase.
Click to expand...
Hi,

Laptop and notebook support is a thorny issue. The FreeBSD Laptop Guide is good.

Thinking laterally (just ideas, that might, or might not, be applicable to your circumstances):
  • Is NFS access to the xfs file system (mounted on a Linux host) possible? NFS offers excellent read and write compatibility between all Unix and Linux variants.
  • Have you considered running Windows on the laptop and something like VirtualBox to provide a FreeBSD VM? That generally resolves compatibility problems with exotic laptop devices. Battery management is something that often benefits significantly, but your CPU must support VT-x, there is always a performance hit, and there are still traps, e.g. check for USB3 pass-through.
  • If you run VMs, you could have the xfs file system mounted on a Linux NFS server VM, and configure a FreeBSD NFS client VM.
Cheers,
 
I'll be upfront -- I find using FreeBSD on consumer gear not worth my time.

My guess is that a great many our FreeBSD experiences lean towards server use. FreeBSD does very well with enterprise server gear.

To use standard consumer stuff can be problematic, and to use a dynamic device like a laptop even more so. If you're going to use a laptop you probably want to specifically buy something with a high degree of compatibility.

That said you should know ahead of time that many features that "just work" in Linux just won't in FreeBSD -- things like 802.11AC wireless, Bluetooth, power states, fingerprint readers, etc.

I bought a Lenovo ThinkPad x270 with the specific intention of setting it up for FreeBSD and reverted course -- even when I had gear that should work setting up a laptop OS by hand (and via experimentation) wasn't actually that much fun for me. If you enjoy that sort of thing more power to you. Ultimately I do intend to get a FreeBSD laptop setup put together but time can be scarce.

Anyways, I don't mean to discourage you -- just trying to provide some context. I was already very happy with FreeBSD server-side and so finding that I didn't want to mess with it laptop-side was no great blow personally. If I had come to the project trying to get a random laptop to work I most likely wouldn't be here today.

Ultimately I think the metaphor is the square peg and round hole. FreeBSD is great but you're less likely to appreciate it when using it on a laptop.
 
If you are looking for a 'new' laptop, the x270 might be worth a shot. I bought the x270 almost a year ago with the purpose to serve as my main workstation and the intend to use FreeBSD in a professional environment. My experience so far is quite good: I travel a lot so WIFI is absolutely mandatory, and wpa_supplicant is working like a charme, it doesn't matter if you are in a hotel or use your smartphone to be connected.

2nd mandatory point to me is a working suspend mode, this is not a 100 percent thing, more like a 70 percent, it doesn't matter if the laptop is attached to the docking station or not. In both scenarios it's working most! of the time. I also use an GELI encrypted home partition and the good thing is, so far it survived my harsh reset after a not recovering from suspend mode.

3rd mandatory point noise: The setup is very quiet as long as the process is running remotely, so to have the x270 running over night during sleeping hours in a hotel room is possible, if it's a remote job. ;)

4th mandatory point battery power: If the x270 is 100 % charged, 8 hours of work (usual stuff like 4 work spaces each with at least 4 xterm, a firefox with a couple of tabs and a few other programs running, libre-office) is no big deal.

5th mandatory point updates: I started with FreeBSD 11.1 and so far everything works, my guess would be the upgrade to 12.00 will be a big deal. I already read a lot of stuff about those kind of major upgrades break a lot of stuff so I'm looking for a quiet moment to make the upgrade. What I did notice so far is that for what ever reason the Firefox 63 for example seems to be missing in FBSD 12.0 and only Firefox-ESR v60 is available, but I guess that's an issue for another thread. ;)

My workstation setup for almost a year now:
Lenovo x270 Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-7200U CPU, 8GB Memory, NVMe SSD
Lenovo Thinkpad Ultra Dock - 90W, EU
2x IIyama ProLite XUB2492HSU attached via DisplayPort
NitroKey Pro 2016 Release
Mouse, Keyboard

OS: FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE-p9 (UEFI setup)
GUI applications: Fluxbox, cairo-dock, PCManFM, Firefox, XMMS, mplayer, libreoffice, GIMP, xscreensaver, filezilla, hexchat (the usual applications)
 
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