Beginner NomadBSD user - thoughts

Firstly, I’ve been using FreeBSD for years - not a power user, or a professional, just serving smb shares, web pages, and the like in office settings. I am at home with the command line.

But, always with a hankering to switch some or all of desktop work from Windows. NomadBSD has been the best experience to date - by a considerable margin. So, to the team, thank you very much.

There have been a couple of niggles that I’m not looking to solve right now, but might go into the ‘to do’ list.

  • The brand spanking new Radeon RX 6700 XT doesn’t manage dual monitors - This card is very recent, seeing it manage 1 monitor is good and I can wait for dual monitors.
  • pkg upgrade broke the log in process - NomadBSD 130R-20210508 Errata - fixed this on a bare metal install, but not for the VirtualBox experiments. They should be the same, right? just a week between installs.
  • Virtualbox machines (windows 10 host) were solid (note above) except changing the VB window froze Xorg - mostly black screen and mouse, sometimes the dune background and mouse, but no icons. I could ssh into the ‘frozen’ machine, so… Xorg maybe? On first boot, Nomad brings up a note suggesting to upgrade guest addons, which was done, but without changing this behaviour.
  • Lastly, once frozen, that virtual machine would never function again - even over reboots.

Anywhoo, now that NomadBSD is on one machine, I’m hoping our people will start shifting over.

Thanks again for NomadBSD,

1 Like

A couple of corrections after further experiments.

  • The USB install creates settings suitable for the machine it first boots on. the USB will boot on other machines but with settings appropriate to the first machine. NomadBDS DOES drive multi monitor on Radeon RX 6700 XT if that machine boots the USB first.

Other

  • Manage User Accounts (nomadbsd-churs) cannot find PyQt5.QtWidgets. I’m not sure which pkg bring pyqt5.qtwidgets to the party.
  • Clicking the ‘start button’ on dual monitor brings the application menu to the ‘start button’ of the other monitor. A second click on the ‘start button’ brings the menu to the mouse cursor.
  • Lastly, netstat -r takes a while to display, sticking on ethernet device igb0. A network adapter from Intel? I doubt this has much to do with Nomad

Welcome to the forum, @most

Did you change the first line of /usr/bin/nomadbsd-chusr as described in errata (you mentioned it in your first post)?

> head -n 1 /usr/bin/nomadbsd-chusr
#!/usr/local/bin/python3.8

As I read it, it’s a package in its own right:

> pkg info x11-toolkits/py-qt5-widgets
py38-qt5-widgets-5.15.4_1
Name : py38-qt5-widgets
Version : 5.15.4_1
Installed on : Wed Jul 28 13:03:43 2021 CEST
Origin : x11-toolkits/py-qt5-widgets
<snip>

Do you have this package installed:

> pkg info -a | grep -i qt5-widgets
py38-qt5-widgets-5.15.4_1 Python bindings for the Qt5 toolkit, QtWidgets module
qt5-widgets-5.15.2_1 Qt C++ widgets module (a dependency to the above and many other packages)

If installed - Does the python versions (in bold) match?
If not - Do an install and edit /usr/bin/nomadbsd-chusr to match the version

> sudo pkg install x11-toolkits/py-qt5-widgets

[edit: sudo not needed for pkg info]

I had indeed neglected to point the four files mentioned in the errata to python3.8.

Thank you ludensen.

1 Like