FreeBSD Part 1: Intro and Goals
This is the start of a new blogpost-style series. Its purpose is to document my experiences with setting up and running a FreeBSD workstation. This is not a complete how to.
Goals
My goal with setting up a FreeBSD workstation is to learn about the system and get comfortable with it. I have always used some form of Linux as my main OS, both on my laptop, as well as on my desktop. As such I have become accustomed to certain tools and a certain level comfort. There are Linux distributions that do not provide some tools (e.g. Void doing without Systemd) and also some that do not provide much comfort (e.g. Slackware), both of which I have also used in the past. But this is about learning a new way to do things.
The other part of the goal is to end up with a completely usable system. Preferrably one that I like better than my current Debian desktop. This means there are plenty of things that must work without exception:
- A modern shell (more on this later)
- tmux (or at the very least screen)
- vim >= 8.0
- A modern webbrowser, preferrably qutebrowser and firefox
- i3wm or sway
- Some sort of audio (both output and microphone)
- Webcam
- openvpn, ssh
- git
- a C/C++ compiler
- Python3
Some of these tools can actually be replaced, for example I do not really care about the make of the audio system as long as it works. I can accept that some of my usecases, like gaming for example, will probably not work quite well natively and I will have to use a VM for that, but for work and productivity this is not acceptable.
With the goals for this adventure set, I can go about messing with my system.
Pre-Install
Usually, I only change my OS when the old one breaks in such a way, that reinstalling is easier than repairing, or the root-SSD changes. This time is different, since I do not want to destroy my old OS, because I need it until I am fully set up. So my plan is to keep the old OS and configure a dualboot option for FreeBSD. This is actually already done for me, because my motherboard has a UEFI BIOS, which has a feature, that allows me to choose which OS to boot. Thanks EVGA!
After backing up everything from the destination SSD, all thats left to do is to
download the newest stable FreeBSD release iso and dd it onto a USB
thumbdrive like so:
dd if=~/Downloads/FreeBSD-12.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img of=/dev/sdd bs=4M status=progress
In my case, the USB thumbdrive showed up as sdd, but your mileage may vary, so
doublecheck with lsblk or similar. status=progress is optional and so is
giving the block-size, but it is nice to see the progress setting a larger
blocksize than the default one increases the write-speed.
The last thing to do before heading into the unknown is to grab the laptop, because a working PC will come in handy the moment I need to look something up in the manual.