¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Previous post.

This is the final post of this series.

TL;DR: In this post, random maintenance and cleaning, better defaults, etc; and, in the end, a small review and opinion about FreeBSD.

Keyboard map #

I’ve finally discovered how to change my console keyboard map. Run kbdmap, then choose your keymap in the curses screen. Another option is to directly load a keymap file: kbdcontrol -l /usr/share/syscons/keymaps/br275.iso.kbd.

Default shell #

To change my default shell to bash: chsh -s /usr/local/bin/bash root. You might recall I’ve already installed bash before, but I haven’t changed it to be the default one, until now.

Creating new ports #

The Porters Handbook is a fantastic manual on how to create your own ports. However, given its complexity, I’ve realized I probably won’t create any new ports for FreeBSD. I come from the PKGBUILD world, where creating a package is really simple. It is so simple that I can explain it to you in just one paragraph:

Just take an existing PKGBUILD file, modify it to your needs (it’s just Bash scripting), then use makepkg to create a .tar.xz package. You can install it with makepkg -i.

OK, I’m not comparing Arch to FreeBSD, and I don’t want to begin a flame war. But here is the problem from my point of view: a FreeBSD port uses many predefined variables, and the process of testing and creating a port is divided in several steps (it should be just a few). You can confirm what I’m saying by skimming the handbook. Anyways, I’m willing to try to create a port in the future.

Also, I can’t say that modifying an existing port is difficult: it is probably not. For example, if I want to change an nginx compile flag, it should be easy. I believe it is. This is good, because most people will just modify an existing port, instead of creating a new one. There is a list of requested ports, where you can contribute to the project if you want to.

Poudriere #

In the last post I’ve said I would install poudriere for a friend. It turns out this is not necessary anymore, because he already installed it. This is not an excuse, as it doesn’t need to be (i.e., I don’t care, really); I just believe it is wasted effort to install it for no purposes. However, I’ve skimmed over a couple of pages and tutorials, and it looks like a good and standard solution for the FreeBSD world.

If you want to maintain your own collection of ports and your own package repository, you just install Poudriere then tell it which ports you would like to be available. It will then build everything in a jail and later serve these packages. Well, actually it just makes the packages available; the responsible to serve is probably nginx or other common web server. As a comparison, in the Ubuntu world you would probably create a PPA for that. In the Arch world, you would maintain a collection of PKGBUILDs then create your own repo from those packages.

Now, if you only want one or two ports, you don’t need Poudriere just for that. You better store your patches or your built .txz binaries somewhere.

Services #

I’ve already looked into services in previous posts. There is a good read about them in the official FreeBSD Handbook (specially section 12.4, “Managing Services in FreeBSD”). Style is like sysvinit/OpenRC; every service is either in /etc/init.d or in /usr/local/etc/init.d for user services. Usual tasks include: start, stop and status. There is one remarkable feature: if you want to execute a service only in the current session, you should prefix the command with one: onestatus, onestart, onestop.

To make the services restart on boot, it is just a matter of adding a line such as:

SERVICENAME_ENABLE="YES"

in /etc/rc.conf or /usr/local/etc/rc.conf. It is also possible to use the service command, although I usually avoid it.

Overall #

I believe there is not much more I can add. This was intended to be both an overview and a documentation with my experience and exploration about the FreeBSD system. I can keep exploring more, however this would get out of scope. Now, two things:

Feedback #

What did you think about this mini series? Did you like it? Did you hate it? Have you learned anything new? Any suggestions or corrections? I am open to critics and would really like to hear you; if I ever write a new overview about other subject, this would be useful to me. Well, if you have something to say, just leave a comment! And, of course, if you are reading this, thanks for your attention! I’m boring, I know :), and yet you have managed to come here, so I appreciate it.

What is my final opinion about FreeBSD? #

I can’t express everything I feel in just a subsection, but let’s try to summarize it: I liked it. I won’t say I loved it, neither that I super enjoyed it, because this would not be true, however the system is really nice. Many packages and ports are available, there is a reasonable active community out there, many blog posts and documentation scattered across the web, and a very good flexibility about customizing your system by editing ports and compiling packages: this is not easy to achieve in some Linux distros!

Use cases? Servers, period. This is not a system I would use for a desktop. Neither for my own, neither to recommend to other people. There is a distribution called PC-BSD which may be a good choice for desktops, but I never tried it myself. Why not a desktop? Maintenance, mainly. And setup time / configuration. One might argue that Gentoo and Arch are in the same category in this aspect, but I have to disagree. OK, true reason? Compatibility. I am more comfortable in running desktop software in Linux rather than in *BSDs, because support and documentation for Linux is much more available. For servers, this doesn’t matter much, because use cases are usually specific.

And now, how would I rank it, compared to other Linux distros? Hmmmm, that’s tricky. Well, for servers, FreeBSD is the best distribution regarding customization, because of its ports system. It is not super easy to customize a .deb or a .rpm package; so, FreeBSD covers specific use cases for servers (don’t forget about Poudriere here). If customization is not much necessary, it competes well with Debian.

Problem with Debian is that it kinda enforces you to use specific stacks of software – for example, Apache with PHP. You can use PHP with nginx, but it is a little boring to see warning messages about Apache in this case. And CentOS packages are old, really old. FreeBSD wins in this aspect, because its packages and ports are usually more bleeding edge / up-to-date. I guess that’s it! See ya.