Questions on updating, folder management and Wine

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First let me thank the developers for coming up with such a slick and easy to begin with desktop environment. I’ve been planning to learn BSD for a long time, but the initial learning curve and hardware investment is a killer.

The user friendly desktop and installed apps gave me a nice running start in a usable environment pretty much by clicking on things like a blind chicken and getting stuff to work… while I learn the terminal commands.

The USB stick live persistent OS is an awesome idea… it lets me re-purpose my current hardware while I learn. It’s a whole new computer for the price of a thumb drive! And I’ve tested the 32 bit version on an old potato Laptop and it runs pretty well there too… well… for a potato.

Now if I may, I’d like to ask a few questions…

First, as Nomad is a live and persistent OS, can it be updated or upgraded when FreeBSD upgrades updates or releases a new service pack? I mean it might be nice to update the OS without starting over every time the underlying OS needs an update… Is this done through the FreeBSD repositories or is Nomad BSD going to release updates and how do I get them?

Second, I’ve never used audacity before, but when it starts up it tells me there’s not enough room in the temp directory… It claim that there are 71 meg free out of 3.9 Gig and there are two files in the directory with 0 bytes each. 3.9 gig- 0 bytes shouldn’t = 71 meg. And why is the folder a fixed size anyway? I don’t understand and would appreciate some help here.

Third… Out of curiosity, what file system is the memory stick using… is this ZFS, and how can I see it?

Fourth and last (for today) and maybe just a little bit too advanced for someone who is just starting out… Can wine, winetricks, playon BSD or some other windows bottles be configured and run on Nomad BSD? And if someone knows where there’s good instructions on how to do it, please let me know…

I’ve been working on an building PC’s since the IBM XT and AT, I once had to service a PC running Unix back in the 1990’s and it was awesome what it could do compared to DOS at the time. I’ve always wanted to play with a Unix-like OS and I’m having fun so far. I’ll try not to be a pest, but if someone has a few moments to spare, I’d really appreciate your help.

Thank you again!

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Thank you very much :slight_smile:

NomadBSD itself doesn’t have an update mechanism. But you can update the underlying system via freebsd-update, and you can upgrade your software packages via pkg upgrade or OctoPkg (graphical front-end to pkg).

Please post the output of df -h

We are using UFS1 on the live system. If you install it to a HDD/SSD, you can choose UFS2 or ZFS.
You can see the which filesystems are currently mounted by executing mount.

Yes, there are packages for wine, winetricks, and playonbsd, which you can install via pkg or OctoPkg.

1 Like
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Mk1

Thank you for your kind reply.

Regarding the Audacity error…

When I boot Audacity it pops up a ‘Warning’ box. that reads: There is very little free space left on this volume. Please select another temporary directory in Preferences.

Going into Audacity-Edit-Preferences I found that the path for temp is /var/tmp/audacity-nomad and the Free Space shows up as "-2527232.0 bytes. When I clicked “choose directory” Audacity replied that "Directory /var/temp/audacity-nomad canicreate is not writable.

Going through the “File Manager” it shows the subject directory as having 0 items now with 16.0 EiB free.

I checked this on a few different laptops… with the same or similar results. I might note that NomadBSD is installed on a 250 gig thumbdrive with lots of space available.

If I may comment, it appears that Audacity is somehow seeing the thumbdrive as ROM.

And thank you… the freebsd-update worked a treat.

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The free space on / is fixed an very limited (~80MB). The remaining free space on your thumb drive is used for /home. You can either set Audacity’s temporary directory to /home/nomad/tmp/audacity-nomad, for instance, or you can set it to /tmp/audacity-nomad. /tmp is a volatile memory filesystem (tmpfs) which has approx. as much space as your computer has RAM. It is very fast, but unlike /var/tmp files stored on /tmp will not be kept between reboots.

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Hi mk1

Again thanks for getting back to me… So basically, the “/” and the “home” are different partitions? As I’m still learning the file management on BSD memory sticks… I’m also guessing that the OS is on the “/” partition. And so upgrades and updates and such will go on that partition… until it fills up and then things go wrong?

Again thanks for your help.

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Yes. You can see what is mounted where by running the command mount or df.

Right.

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Hi @mk1 ,

Blockquote
Yes, there are packages for wine, winetricks, and playonbsd, which you can install via pkg or OctoPkg.

But:

Blockquote# pkg info -D playonbsd-4.2.10_8
playonbsd-4.2.10_8:
Always:
===> NOTICE:
This port is deprecated; you may wish to reconsider installing it:
Uses deprecated version of python.
It is scheduled to be removed on or after 2020-09-15.

And, its Homura alternative get error: http://dpaste.com//2D8CYGCAX

Then, no Windows PC emulation games in NomadBSD ?

See you.