¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Previous post.

TL;DR: In this post: setup of gcc/g++, golang, nginx and Xorg/X11. Let’s begin with a simple C/C++ hello world. For that, I’ll test both gcc and g++.

gcc #

Run pkg install gcc and create a new hello.c file:

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
  printf("Hello World!\n");
  return 0;
}

The gcc command doesn’t exist, but it is easy to find the correct executable name: gcc47. Then run gcc47 hello.c -o hello -Wall and test it: ./hello. Everything was nice here. For C++, the gcc package already contains it. You can also test the previous file, with the g++47 executable.

Newer versions are also available: its packages are named gcc48 and gcc49 as of this post. It is not hard to see that all these versions can coexist. For comparison, Gentoo also (elegantly) allows multiple versions of packages; and Arch, by design, sticks only to the latest version (gcc 4.9 in this case), although it is not hard to obtain previous versions, as they are usually available in the AUR.

golang #

I just wanted to pick some less traditional language (no Python, Ruby or Java here) to test, so I chose Go, since I’m learning it now. Also, since the Go library compiles fast (by design), I chose to install it using ports. Run cd /usr/share/ports/lang/go and make install. The whole process took under 90 seconds, using only one processor (also, remember I’m running FreeBSD under VirtualBox). Now edit hello.go:

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
  fmt.Printf("Hello, 世界\n")
}

Then run go run hello.go. Nice!

node.js #

Just one more quick example, shall we? Run pkg install node. This time I’m testing interactively, just running node then console.log("Hello world!\n");

nginx #

Now, let’s get our feet wet. Run pkg install nginx. I also need a text browser, since I’m not running X yet. Run pkg install w3m. Now: how to start nginx? With a little serendipity (yes, no Googling!), we can use pkg info -l nginx to find the archives we need. They are all within /usr/local. And, with a little luck, we also find that the service command exists. If I were on a Linux machine, I would do a service nginx start. But this doesn’t work here.

Reading the man page of service, and with some additional tries, I discover that we should do a service nginx onestart. This works, because I can see the success message; additionally, I can confirm it with pgrep nginx or with ps aux | grep nginx. Without further reading, it looks like if I wanted to enable nginx permanently, I should add an entry to /etc/rc.conf; and every time I want to start it manually, I should use one*, like onestatus, onestop, etc.

For comparison with the systemd world, the onestart equivalent to it would be a systemctl start nginx and the ‘permanently start’ equivalency is systemctl enable nginx. I guess it is just different here, but since it is easy to use this ‘one’ thing, I don’t have reasons to complain for now. A simple w3m localhost shows that it really worked. An additional step would be to enable PHP and FastCGI in our little server, but I won’t do that here, since I’m not focusing specifically in the server side of FreeBSD.

X11 #

This is the last tool that will give hello to you today, I promise. Run pkg install xorg. Next, I’ve created a $HOME/.xinitrc file as another user (not root):

xterm &
exec twm

Then run startx. Well, X started. But I couldn’t use the mouse – actually, I’m running this VM in a ultrabook, so I couldn’t use the touchpad. I also couldn’t see the xterm window (although it looked like it was minimized, but I’m not really sure about that – no familiarity with twm). Also, Ctrl+Alt+BackSpace didn’t work out-of-the-box, so I had to forcefully shutdown the VM, then restart it.

OK, debug time. I installed the sudo package, then added my non-root user to the sudoers file (by running visudo and changing the appropriate line). Now I can log in again with my non-root user and install programs properly with sudo. I’m going to test with tools I’m familiar with: pkg install i3 rxvt-unicode. Now, an updated version of my $HOME/.xinitrc file:

urxvt &
exec i3

This time I couldn’t even start Xorg, because it was complaining about some missing libxcb-cursor library (missing dependency, huh?). Despite of me installing everything I could find about xcb, the problem persisted. So I had to read section 6.4 of the manual. It recommended me to add hald and dbus to rc.conf, to enable those services, and to regenerate a xorg.conf file, with Xorg -configure, then moving it to /etc/X11.

After another reboot, I got a kernel panic. And another. And another. Oh no, it became a boot loop with successive kernel panics. What is worst? I have no idea why. I haven’t touched anything critical. A screenshot of the kernel panic is a screenshot of the kernel panic. I’m not in the mood of reinstalling everything just to continue this series; however, I’m still going to try to recover it. If you have any idea or tips about that strange (and unexpected!) error, please leave a comment. It looks like a disk error, maybe the virtual hard disk has been damaged, maybe because of my forced shutdown? I don’t know.

What’s next? #

Not sure. I’ll only continue this if I recover the system. Here is the org list, anyways:

* DONE Binary packages
* DONE Ports
* TROUBLE X Window System (X11)
* DONE nginx hello world
* DONE C/C++ Hello World
* DONE golang Hello World
* TODO create a new port (poudriere?)
* TODO jails, chroot, etc
* PROGRESS services (rc.conf, /etc/rc)
* TODO Linux compatibility?
* TODO what about user contributions? Is there something like AUR? Maybe freshports?

I’m still going to write at least another post.

Update (2014-07-25): Thanks to Vinicius I’m going to continue this series, now on QEMU with KVM instead of VirtualBox. I’ll take a little while to write the next post, but now you know it will exist :)