Using FreeBSD as Desktop OS

mefizto said:
Hi @Sensucht94,
Click to expand...
Hi !
Is it possible to install OpenIndiana without the default DE, or did you just disabled the DE and installed E22?
Click to expand...
Sure it is, at least last time I tried; in addition, installation can be carried out either manually from CLI (not recommended), or using guided installer, again, either through classical Solaris 'Text Installer', or from X, following the GUI install wizard. In all those cases you should be able to choose to install desktop or not.

I just installed the whole thing with Text installer, then refreshed hipster IPS publisher (the official repo) and installed E22 from it (openbox, awesome-wm, notion-3 are available too), keeping MATE as fallback. Obviously if you have LightDM or XDM services enabled, you'll have to add Enlightenement to .xprofile or .xsession respectively.

What package repositories are you using?
Click to expand...
I was using hipster (default), hipster-emcumbered (providing stuff built with libmp3lame support, such as ffmpeg, vlc, audacity, rithmbox, mpd) and localhostoih from the SFE community database, nowadays practically providing Libreoffice and Wine32 only, which is a pity, given that since a couple of years ago SFE repo crawled with fresh software...I remember thousands of packages built for OpenIndiana and Solaris. If you ever tried OpenSolaris back in its days, you'd know how many packages, including games, were available on the Blastwave community repo, which SFE was forked from.

The only way to achieve a more diverse software availability on OI, is using Joyent's pkgsrc binaris for Illumos, which - god bless pkgsrc - adds tons of more packages (e.g. i3, XFCE, Darktable, Firefox Quantum) and works shamelessly on OI.

Yet, I see OI development is progressively slowing down, to the point they contribution is become clone to insignificant in the Illumos world; and as I mentioned above, SFE repo is dying. That's way I've moved completely to Tribblix meanwhile: simple, lightweight, old-school distribution, installs automatically in 2 minutes with a sh script, reminds a lot NetBSD and Slackware; uses classic SVR4 packages, grouped in overlays (meta-packages) to easily manage through its zap() utility; supports IA-32, SPARC64 as well as UFS-root too, all things which are rare nowadays in Illumos. Tribblix software availability is at least 2x than OI; additionally, a pkgsrc bootstrap is pre-configured as a zap overlay. There's also a tool, named ips2svr4, to convert Solaris IPS packages to SVR4 format.

zap is an awesome util, in the way it can perform major system upgrades and can manage zones; oh, and the Tribblix variant named OmniTribblix allows building LX Zones.

Last but not least, the creator wrote several useful managment tools in java (see tribblix-tools overlay)

It's sad to admit that while OI was migrating userland from python 2.7 to 3.5, Tribblix was moving to python3.7 already

Anyway, this is Tribblix 0m20.5 with CDE 2.30_1 running on my Pentium 4 Netburst from 2000, UFS root

52d783f33dc57283.png
 
Hi Sensucht94,

thank you very much for your detailed answer. Based on it, I found both the Text Install and the Minimal Install. I have OnmiOSce running on one of my servers and have been experimenting with OI on my laptop, but would prefer a different WM/DE.

I am rather surprised about your conclusion regarding OI, I have been following it for a while and my impression is that after a long lull when Alasdair Lumsden resigned, the development resumed.

I had also found Triblix, but as I understand it is a one person affair, so I am concerned about a longer term viability. However, based on your recommendation, I will try it.

Since you are knowledgeable about Solaris, do you think that from a long term perspective it might be possible to use OmniOSce as a base and use pkgsrc? BTW, it seems like John Marino (marino) is also a Solaris fan, but currently his work on (Solaris) ravenports slowed.

This may already be rather off-topic, so if you agree and would be willing to answer, you may do so via pm.

Kindest regards,

M
 
mefizto said:
I am rather surprised about your conclusion regarding OI, I have been following it for a while and my impression is that after a long lull when Alasdair Lumsden resigned, the development resumed.
Click to expand...

Don't get me wrong, I'm still fond of OpenIndiana: it is the true OpenSolaris spiritual descendant (like probably SmartOS is SXCE's), still keeping it Nimbus UI alive, pushing towards Solaris desktop usage, maintaining SunStudio12.1 in base in spite of Illumos adoption of GCC. OI's devs are very knowledgeable, but also prone to provide entry-level support. Yet it's about ~5 truly active maintainers we're speaking, and they clearly have not much time to spend on OI. I'll admit that some of the recent changes, like KVM zones, GCC8, Rust, KPTI/FPU fixes, MATE 1.2, represented great achievements, but to me it's clear that OI nowadays is out of fashion, and illumos-joyent branch, is where serious development is currently at; Tribblix at least tries to keep up with new additions


PS: you surely know more than me; it's true I've been in and out Solaris for nearly 10 years now, but I'm just an passionate amateur,not even a tech guy
 
Hi Sensucht94,

thank you again for the answer. Yes, the Joynet appears to be the most active, see pyret rundown. Alas, it appears to be a RAM based hypervisor.

Sensucht94 said:
PS: you surely know more than me; it's true I've been in and out Solaris for nearly 10 years now, but I'm just an passionate amateur,not even a tech guy
Click to expand...

Ha, ha, you could not be more wrong. ;-)

Kindest regards,

M
 
This is really interesting. I have two questions:
1) Are Solaris and its descendants likely to support similar hardware to FreeBSD? I’m particularly concerned about my D-Link USB WiFi dongle (i think the driver is called “rum”-something).
2) Do Solaris’ descendants have authoritarian community codes of conduct like the new Linux one? It would be lovely to use an OS that doesn’t have a freaking worldview attached to it.
 
Hi AlexanderProphet,

I can only speak from my limited experience, perhaps pyret will be able to provide more details.

Re 1: I have OmniOSce running on a SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCM-F-O as a headless server, which previously ran FreeBSD. All of the motherboard hardware works. I switched due to problems with SMB, the in-kernel CIFS/SMB implementation appears to be superior.
I had previous version of OI installed on ThinkPad R61, where everything except card-reader worked out-of-the-box.

From my search, some drivers are/have been adopted from FreeBSD.

Re 2: I have not read anything like that.

Here are a few interesting links:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/ques...pressions-by-a-bsd-user-4175626757/page2.html
https://geekblood.wordpress.com/2017/10/26/installing-x11-and-a-desktop-environment-on-omnios/

Kindest regards,

M
 
pyret said:
SmartOS was developed by Joyent and is really a hypervisor only. A new release is published every 2 weeks and Joyent engineers actively watch the mailing list and provide support via email. It is excellent and Joyent has moved to FreeBSD's bhyve to replace KVM. You can run almost any x86-based operating system (I had Plan 9, 9front, OS/2 via eComstation and ArcaOS, running) on SmartOS
Click to expand...

SmartOS is such a nice piece of software. I have several Linux distros, including Alpine (musl), bootstrapped on LX Zones on. SmartOS bhyve VM running on my FreeBSD/amd64 box

XStreamOS was developed and maintained by Sonicle, an Italian company. July 1, 2017 was the last release, so I'm uncertain of its status, but appears to have stalled. I had it installed and it was excellent, and surpassed OI as a desktop OS
Click to expand...

I'm very concerned about XStreamOS too, I agree on it faring better than anything else as an Illumos desktop. My first Illumos distribution to tell the truth, and I like the conservative Unixist approach and the xstreamos-illumos branch, compared with illumos-gate and illumos-joyent, which progressively integrated many GNUisms.
As an Italian, I saw Sonicle personally in Milan. As far as I can tell, it's still selling XStreamNAS and their other server products; probably they just lost interest in the desktop development, given the abysmal userbase. IIRC, last time someone from Sonicle posted on illumos-devel ML, he said they were trying to port Apache OpenOffice

I still have the original OpenSolaris release on DVD, as well as SXCE (Solaris Express Community Edition aka Project Nevada) which preceded OpenSolaris (codename by Sun was Project Indiana).
Click to expand...

I still have OSol 2008.05 CD-ROM too; my first experience ever with *nix, I was 14, bought it preloaded on a Toshiba Tecra M10

I don't know if you ever heard about it, but you forgot to mention another cool Illumos project, with is v9os
, another one-man initiative, small SPARC64-only server-oriented Solaris (no direct relationship with OpenSXCE AFAIK, unlike Tribblix/sparc)

The there's the very young and experimental Unleashed OS, more or less a R&Dproject with the aim of porting BSD technologies to SunOS 5.11
 
AlexanderProphet said:
Are Solaris and its descendants likely to support similar hardware to FreeBSD?
Click to expand...

Desktop hardware support hasn't received great updates since Illumos forked. Intel DRM is supported up to Haswell, Nvidia GPUs have binary drivers, no Radeon support. WiFi NICs support is ancient.

That said Illumos runs smoothly on 2 laptops of mine, but you have to stay with ~7 years old hardware at least
 
I'm quite impressed with FreeBSD 12. From all the reviews I'm reading, it seems that FreeBSD 12 has become easier to configure and use as a desktop (according to the reviewers). I know I've tried getting FreeBSD 11 running on my computer in attempts to switch to FreeBSD.
Looking closely at my requirements, at work, I'm forced to use Windows and At home, my preference as always been MacOS. I notice that I should be able to get everything at home on FreeBSD. I'm not tied solely to proprietary software. I use VLC for playing my videos over a network on Linux Server, I use Firefox and Brave browser for web browsing and streaming youtube.
In my past experiences with FreeBSD installations, I did have issues which I believe could easily be resolved. In the past I attempted to build a desktop using OpenBox. The main issues were trying to do things that I think most of us take for granted like Automounting a USB or External Hard Drive when you plug it in, Notifications, etc..
I guessing that by using KDE5 I will have most of these resolved. Don't really know considering the last time I tried to install FreeBSD, there was an issue where all the pkg install was timing out all the time. No clue what was the issue since there was no issue with my internet. In the end, I gave up and went back to my trusty High Sierra installation.

All in all, I'm looking for a fully featured desktop like what I would get with MacOS. So far MacOS does everything I need with the exception of theming.

Another thing that I would like to know about before moving over to FreeBSD, how does one get the same functionality of the Apple Ecosystem in FreeBSD? I like the way that data, etc is shared in between my iOS devices and my desktop computer. I know I will loose much of that in the move, but is there a way to recreate it using other alternative apps?
 
knightjp said:
Another thing that I would like to know about before moving over to FreeBSD, how does one get the same functionality of the Apple Ecosystem in FreeBSD?
Click to expand...

I've been tip-toeing my way into a FreeBSD-only environment as well. I do intend on purchasing another new T480 soon as my daily driver + Game Dev machine.

In terms of functionality - are we talking iCloud sync? I've come to find that NextCloud will resolve most (if not all) of my syncing needs - albeit you may have to manage your own servers. If you don't want to manage your own servers - i've read ProtonMail + SpiderOak is a great service combo you can subscribe to. In fact, first party iOS apps (Mail, contacts, calendars, etc) have support for custom IMAP/CardDav/CalDav accounts so you don't re-learn new apps.

In terms of all first party utilities (ie. Disk utility, activity monitor, Time Machine, etc) in macOS - FreeBSD already provides most of those in base - although via CLI so you may want to brush up on your shell-fu. If you prefer GUI alternatives - there's many Qt or GTK (eek!) apps in our 'app store' - ports! :)

My only gripe is lack of Netflix support, and a few content creation apps.
 
Beastie7 said:
My only gripe is lack of Netflix support, and a few content creation apps.
Click to expand...
Quite interesting since I heard that Netflix uses FreeBSD as the base for its servers, etc.

Beastie7 said:
In terms of functionality - are we talking iCloud sync? I've come to find that NextCloud will resolve most (if not all) of my syncing needs - albeit you may have to manage your own servers. If you don't want to manage your own servers - i've read ProtonMail + SpiderOak is a great service combo you can subscribe to. In fact, first party iOS apps (Mail, contacts, calendars, etc) have support for custom IMAP/CardDav/CalDav accounts so you don't re-learn new apps.

In terms of all first party utilities (ie. Disk utility, activity monitor, Time Machine, etc) in macOS - FreeBSD already provides most of those in base - although via CLI so you may want to brush up on your shell-fu. If you prefer GUI alternatives - there's many Qt or GTK (eek!) apps in our 'app store' - ports! :)
Click to expand...
Interesting... I will look into those. To be honest, I don't use much of iCloud storage etc.. I only like the features that update contacts, notes, calendars. The trouble with some solutions, we never know when the servers will be shut down, etc.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
That's Netflix' problem, not FreeBSD's. Actually, it's Google's problem for them to fix cause they won't make Vine work.
Click to expand...

No fault to FreeBSD - but the matter that is the problem exists for me. Could you go into detail about the Vine work?

What about Netflix on Firefox?

knightjp said:
Quite interesting since I heard that Netflix uses FreeBSD as the base for its servers, etc.
Click to expand...

Yeah. I don't understand. FreeBSD drives most of their business - one would think they'd provide support for it.
 
asifnaz said:
I know FreeBSD is a very stable OS . I want to use it as Desktop OS (with some GUI) . How do I do that..?
Click to expand...

I use FreeBSD for its stability. I used it on Pi since some time, and it is highly stable.
I fear Linux for its networking layer for professional use, which not as reliable as all *BSD*, incl. FreeBSD.
Robust = BSD. Years of experience and very stable, reliable, and free as freedom.

Desktop with icewm is cool, nice stable, and never ever clashed a single time. Just positive feedbacks.

For RPI3b, no support yet, but it might happen at some point in several years.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
knightjp I've been using FreeBSD as my desktop for 16 years. So do many others. I don't understand the problem.
Click to expand...
I'm sure you're well versed with the whole system, but I'm mostly a novice. I was mostly talking about the stuff that we take for granted in modern Operating systems like, auto-mounting external drives, good notifications, fonts aliasing, etc...
I'm pretty sure that I will be able to learn how to do stuff, but it will take some time.
I would like to know how to build a really good desktop using OpenBox that has all the modern features without me having to use KDE5.
 
Building a desktop that will do all of those things is certainly possible but you hit on the key: will take some time. The OS does not hold your hand like OSX, Windows or Linux, but the things you describe can be achieved. You will not find the level of integration like you see on iOS or OSX, but to be fair, no other OS has this level of integration. Not an Apple fan so not touting them, just stating my experience.

Be patient, ask questions and in the end, you will have a rock solid, stable OS that does what you need, or mostly anyway :).
 
knightjp said:
I'm sure you're well versed with the whole system, but I'm mostly a novice. I was mostly talking about the stuff that we take for granted in modern Operating systems like, auto-mounting external drives, good notifications, fonts aliasing, etc...
I'm pretty sure that I will be able to learn how to do stuff, but it will take some time.
I would like to know how to build a really good desktop using OpenBox that has all the modern features without me having to use KDE5.
Click to expand...

I cannot recommend vermadens desktop guide enough. It goes over setup and configuration of building your desktop - with brief explanations of what components do. Don't get discouraged by the multitude of steps either - it's crazy simple.

For a WM system notification daemon - have a look at sysutils/dunst.
 
knightjp said:
Automounting a USB or External Hard Drive when you plug it in
Click to expand...
I can recommend an ingeniously simple program called dsbmd. Here is official site. You can install it as package, or compile it by yourself. And here is forum thread.
knightjp said:
Notifications
Click to expand...
Just use Dunst. You can install it as package, or compile it by yourself. Dunst is a highly configurable and lightweight notification-daemon: The only thing it displays is a colored box with unformatted text. The whole notification specification (non-optional parts and the "body" capability) is supported as long as it fits into this look & feel. Dunst is designed to fit nicely into minimalistic windowmanagers.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
knightjp I've been using FreeBSD as my desktop for 16 years. So do many others. I don't understand the problem.
Click to expand...

Maybe You never used a Mac? ;)

The main feature a Mac provides is that you don't have to configure an OS and tools and applications, you can straightaway start your creative work - graphics, music, whatever. You don't have to know much about a computer and OS; everything you need is on the GUI.
And thats what they charge their price for, and there is a customer base who is willing to pay.

If that weren't the case, there were no market for these machines, because on the OS level they are just Berkeley (well, almost) - actually anybody could have done this by taking e.g. FreeBSD and putting no-brainer GUI and apps onto it, but the Mac guys were the ones who did (and made the money).

So, yes, I understand the problem. The expectations of a typical Mac user, concerning the ease of configuration, are a lot higher than those of a typical FreeBSD user. Many FreeBSD users love to do the configuration, love to adjust the /etc/rc.conf, to look for the proper applications, configure them properly, and have The Power To Serve under their own discrete control. (Some even love to go into the code and hack it.)

For my taste, the things that have changed during the mentioned 16 years are not very significant (and sometimes annoying) - I need the hardware drivers properly working, office-suite, browser and (something like) vlc compileable, and that's it. For a Mac user they are essential (and probably not yet enough).
 
So...the reason, at least MY reasons I use FreeBSD as a desktop are I have complete control over it and it is open source. This:
The main feature a Mac provides is that you don't have to configure an OS and tools and applications, you can straightaway start your creative work - graphics, music, whatever.
Click to expand...
is precisely the reason I do NOT use commercial operating systems, especially OSX. Not that OSX is bad, but I refuse to be sucked into that entire landscape/infrastructure. I always felt like I was forced to work with blinders on when I had a Mac: I could do zilch to it, it had to be the way Apple wanted it to be, not me.

Maybe if I were a professional photographer or musician I would be forced to use either a Mac or (shudder) Windows, but I am not. Everything I need to do for my personal workstation: edit and organize photos, write (documents and LaTeX), manage finances, play games, write code, I can do on my FreeBSD workstation.

I absolutely love that FreeBSD is simple and has not gotten caught up in an extreme technology race like some other OS's. Every piece of hardware I have works perfectly. The only exception is the OS reading my phone, but that is solvable.

I was a Mac user for 3 or 4 years and dropped the platform because I could no longer stand being so confined, nor being forced to do things the way Apple wanted.

I am extremely passionate about open source: it has been my primary means of computing for 20 years and computing is my life. Geeky? Yes, but it's my calling :)
 
I'm not scared of the work, steps or time. I'm just wondering if something in the similar functionality of MacOS features is possible. To be honest, I know it is possible. GhostBSD and TrueOS is proof. However following online guides isn't always as simple many claim. Even in Linux circles, what you see online doesn't always work the way they say it will; even if you have the exact same hardware and distro version. A slight variation in the system hardware or if you neglect an important step, you will be run into issues. I've seen many guides.. even this one..
https://cooltrainer.org/a-freebsd-desktop-howto/
I'm guessing that half the steps on there aren't even important and for a novice like me, I sometimes fail to follow if everything mentioned is important or not. Installation videos don't mention much of the steps in the article makes me wonder what this person is on about. Is it because of an older version of FreeBSD or is it really required. How can I recreate something like TrueOS from scratch without using the Lumia Desktop.

Anyone who has used MacOS or even a popular Linux distro will get what I'm on about with the features. As for the iOS and desktop integration, I get that is something that I will have to figure out along the way or learn to live without.
 
Totally get what you are saying about features - used OSX, and nearly every Linux distro on Distrowatch. I guess, at least for me, I like "roll your own", which is why I used Gentoo for years. I did fall in Love with KDE5 (Plasma) however, it proved to be massively complex and kind of like driving a Ferrari: it is super cool but at some point it is going to break and it's going to be expensive....

As for your quandary, I just saw GhostBSD was released, a new version based on TruOS but I "think" with the Mate` desktop, which was always their default. Not sure if this was just an announcement or if production ready. Might want to check it out.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top