26Apr 2023 by Jim Blaich

Rock Solid BSD (FreeBSD 13.2) with KDE Plasma (and including video acceleration setup)

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Note: FreeBSD 14 is due out in the middle of this year. Note: FreeBSD has a linux compatibility layer as well as support for wine. It has jails. Jails is a tool similar to containers. BSD does not support LXC as LXC means Linux containers. The video linked below walks you through downloading and the install FreeBSD and then XORG and then X11 with KDE Plasma. Since the video does this and since I already did it I have not included those steps. The install was near flawless, albeit somewhat dated in the installer's UX (user experience). As well since the video shows the person installing it into a container it does not cover configuring video hardware acceleration. I added that at the bottom of this guide. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzIWXdcrK5I sudo does…
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26Apr 2023 by Jim Blaich

Upon boot BSD spams that the file system is read-only

BSD, rc.conf, read-only
The actual message is "/usr/sbin/rsysrc: cannot create /etc/rc.conf: Read-only file system" I worked quite a bit yesterday discovering the different programs that I use on Linux that I wanted to work on BSD. My reasoning is that if these are there then there's little keeping me from switching to BSD on at least one of my main desktop computers. The program that I wanted to install was tuptime. This program will keep an eye on how long the computer has been up along with various statistics involved, such as the longest interval up, longest interval down, etc. I did the install of the package which is part of the BSD repository. At the end of the install it generated a message indicating that I needed to add a couple of…
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25Apr 2023 by Jim Blaich

FreeBSD Enable Graphics Acceleration for your Desktop.

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You can get FreeBSD (and maybe others) installed without graphics acceleration and that will still allow you go install and run KDE Plasma. However, the experience will be somewhat poor. What made me take note is that when I looked at KDE Plasma settings under Display and Monitor the refresh rate of the monitor was 0hz. When I was at a remote location I decided to run using x11 forwarding the settings program where I found the refresh rate properly set for that monitor, which was 60hz. In order to actually install the accelerated graphics you must install the appropriate drm-* driver. This is done with the following command. sudo pkg install graphics/drm-kmod This will download and install nearly 100 items pertaining to various graphics technologies, such as AMD, NVIDIA,…
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