Hey everyone!
First - I’m not at all new to Linux and messing around with other *nix systems, mostly in their desktop flavors. I’ve been using Ubuntu mostly since it was my first one so I’m way more used to how Debian functions than any other members of the family. I’ve managed to get various forms of BSD (Dragonfly, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD) running in virtual machines, and have got the Darwin kernel and a whole lot of DOS and Windows-based things running in virtual machines, if not on actual PC’s. All of this was through help in the forums of various places and asking LOTS of questions and searching for everything… so while I know my way around a terminal, kind of, I don’t know that much about it. And when it comes to BSD - I found NomadBSD through the ExplainingComputers YouTube channel like a lot of us have and I wanted to finally play with it on a pretty crappy laptop I couldn’t get Windows 10 to run well on at all, which came with it, and that any of my favorite lightweight Debian Linux builds wouldn’t run on either. It’s probably hardware limiting, but nothing should be that slow. I got NomadBSD to install on it’s HDD and it actually runs quite well, so all of my questions aren’t from the persistent standpoint - that didn’t run well for me on this laptop either. Installing, again, did, and I finally have a box dedicated to totally screwing up lol.
Second - THANK YOU for finally getting something out there for someone like me… comfortable in a terminal, but prefer the GUI because let’s face it - it’s easier for almost everything. I have plenty of Windows and Mac boxes, and I have everything in virtual machines that I can, but BSD always eluded me for the most part. I had more luck, again, with Solaris than I ever did with BSD. Anyway though - to you Devs, you kick every kind of [expletive deleted for modesty lol]. Thank you guys for real.
Now onto my petty problems.
After install, messing around with settings, and getting familiar with how the desktop works, and following the Handbooklet for everything I wanted to do, I ran into some problems.
-
freebsd-update hangs up. It gets to where it’s telling me the boot/ files it’s going to update and then given a “bytes 5xx” message as though it were loading, with xx just being anywhere from 511 to 526. Then nothing. I left it sitting for 4 hours like that twice, and it still does nothing. So for whatever you have compiled for the 1.3.2 update is what I’m stuck with for the kernel and any underlying things as well until I can get it figured out.
-
Updating packages in the Terminal or in OctoPKG hangs up every single time. No matter how I do this, it hangs up somewhere. Sometimes it’s a “connection reset by peer” issue, others is just getting stuck and doing nothing. Mine as of a couple days ago when I finally got this thing done - after probably 40 killing processes and exiting and re-opening of the terminal or OctoPKG, I updated 400-something packages. This was prior to deleting packages I don’t want like XFBurn, HexChat, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. I didn’t touch any packages prior to updating, I only disabled the graphics driver check and made it automatically choose the scfb on boot. The only other things I did was give it the file system compatibility in the Handbooklet and disabled e2fsprogs from updating thanks to your errata page. It’ll download a few packages, then reset the connection or just flat-out get stuck on some random percentage until I close and go back to it. It’ll compile everything just fine, it’s just fetching it has serious issues with. And it’s not my internet - this only applies to this laptop on this OS and only while updating through either OctoPKG or the command line, su or not. This didn’t happen on Linux or Windows either, just this OS.
-
The Lock Screen. Is there any way, since it’s installed on a HDD as the only OS on the machine, to set it so the lock screen comes on after a certain time? I hadn’t seen it in the power or display settings. I can blank the screen of course, but I don’t know how to set the lockscreen. I don’t need it I guess, but it would be nice to have.
I think that’s really it - it does what I want it to do so far other than than, and runs much, much better than any Linux or Windows OS I put on it. So again guys, thank you SO much for getting something together like this.
I’ve deleted a bunch of packages I don’t want and replaced Firefox with Midori, but otherwise hadn’t messed with a lot of other stuff. Updated the packages FINALLY, lol this took forever to do, but can’t update the FreeBSD base, and the screen timeout to lockscreen would be nice. I can’t think of anything else I’ve run into yet.
Thanks again for making this thing, and thanks in advance for any help.