¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Previous post.

TL;DR: Reinstalling the system, in QEMU/KVM + Xorg stuff. Okay people, so after a (probable) virtual disk corruption, I’ve decided to start a new and fresh installation. I’m using the same ISO as before (Release 10, amd64), however I’m now with QEMU/KVM. Fortunately, my beloved Linux distro has a very well documented wiki page on how to setup it. I’ve chosen gnome-boxes as GUI, after a non-successful trial with qtemu, and it was pretty straightforward to use it to re-install the system.

Too straightforward that I don’t need this anymore. This time the network interface didn’t configure itself automagically, out-of-the-box (at least not completely). I later confirmed that: after logging in as root, there was no internet connection. At this point I suspected I would be in trouble. It is a nightmare to manually set up networks from the command line – I know it from Arch Linux. However, after further inspecting with ifconfig and then realizing that there wasn’t any /etc/resolv.conf file, hmmmmm, I got it: DNS!

What, then? I tried (literally, several tries) to play with dhclient; things such as service dhclient status, service dhclient onestart, etc; finally, I managed to do a dhclient re0 (re0 is the name of the network interface here). This worked! ping google.com (the most standard way to test connection, huh?) returned successfully. So, let’s reinstall our ol’ good tools:

pkg install bash dmenu dwm htop i3 rxvt-unicode uemacs xorg
echo "urxvt &\nexec dwm\n" >> $HOME/.xinitrc

A quick startx wouldn’t work. However, this time I didn’t shutdown the VM; instead I’ve found that I could use Alt+F1 to switch to a tty (note: it is not Ctrl+Alt+F1, this would instead switch to a tty in my host machine. In other words, drop the Ctrl key here.) In part III, I got stuck here, remember? Not anymore.

service dbus onestart
service hald onestart

Additionally, add the following to /etc/rc.conf so this will persist across reboots:

dbus_enable="YES"
hald_enable="YES"

Now a startx works, and I have a terminal emulator (urxvt) running. Both keyboard and mouse work. Nice! This is getting better. To properly configure my X keyboard is simple: setxkbmap br. Yet I still have to discover how to configure it in a tty. I’ve chosen a lightweight GUI application to test Xorg: pcmanfm (a simple file manager). It runs okay, except that I don’t see any folders there. This is probably related to some missing component, or something about the FreeBSD filesystem that I don’t know yet.

Since X seemed to work okay, I’ve installed i3. I just tested with dwm because it is even more lightweight than i3, but I don’t know how to operate it beyond its basics; however, I’m very familiar with i3. My updated .xinitrc file:

setxkbmap br &
urxvt &
exec i3

Xorg doesn’t end here, of course. However, my goal – and I’ve already said this before – is to get a feeling of how FreeBSD works, not to exhaustively configure each of its components.

Next #

At this point, here is my org file (from now on I’m gonna delete old ‘DONE’ entries, there is no need to keep displaying them):

DONE X Window System (X11)
TODO create a new port (poudriere?)
  This will probably take a while. I'm accepting suggestions of software to port (should be something not much complex).
TODO jails, chroot, etc
  I've heard they are common in the FreeBSD world. Let's find out…
TODO services (rc.conf, /etc/rc)
  Explored this a little, but let's see if there is more.
TODO Linux compatibility?
  systemd, gnome3, binaries in general. Is any Linux software automagically portable to FreeBSD?
TODO what about user contributions?
  Is there something like Arch's AUR? Maybe freshports?

If you want to suggest more items to this list, please let me know. There is no fixed quantity of posts, I’ll keep updating my experience as long as there is something relatively relevant to write about.

~~Edit (2014-07-30): There is a friend of mine who needs Poudriere on his server. I’ll probably help him then write about it in my next post, by the end of the week. Thank you for your patience.