LINUX Unplugged - 602: The BSD Humbling

Episode Date: February 17, 2025

Our FreeBSD Challenge comes to a close, and chances are one of us will be paying the Windows tax.Sponsored By:Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices! 1Password Extended Access Management: 1Password Extended Access Management is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMPlanet NixFlox — Your dev environment, everywhereThe Launch 🚀 09: The Eagle has LandedThe Rules of the FreeBSD Challengelibluksde — Library and tools to access LUKS Disk Encryption encrypted volumeslinuxulator-steam-utils — Linux Steam on FreeBSDbhyve/Windows - FreeBSD WikiChapter 12. Linux Binary Compatibilitydoas - dedicated openbsd application subexecutordoas masteryChapter 33. Firewallsardour « audio - ports - FreeBSD ports treejellyfin « multimedia - ports - FreeBSD ports treeHank wrote in about his testing with a Pi4FreeBSD pi4 tweak — I got lucky - that was posted two days before I gave this a go. I installed on a 4GB Pi 4B.Hank's BSD Notes — IMO should get a point just for figuring out how to configure NTP and time zone. Sheesh!Mizutamari — User-friendly Wine front-end primarily for FreeBSDOldschool Gaming on FreeBSDGames - GhostBSD WikiWhat’s Coming for Future Releases of GhostBSD? — We're making some important changes to how GhostBSD is built and released to provide a better, more stable experience for our users.Annual Membership — Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!Gene's Portable ScreenNetBSD Root on ZFSMusic Assistant — Music Assistant is a free, opensource Media library manager that connects to your streaming services and a wide range of connected speakers.Pick: HedgeDoc — HedgeDoc lets you create real-time collaborative markdown notes.Pick: Add Water — A utility app to easily install the Firefox GNOME Theme and automatically update it in the background. This theme keeps Firefox fashionable within the GNOME design ecosystem, and provides many helpful features to customize the interface to make browsing even more pleasant

Hello friends and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Well hello gentlemen. Coming up on the show today it is indeed the grand conclusion of our free BSD challenge that we kicked off in episode 600. You've been reporting in, we've been bench testing, and we'll find out how we did. We'll score our BSD challenge and see if

one of us ends up running Windows. Then we're gonna round out the show with some great boosts, some killer picks, and a lot more. So before we get into all of that, let's say time-appropriate greetings to that virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello. Hi. Hello. Hello, hello, hello.

Hi. Amazing. It's nice to have people in there. Of course, you can always join our Mumble Room. We do it live on the Sunday. We start around 10 a.m. Pacific. And Mumble details are at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash mumble. And a big good morning to our friends at Tailscale.

Go to tailscale.com slash unplugged. This is the easiest way to connect your devices and services to each other, wherever they are over a flat mesh network protected by wild guard. Yeah, it's modern networking and it connects your devices, your applications, your mobile devices directly to each other.

It's great for individuals and it's so killer for companies as well. Secure remote access and it's really, really fast. It's intuitive and it's programmable. So you no longer need to have any inbound ports, but if you're a corporation, you no longer need to have any of this crazy legacy, just massively complicated VPN stuff. It's easy to deploy. It's easy to integrate with your authentication infrastructure, it's zero trust every organization or user can use, and the free plan, when you go to tailscale.com slash unplugged, gets you one Hyundai devices

and three user accounts forever. No credit card required. That's the plan I'm on, been using since like, you know, three or four years ago or whatever it's been, and still using today for my personal, and then started deploying it for Jupiter Broadcasting too, and it's just changed our infrastructure game and our flexibility of where we can deploy,

what systems need to be where. It's been a huge cost saver for us, and there's thousands of other companies and individuals beyond just that that are using it as well. So try it out for yourself or for a business. See why we love it and why we all use it. tailscale.com slash unplugged. I am very pleased to say that we have locked in our plans for Planet Nix. Oh, this is exciting. Oh, this is huge for us, obviously, just because of the next journey we've been on. But this is the first Planet Knicks.

We really wanted to be there for the first one. I'd like to be there for every single one of them, just like I have been for Linux Fest Northwest, because you really understand the culture and journey of an event when you can do that. And I have tremendous gratitude that I want to convey to FLOX. They're making our coverage possible. Last year, we successfully crowd funded our trip and we are immensely grateful. But this year I was able to find the right partner, the right fit,

and that's with FLOX. So we're really excited to work with them. They're going to be helping us get down there and make the coverage possible. If you're not familiar with them, they make it super easy to create development environments with all the dependencies you need and then easily share them with a colleague. You can go to flox.dev. That's F-L-O-X dot dev to check them out. Super excited about all this. We'll have more details soon. We'd love to see you there March 6th through the 7th in Pasadena.

Join us for the first Planet Nix ever, the very first one. Whether you're a cadet or a Commodore, a hacker or a learner, come on down, check out all the fuss. Very, very, very excited about Planet Nix and of course, scale as well. And then the next fast Northwest just around the corner. And then one little bit

more of housekeeping for you, all just something to be aware of. I have a new show that I'd like you to check out. It's relaxed, it's fun, and we have an open mumble room like we do here for this show. We start at 1130 a.m. Pacific, that's 2.30 p.m. Eastern, 7.30 p.m. UTC, and I specifically want to invite our members to join us in the mumble room.

This will be a one-to-one way to communicate with me and some of the team that shows up, hoping to have our friends from the network on, like Wes and Brent was on episode one. Indeed, that was a great episode. And those that remember Angela, she's on there with me as well. In fact, this next week's episode, episode 10,

is going to be kind of a reintroduction to Angela, my ex-wife. If you'd like to know about that and some of the family story there, then check out the episode, episode 10, which will be weeklylaunch.rocks, and you'll find it over there. Nine is already out, where Brent joins us,

and we're gonna have fun with it. I wanted you to be aware of it. I'd like to just give a moment of shout out to our tireless website crew here. You know, this relaunch of the launch happened very quickly, and CGBasePlay Player and Chance M were instrumental in getting it across the finish line. Knocked it out for us to make sure we could publish

right on time. Yeah, that was great. So you can find it at jupiterbroadcasting.com, or you can find the show site at weeklylaunch.rocks. I think you'll enjoy it, and it's going to be a nice, easy listen as well. And that, gentlemen, is the housekeeping for this week. BLEEPING All right, boys, it is the end of the FreeBSD Challenge.

Roar! And let's do a little around the horn check-in and start with Mr. Brentley and see how his final week of the challenge went and eventually tally up his score. Well, Chris, you and I started our week together in studio, which is always fun, but I decided to say bye-bye to the pie that I mentioned last week with FreeBSD on it, and to give modern hardware a go. So I decided to do the BSD-ing on my framework this week.

That meant I had to start from scratch, but I could try a whole bunch of new things and see how the hardware did. And I decided, well, to go ghostly. So ghost BSD is where I decided to jump in. I figured for sure someone else would do a next BSD.

So I was going to leave that to you boys. And I think it went pretty well at first. Of course you were there. You saw it just kind of boot up and wifi worked, which I was curious about. And the video, everything video wise worked really well and it just seemed to like get going and it was snappy too, considering that it's mate in there with a bunch of super nice defaults and GhostBSD that I really appreciated.

One of them especially was having the fish shell by default. That was super nice defaults in GhostBSD that I really appreciated. One of them especially was having the fish shell by default. That was super nice. Yeah, we were sitting there at the BSD bench as we were busting through all of this. Battle, battle, battle station bench. The BSD battle station bench as we were busting through all of this. And my first impression when we both tried GhostBSD

on physical hardware was, this is instantly more like a traditional Linux user experience. You know, it boots, it boots really quick, it does a fun little trick. Oh, yeah. I kind of wish I had an option, but it does a fun little trick where it dumps everything into what they call basically a swap RAM disk. And that takes a minute. So you need about, you know, you need more than 4.1 gigs of RAM free because it takes about four gigs

Just to do this memory thing. So my first VM didn't like that very much, but I'm physical art There's no problem so it takes a second and it copies everything to a RAM disk and then it proceeds to boot the environment from that RAM disk and If you're on standardized hardware Unlike free BSD which just drops you to a command prompt and it's like, all right boss, what do you wanna do now? This boots into an entire graphical environment with a curated experience, it's pretty nice,

and is much more like a traditional Linux experience, right Brent, like if you had tried Ubuntu Mate, this is what you would have experienced. Yeah, I'm not sure I would have been able to tell the difference, to be honest. And I think that's a good thing. It's nice to see, I guess we're calling this a free BSD distribution. Just have some nice sane defaults or someone who wants to get to

the desktop pretty quickly. This was a good experience. Now that said, I did run into issues as I kept working through our challenge list. We did give certain points in episode 600 to certain activities, so I worked all this week, well, and just before this show, to try to get as many points as possible. You know, I'm gonna beat you guys at something.

As we are setting up to record the show, this guy is working on his homework, last minute. I'm literally calling attendance, and he's sitting here filling out his homework, trying to get the highest score possible up to homework, last minute. I'm literally calling attendance and he's sitting here filling out his homework, trying to get the highest score possible up to the very last moment. Okay. Okay.

I can sympathize. I mean, there was no rule about that. All right, okay. So as part of my homework, I did catch one, well, there's a few things. Let's walk through the points here. Install BSD and get it online. Check, all of that worked for me.

So that's worth two points. Thank you very much. The next one here, record audio from a working desktop. So I did get a working desktop and I did, about five minutes before the show, send you a little audio file. You'll let me know what you think of it. Yeah, speaking of last minute homework, here I believe, it's a little audio file. You'll let me know what you think of it. Yeah, speaking of last minute homework here,

I believe it's a little quiet, but it's Brent on Ghost BSD. Hello, is this thing working? Chookity. Chookity? All right, I mean, it kind of sounds like garbage, but it did sound like garbage. You couldn't use it if you needed to record on it

for the show in reality. Yeah. And you probably couldn't use it if you needed to record on it for the show in reality. Yeah. And you probably couldn't use it to take a work call. No, I know. This was from a headset mic that I've used in many, many, many calls. Of course, I did not plug my podcasting microphone into it, just because I figured that would be a more realistic scenario for most people. And it sounds rough.

I think maybe there's some stuff that I could do to make it sound better, but... I feel like.5 point is fair. Oh, hey. Hey now. And in previous Deezed events, for many years, Linux audio has also sounded like that. So, well, here's the thing. And I'll just be honest with you guys right up front before we get to my section. I never got audio working. I intended to circle back to it, as they say, and I'll just be honest with you guys right up front before we get to my section. I never got audio working.

I intended to circle back to it, as they say, and get it working, but I've hooked up this little USB speaker that I've used for other things, and it has a little microphone on it, and it's just, I thought, a generic audio device. I hook it up, and it never gets detected. By FreeBSD or GhostBSD, I never got working audio out of this device.

And I'm sure if I would have gone through the closet, I probably could have found a USB audio device that would have worked fine. I just assumed this one would, and it did not. So I never actually got working audio. So I get no point for this. I mean, point five isn't that bad. Yeah, I'm in the same boat, so I think Brent

and several audience members really smoked us on that one. Yeah, yeah. Heck yeah, take that. Chris, and to confirm, I did take that audio device you were trying and I did try it on Linux and it worked perfectly fine. So not the device, definitely the software. Yeah, this is probably just not a driver.

I just assumed it was some super generic USB audio codec, but now you try it on FreeBSD and you find out, no, actually, somebody, some brave soul is maintaining some esoteric driver for this stupid speaker or whatever it's using, whatever chipset it's using in the Linux kernel. I did continue using this on my framework, which went pretty well. Although just today I shut the lid to put it on suspend because I figured, well, it's five minutes before the show. I should put this thing to sleep and it started.

Overheating I would call it fans of blasting with the lid down. And I thought, geez, that's not good. Yeah. Sure enough, I peeled open the screen and it was, it just had crashed. Basically it was on a prompt command prompt and nothing I can do, nowhere I can go. So it seems like sleeping, at least on the framework, 11th gen is not so nice with Ghost BST. So that's a little PSA.

Can I ask you something? Yeah, please. Did your crash screen have a cool Rust QR code? It did not. It did have some information, but I could not leave. I could not go to other TTYs to try to save this thing. It was just blasting heaps, blasting fans. Oh yeah.

And I just had to hard, hard reboot it. And just to make sure it wasn't me, I rebooted fresh and I put it to sleep and same deal. So that's a little disappointing. And does it, so it seemed like, I always love it when something crashes, especially at the system level. And then it just pegs the CPU. That's the best. That's so like, I've literally had situations where I've come into a room

and it's just like ridiculously hot. You're like, what is going on in here? And oh, this machine's been crashed for 24 hours, pegged out. Sorry. You didn't even get any Bitcoin for it. Right? Yeah.

So I guess maybe no sleep, no suspend for you on the framework for now. Yeah, which kind of is a deal breaker, I would say for most people. There might be a workaround, some way to fix this. I didn't have a chance to do any research because it happened a couple of minutes before the show, but to be noted, because that, yeah, didn't feel too good.

Yeah. I also, of course, ran into issues. So Wi-Fi worked at the studio, worked perfectly fine. I came home, that was not the case. And it took me a really long time to try to figure out. I had to like even open up WPA supplicant, you know, that old file that you haven't touched in ten years. And just to try to figure out what was going on. And my theory, the closest theory I can have, is that WPA2 isn't quite supported at the box it seems. My network here is WPA2

only and that didn't seem to work either so a little I don't know disappointed with that. Really? Yeah really. The GhostBSD wiki has a nice FAQ where they mention you know how to troubleshoot Wi-Fi if you need it but doesn doesn't mention anything about that. So again, I was maybe. As far as I know, there should be support for WPA2 and FreeBSD and GhostBSD is based on FreeBSD. Yeah, I was able to get it working with. WPA2, yeah. I think the studio uses WPA2.

That's what I could find as well. But it's the only thing I could see. So opening up WPA supplicant, it was saving my password for, the correct password for the network. But just marking it as WPA. So I don't, it needs more work. But that's another little hiccup I ran into.

And my experiences with BSD, you quickly have to basically dive into config files to try to troubleshoot some of these things. So a good way to learn. Is this guy, is he new to Linux? What's? Yeah, I don't mind. I mean, really the config files are pretty reasonable. They're pretty sensible and they're generally a handful that you really have to care about. Yeah, you do kind of have to end up learning like what are the core things. Okay, I want

to modify this part of the system that That's over in this.conf. Yeah. It's over here. And there's a few things that are stored in slash boot that would be stored in slash Etsy for Linux, and you have to kind of remap your brain around that. But it's not too bad. How did you manage the command line stuff in general, Brent? Yeah, I thought it felt kind of just right at home.

It felt like trying a new distribution where, OK, a couple of tools are renamed and they're a different tool, but they kind of function in a similar way. So installing packages and those kind of things, but really it felt very familiar. So I thought it was completely fine, totally fine. I would be very much okay with it. Not your opinion? No, I'm just glad to hear you didn't have a problem with it. Hmm. Not your opinion? No, I'm just glad to hear you didn't have a problem with it.

I, you know, I don't know. You guys saw it, I was like, I just want to use sudo. All the suggestions, all the guides online have a use sudo and then you're not actually supposed to use sudo. You're supposed to use do as or whatever. Well, I mean, supposed to is a strong word, right? Like you could do it. Well, it's not installed.

It's not installed. Well. Oh. It was installed by default on Ghost. On Ghost, it's not installed. It's not installed. Well. Oh. It was installed by default on Ghost. On Ghost, on Ghost, yeah. That was a nice- And that's true on some Linux setups too.

Not most these days, but historically that has been. Back in the day, you're right. You got root, you could set up pseudo if you wanted. You would have to set it up yourself, that's true. So it's just sort of that style. It is, you're right. Which fits, right? Yeah, yeah.

Okay, Brent, let's- Also, just point in favor in my mind, I think DoAs is a lovely little utility. Oh yeah? Well, just, I mean, the conf is so much simpler than, you know, the pseudo conf, I mean, maybe you want this with DoAs too, but the pseudo conf,

they had to come up with this whole VI pseudo thing because the pseudo conf is so easy to mess up that you can lock yourself out of the system. Yeah, and half the files, them warning you not to edit it directly. Right, yeah. So, like just the simplicity, it's not as full featured. You probably wouldn't want to use it in every situation,

but if you just want to have a normal user who can run things as root, super easy. I mean, this is kind of, right, like why we're on Linux now catching up in a way with the system to run improvements in terms of CLI UX. So anyway, that's my little Microsoft box on Doos. Well, you know, Wes, because you had a micro Microsoft box last week and told me, Brent, it's Doos.

And I was like, okay, okay, all right, this week I'm going to do that. And I got on Ghost and it wasn't even installed so I couldn't even use it. So I tried, I promise. All right, let's get to the points. What else did you do to stack points? Because I know you were doing your homework late. Yes, the last point here for two points is get one server or service running

accessible via the LAN. Yeah. How did you do? Well, it depends what you consider a service. I... So a few points here I kind of tried to combine. So I figured, jeez, I could just try SyncThing. That's a service and I could try hosting it maybe in a jail.

Maybe then I can get some extra points for running something inside a jail. That ended up as quite a nice rabbit hole. And I will say I failed at the jails part. The same thing is well known to not work with networking in jails. So maybe a bad choice on my end. I did dive into jails and they sounded very interesting. I didn't get far enough to get it working

in a way that I was happy with. So I would say more adventuring there. So when it comes to the five points, get an app running inside Ponman or Jailz, that is a total zero for me. Okay, all right, that's fine. That's kind of extra. Yeah, you got the audio file, so.

That said, I bailed on Jailz and just installed sync thing with, you know, normally, and got it up and running and used it through TailScale. And I found TailScale was very easy to install in BSD. It was just such a treat. And that was your experience too, right Chris? Yeah, so I think out of all of the things I set up on BSD, TailScale was the simplest.

Because nothing works by default, but TailScale had the least amount of shenanigans I had to go through to get it working. And combined with the fact that it's packaged upstream, so it's really easy to get installed. The FreeBSD package manager is very serviceable. Yeah, it's just in the port street, so you can just. No, you don't even, it's not even, you don't.

Oh, is it packaged? Yeah. I know it is a port too, but. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's in the, you can just use package install. That's right, oh wow. And it's fantastic. It's so easy. And you know, you just change a couple of things and it's up and running, you can even use package install. That's right, oh wow. And it's fantastic. It's super easy.

And you just change a couple things and it's up and running and you can tail scale up it. Really impressed, see every time, that's the only time I've ever got it working on BSD and all of the things which I'll talk about in a minute that I did get working, that was the easiest for me. So I agree with you, Brent. Yeah, getting tail scale working,

I realized I needed access to my password manager, which I was like, oh, it's on my hard drive hard drive like local hard drive I had installed ghost BSD to an external hard drive so I just had to access my internal hard drive on the framework no big deal except I did find out that it was actually a big deal because it's lux encrypted and lux encryption is not supported by default on the BSDs. There is a project I found, LibLuxSDE, which is considered a status experimental for Lux support, and I played with that for far too long

and could not get it working. So another little red flag there, I would say, if you've got Lux encrypted disks, that is not the standard way to do it on BSD, and I could not access mine even though I tried and tried and tried and tried. In reality, if you were a regular BSD user, you'd probably have this on ZFS. You'd be using some, yeah, you wouldn't be using Lux. But during this migration, if you were to

move over, it's important to realize this is going to be a roadblock. So that was a good learning experience. Did you consider ZFS native encryption? Well, I mean, that's what I used to install GhostBSD, but this was basically me testing on my hardware, not wanting to wipe my current hard drive because I would like to use that later. You wanted to be able to access already in Lux encrypted data.

Yeah, I mean, what I discovered by trying this week was that a lot of things I took for granted by trying Linux distributions were not necessarily true on BSD, and that was kind of the whole point of this experiment was, what do they do differently? Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. You just glanced off, I think, one of the key insights of the challenge.

Yeah. I think as Linux users, we start to take for granted how much stuff actually does work between distributions. Commands, things like lux encryption, file systems in general. You can really move between your Ubuntu's and your Fedora's and your Arches and your Nix's and it's really quite manageable.

Especially if you've been around long enough to know the slight variations you need for each flavor or whatever. Yeah, but this is truly a different world and some of the things that you relied on that you could just bring over don't work. I ran into this too and there's alternatives and often they're very clever alternatives,

but you need to migrate to that. It's a different world and not everything works the same. And it's, uh, in that way alone, it's an interesting technical challenge from just distro hopping. And I think you were just kind of glancing on that Brent, but I really think that's something to underscore. Yeah. And in that way, I don't think a two week challenge is actually enough

because there's some tools that map one to one, but really if you need to change your entire file system to reach the same level of functionality that you previously did, well maybe that takes a little bit more time. And so, yeah, I would agree a lot of tools I took for granted had a whole new way to configure them, whole new way to use them, sometimes arguably better, depending what you value, but it just meant I couldn't move very easily from one system to the other. So a lot of learning opportunities.

I do think you're definitely right that, you know, FreeBSD is deep enough that you could spend it, I mean, as long as you like, figuring out new and cool ways to use it. I kind of went into this thinking, you know, what if I keep one of these systems running ghost or free BSD? And, you know, what if I just used it ongoing

to try different stuff? And so I'll talk about that when we get to my section, but that was kind of my mindset when I went into it. We should, let's look at your total points though, Brent, because you're sounding like you're doing pretty good here. You got sync thing running, you got audio. You got, okay, all right. Did you total it up?

Well, there are a couple more points here I'll just work through really quickly. So get tail scale working on BSD system, check. Install and configure a firewall. I wasn't very intrigued by that, so I didn't even give it a try, even though that probably would have been easy points. So zero for me on that one.

Didn't you technically have to get PF up and running with a basic rule? Oh no, because you didn't do jails. Sorry. Never mind. Never mind. Nope. So I'm going to give myself a fail on that particular point. Next here, try out two BSDs.

So that could be net BSD, ghost BSD, free BSD. I certainly did that. So five points there. Next BSD, give that a try. That might be next week. So, haven't done that yet, zero points. And the last one here, get a non-BSD native video game running.

Right. I will say I took this very hard mode, but I did try. On the Pi 400 last week, I tried to get Steam going, which I understand is a very bad idea. All right, well let's total it up here. All right, what's your total? Well, here's where I have to fight for some points. You suggested that I should get 0.5 points

for my record audio from your working desktop, but I'm gonna push back on this one a little bit. Question, were you able to, how did it sound if you played audio? Because if that worked cleanly, then that sounds like more points. Like playing audio from any audio source sounded perfectly fine.

Playing that audio sounded identical. So it was definitely a recording issue. But audio worked out of the box. I will concede and for the full point for the audio, because I think the rules didn't say how good the audio has to be. That's true. Which is something maybe we keep in consideration

for the next check. I'm being a bit of a purist here. Yeah, you're right. We did not say, we just said you had to be able to record audio. As usual, the problem is in the spec. Well, here's my argument. This particular line has two aspects to it.

Record audio from a working desktop. So I think working desktop, I get a full point and record audio, I think I should get a half point for that because, you know, I was going to give you the full point. I know you were, but let's keep this interesting. So I think 1.5, you were going to give me 0.5. I want to argue for 1.5. Oh, I see. All right. I see. Because's a double because you can compounded it. It's true All right, let me do the math again Okay, and have you done your totals see what do you have? Well my total here looks like if I've done this live properly

25 and a half. Oh 25 points. Yeah, let's beat that one I don't know what the rubric should be but it sounds very impressive and you've definitely beaten me Yeah, that is that might be hard to beat. I don't know if the rubric should be, but it sounds very impressive. You've definitely beaten me. Yeah, that might be hard to beat. I don't know if I'm going to do it. Oh boy. Okay, all right. Well, I'm going to need you... You'll have to keep track of my points because I don't think I totaled mine up. But I like this compounding point idea. You may have just set precedent. We'll see. OnePassword.com slash unplugged. That's all lowercase.

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And one password famously solved that. But now extended access management, it solves these much larger problems now. Things that we just weren't really thinking about back in the day. And now it's security for the way we work today. And the great thing is it's generally available for companies that have Okta or Microsoft Entra, and it is in beta for Google Workspace customers as well. So go to onepassword.com slash unplugged. Go see why One Password is the award-winning password manager trusted by millions of users and over 150,000 businesses from IBM to Slack. And now you're securing more than just passwords

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I did I did run into a slight complication. I was dealing with a bit of an illness. So I didn't get to spend as much time in the BSD universe as I wanted but I did of course end up Having a lot of fun. So let's see maybe we can look through the Challenge rules again Brent you nicely summarized yours, but I did not I Definitely installed BSD. No problem. I got it running on a VPS. I got it running in a VM on my laptop. And this part I didn't get to do as much with as I wanted,

but I did get it booted on my T480. Oh, nice. These are some decent points here. Yeah, I did not manage to get audio working. I think I definitely could have. It was probably my fault on the host platform side in terms of the VM. And then in the hardware mode it

seems like it should have been supported I think I just didn't actually manage to enable the right thing. You actually have to turn it on. Yeah. Yeah. And I just didn't have enough time to quite get across that. One of my systems it saw the devices but it wouldn't play anything unless I implicitly went into like rc.conf and did like sound equals on or whatever and then the devices

could play sound. I did want to touch on just, I think it's neat that the BSDs still kind of have the whole C shell thing. It's just a different Unix heritage that you really don't see in the Linux side of things. I did ultimately just end up installing Fish because I love Fish, but I used the C shell for a bit, T-C-S-H. All right.

I mean, you're doing better than I thought for somebody who was down with the plague for the week. I did also manage to get one server or service running, which meant I did have to set up a firewall. I did manage to lock myself out of the VPS briefly, playing with firewalls. Nice. Also like what? There's like three firewalls that you get to choose between.

Obviously there's PF, which came from OpenBSD,s that you get to choose between obviously there's PF which came from open BSD Which got a port to free BSD and then there's the IPFW which is the one I tried. Oh, okay I did PF interesting. I didn't do anything crazy with I'd like to play with it more But that that wasn't bad totally reasonable to use well documented. Yeah, no problem. Yeah, I got jellyfin running Oh, that's a good point. So remote service working that one I just ran on the host, but I did manage to set up a jail. I didn't do a ton with it, but I just ran a little built-in Python web server,

and then I added in a ZFS dataset from the host. So that was my little, like, mock. Oh, this is kind of the container-y thing I would try to do. I want to spend more time with that. I didn't get Podman going, although that seemed quite promising. So that was my little like mock. Oh, this is kind of the container-y thing I would try to do. I want to spend more time with that. I didn't get Podman going, although that seemed quite promising. Well, all of a sudden I feel like I'm not doing so well here. Well, a lot of this I managed to do the previous week, sort of,

because I was doing a lot of the server-y stuff first. Before the plague really struck you? Yes. So I did manage to get Tailskell going. Oh, yeah, yeah. I just did the ports version because I saw those in there and I was... I'm glad that you got to try that because we didn't try the ports version, because I saw those in there. And I was like. I'm glad that you got to try that, because we didn't try the ports version,

so that's cool. That worked fine. I did not end up trying Ghost BSD or Net BSD or Open BSD, so I don't get any extra BSD points, free BSD only. Are you keeping, are you tallying up right? I'm tallying. Yeah. Sadly no video gaming or Nick's BSD.

Okay, okay, all right. That might be something we come back to sometime. I can see as maybe all three of us revisiting that implicitly. I did try to play briefly with the Linux compatibility mode. Oh yeah, okay. I got Reaper to launch in a VM,

but the audio stuff wasn't working, so it didn't actually do anything for me. And I don't, I'd seen other people report that it crashed trying to pick the audio device. So I don't know if it would have and I don't I'd seen other people report that like crashed trying to pick the audio Device so I don't know if it would have worked. I did get our dir working because that has a port But once again, I because I didn't get the audio parts on it and quite good of those the last stuff I was working on I think I was passively using Linux compatibility during my challenge, which I'll talk about I didn't actively use it

But I think some of the software I was using was relying on it. And you know, that should be another big point in FreeBSD's favor if we're tallying those twos, because like, Windows had to basically copy this with WSL V1, and then they ended up pivoting to a virtualization layer, whereas FreeBSD's, I mean, they've got their own virtualization layer, but also, you know, their compatibility mode's working pretty well.

Yeah. And they have different goals, and obviously they have a kernel that's a lot closer in many ways to Linux than the NT kernel is. So part of the problem, not problem, but I thought it would be funny if I could manage to get FreeBSD running on the ThinkPad and then show up to the studio looking like I was running Windows.

Oh, in a beard. But running Windows via Beehive. Because I saw that it's possible, and I actually got the installer going. But I must have done something wrong, because when Windows booted, it wasn't happy about some sort of driver thing or something. So I got to play with that more.

That had been hilarious. You did pretty good. I mean, OK, Brent, that's sounding, I don't know if it's 25 points, but it's close. I have a clarifying question here. Wes, did you get a desktop up and running? Oh, yes. Yes.

So in playing with Beehive and eventually trying to get that going, I did get plasma going. Ah, good. Good, good. I didn't get, it wasn't like a fully feature. It was a pretty bare bones sort of plasma. 527 release and all that. Yes. So it seems on the same point item here,

we might have a split. So you did not record any audio, but you did get a desktop going. So did you get one point for that one? Yeah, it's all right. So, okay, I think that's fair. So total here for Wes looks like 20 big BSD points. Hey, that is better than I thought I might do.

Congratulations, Wes. I honestly, you know, I thought I might do. Congratulations, Wes. I honestly, you know, I thought this would be the one. I really thought this would be the one where one of us would, I mean, maybe I won't make 20, we'll see. Maybe I'm the Windows user. I think I feel just a little bit like, maybe letdown's the wrong, I think Brent's phrasing of this isn't enough time

because like, I played a bit with like, when I was setting things up with like G part and some of the ways that free BSD does Storage on that layer, but then free BSD has also got the whole geom geom framework. That's really cool Obviously, they've got the like ZF tons of ZFS integrations and all the boot environment stuff Which I didn't really get to play with in any real way besides them just sort of existing So I'm left with there's a lot more that I wanna dabble in. Yeah, I actually, there's a couple of reasons

why I feel like there's more to dabble in. First of all, there's FreeBSD 15, which we could talk about. Oh yeah. Hank wrote in and he got FreeBSD 15 working on his Pi 4, which we're having troubles with the 14.2 release. He says, I've got FreeBSD 15 current running headless, but not before I applied a tweak, which he links us to.

I got lucky, this was posted two days before I gave it a go. So that's not fair. Yeah, really lucky. I installed it on a four gigabyte Pi 4B. I'm not sure if I'm gonna enter the challenge. I have no interest in a desktop or FreeBSD, but I just wanted to see if the ZFS corruption bug

I'm working on also affects FreeBSD, and it looks like it does. Oh, I'd like to know more about that, Hank. I said, so I lose points for no desktop environment, but I feel like I should get points for doing real work on FreeBSD. Yeah. Fair.

That is fair. IMHO, we should get a point just for figuring out how to configure NTP in the time zone. I agree. I agree 100%. Yeah. So what are we giving Hank here? NTP and the time zone, jeez. I agree. I agree 100%. So what are we giving Hank here? Install BSD get online, that's two points. NTP, I think we give him that one for another two points.

That's at least four points. I think we give him five at least for doing real work. All right, five for real work. So that looks like nine points at least. Not bad for writing in. We give him another point. Let's round it up for another point. He gets 10 points. There you go. Not bad for, and you know, and for writing in, we give him another point. Let's round it up for another point, he gets 10 points. There you go. 10 points for Hank.

Thanks Hank. 10 points for Hank. All right, so let me tell you about my challenge. Started off the first week pretty good, just using good old classic FreeBSD. One of my early wins was tail scale. Was really impressed with that. Before I left the FreeBSD world though, I did wanna get my remote service working.

And because I thought, why not do it the hard way, I wanted to see what it would be like to get it working with Podman. Oh yeah, I'm glad one of us got to go down this. And so the first Podman container I tried to run. After you, so you install Podman, I think you have to install a lot of the Linux, that's why I was saying the Linux compatibility stuff

gets installed. You do have to set up PF, so I had to set up a firewall in there and do some basic network routing so that way my containers could communicate with my ethernet. Right, you wanted other things to be able to access it. And I'm really impressed.

I mean, I think it may have literally been one line of config for PF to do this, maybe two. It might have been two lines of config. And then I had to start the pf service and enable it to come on a boot. And I think there's like a one line in rc.conf I had to add. I think we're like finally getting closer to this with nftables in some ways at least.

But yeah, there's a reason Docker does a whole bunch of iptables commands under the hood. You don't when you set up a container on Linux. However, Jellyfin, I got an error and it was basically complaining of the wrong architecture. It says the architecture either needs to be AMD 64 or FreeBSD and they didn't have a FreeBSD architecture available.

I didn't really dig into this too much further because I, A, figured I probably could have just installed it locally and B, realized I don't need another Jellyfin server. So pivoted and I went and got VS Code, the Podman container for VS Code up and running. Oh, for the server version? Yeah, for the web version of VS Code,

running via Podman on FreeBSD. And you better believe it worked great. Like I said, I had to get PF working before I could actually pull it up on another computer on the LAN. But once I did, I was able to pull up Visual Studio Code Editor on all my machines on the LAN, running off FreeBSD on Podman. Oh, that is neat.

It was great. And you know, for the most part, I was able to troubleshoot all of the errors relatively quickly. So I enjoyed that and used it for a little bit and moved on to Ghost BSD, which is fantastic. These guys are really cooking. If you want to check out the BSD Desktop World,

just go right to Ghost BSD. Mate or Mate looking great. It auto detects your video. If that fails, it brings up a nice end curses like UI to select your GPU drivers and then continues to boot. If you use their sort of relatively synaptic like basic package manager GUI, it also lets you auto create boot environment backups using ZFS that then get added to the boot menu slick to make it easy to roll back at a reboot. Really like that and a decent selection of packages, which meant. Boys, it is so easy to get retro gaming going on Ghost BSD, and I'll link to a couple of wiki entries on this. If you're an old school gamer, really, you're going to have no problem

on a free BSD Ghost BSD setup packaged in in there, right there is a great NES and SNES emulator. So I was able to get SNES and NES games running, no problem on FreeBSD, which is a non-native FreeBSD game check, and follow some of the Wiki stuff to get other things installed, just playing around. I also got Wine installed. And I came across, how do you think I say this, Wes? It's M-I-Z-U-T-A-M-A-R-I.

Mizutamari? Yeah. Okay. And this is really neat to see. It's an open source, user-friendly Wine front end built for FreeBSD. Wow. So we have a community out there that is building user-friendly wine front end built for FreeBSD. Wow. So we have a community out there that is building

user-facing desktop applications that are designed to make things just easier to get up and going. We've seen versions of this, you know, Bottles is a fantastic version of this on Linux, and it's a wine front end that gives you a GUI. It's pretty much just all bash scripts on the back end, but it gives you a GUI

with a predefined library of applications. So I was able to get things from like Angry Birds to common Windows applications installed. It automatically handles the 32-bit package stuff that you might need. It knows some of the things it needs to do to get it working on FreeBSD, like a little bit of like,

there's like a memory patch thing it does that you don't have to do on Linux. They take care of that. They also make it easy to access things. So once you get the application installed, you get a sub menu to like access Wine tricks or execute the application or browse the file system where it's at.

Like you can manage the Wine applications once they're installed with this application. So I was able to get lots of things up and going through Wine just as an experiment. And the interface is really simple, but fully effective and it's packaged. At least it was on Ghost BSD, you can just do package install M-I-Z-U-M-A,

and I think that was the package, and it'll install and you can just run it, and you're cooking with wine and a bunch of good old retro games too. So that was nice. I didn't even think about trying that. That is slick. I really had no idea if wine would work.

You know, I imagine the Linux compatibility stuff that I already had installed for Podman might have helped. I have no idea. Yeah, is it using that or is it a, do they have a version that just hooks into the necessary things on the free BSD side? Either way, very impressive. Oh, okay, Bren, have you been tallying up my score

as I go along? Well, reluctantly, because Wes, I think he might be pulling ahead here. Oh, really? That's fair, that's fair. Okay, what are we at? He's got a Podman-based VS Code server. I'm gonna give it to him. And while he's not working on his fancy coding stuff,

he's retro gaming. Yeah. He is. Like, we were together this week, and I don't know where you fit all this in. So I have a question for you. He's sneaky. Did you get any audio recorded, Chris? I did not get audio recorded.

All right, so maybe you get half points for the audio. Yeah, I did get audio. I got audio playback once I enabled sound. But I never got audio recorded. Yeah, I know. OK, so let's see here. Install BSD, two points there for you. Record audio and get it working from a desktop.

Half points, you get one point there. Get a service running, you get two full points. Now moving ahead, pod man, you got going, so that's five points. Install a firewall, well you had to do that too, that's another five points. Get tail scale working, yep. Five points there for you. Try out two BSDs, you had to do that too. That's another five points. Get tail scale working. Yup.

Five points there for you. Try out two BSDs. You sure did that. That's another five points. You did not try next BSD, right? Correct. Correct. Correct.

Correct. So zero points. I think we have got some homework there for later. Uh, get a non BSE native video game running. You are the only one to complete that one. That's another five points for a total. Let me see here. Yeah, yeah.

Doing the math, doing the math, doing the math. Total of 30 BSD points. No! Whoa! So that's 30 BSD points for Chris, 25 for Brent, 20 for Wes, and well, Hank got 10.

Not bad at all, boys. And I know we have probably some of the boost we're gonna be getting to as well. I think for the next challenge, the rule should be whoever gets the lowest points has to run Windows. Wes, that wasn't the rule this time. The rule was if you had to bail.

Yeah, I squeaked it out, I think. Yeah, if you had to bail. I think we change it to lowest points. At least amongst the three of us has to run Windows. I agree completely with that one. I wanna hear how the audience did, so I do wanna hear people's boost reports. I also think that means we're gonna need

another challenge, right? And we definitely need some suggestions on our next challenge. These are a lot of fun and it gets us out of our comfort zone. This one in particular, it got us out of our comfort zone in a way that I haven't been in a while and I loved it.

And it felt good and it was really nice to check in with the BSD's I feel like ghost BSD is kind of a star here obviously because I'm coming at it from a Linux users perspective I would love to know if if you're a free BSD purist out there and you're listening Are you rolling your eyes when I talk on about ghost BSD? Is there like a thing there? I don't know how active it is, but they did have a release in 2024. Did any of us try? I did not hello a Hello system? No, I forgot about that. That'd be another follow-up maybe.

So check this out though. GhostBSD is quote, making some important changes to how GhostBSD is built and released to provide a better, more stable experience for our users. So they're switching to the freeBSD release. Future GhostBSD versions will be based on FreeBSD release instead of stable. This will improve stability, reduce unexpected issues, and allow us to focus on more software

updates and tool development. Aligning with FreeBSD's release schedule, GhostBSD releases will now be planned for the same month as FreeBSD releases, ensuring better synchronization with free BSD updates. Sounds like a big change, but also sounds good. Yeah, sounds really good. I think the project's got a good future. They got a nice desktop. I mean, the only thing is can they handle the workload,

but they're on top of it. So one of my takeaways is if you're a Linux desktop user and you just want to dip your toe, just start with Ghost BSD, and you got a good free BSD system with a lot of the heavy lift on. But if you want to build it up from the, you know, sort of the bolts,

then you start with FreeBSD proper. I have to say a huge thank you to our community, you listeners, you were BSDing right there alongside us. We have a couple I'd like to mention here. So we did have Vic, who ran it on a Rock Pro 64 XFCE, that is, got some audio recorded and also hosted a pie hole in Podman

along with tail scale and DOS box. So impressive. SUCD also used FreeBSD via Proxmox, recorded some audio and got a spice console working and a bunch of other spice fanciness. So very very fancy code compost Maybe the fanciest of all shared a file of a desktop with us On a next cloud instance running a jail routed through a Raspberry Pi 4 running caddy in a jail as a reverse proxy

Screenshot is the main desktop running, tail scale on the very same machine. How many points does that get them? I'm gonna say at least 30. Let's say 31, so they beat Chris out. There we go. So thank you for everyone for playing along with us. It was super fun and sharing what you learnt and your struggles.

Now we do have Sheepman here who is in mumble via FreeBSD. Sheepman, what was your FreeBSD experience like? So I installed FreeBSD on a 2014 MacBook Air and discovered that its Wi-Fi card was not supported at all. So I pulled out my old 2011 and I got that running, had to recompile the kernel but I do have working Broadcom, Wi-Fi, and Plasma, and the whole darn show works perfectly. It's a useful system. It was built for BSD, and I'm keeping it this way.

Well done, you're right. It's true to its heritage that way. That's really great. Thank you, Sheepman. Just because our challenge is over doesn't mean we don't wanna hear your experiences. If you're still trying it out there, or give it a go and you're listening after the fact, you can still totally let us know how it goes.

We love hearing the adventures. Yeah, it's really made it kind of a special little event. And now it is time for the boost. You know what? Adversary 17 deserves this one. Very reliable, consistent supporter of the shows and they get the baller booster spot this week with 20,000 sats It's a good guy he's a good guy he's a real good guy no you great guy regarding transcripts

I listen to the bootleg so please don't worry about it for the bootleg feed sounds like a ton of work Yeah, the bootleg feed is two hours and 30 minutes right now for the bootleg feed. Sounds like a ton of work. Yeah, the bootleg feed is two hours and 30 minutes right now. Ironically. And you hand transcribed them. That's true, and I have been actually

for months, adversaries. The thing is, is that, things like a fountain don't display them because it's a private feed. So ironically, there is a transcript for the bootleg. It was one of the places we first started experimenting. But because it's a private feed, some podcast clients don't show it. TABBY DOG BOOSIN with $12,345. So the combination is one, two, three, four, five.

Finally caught a live episode. Happy to be here to listen as it's all happening. This was for last week's episode, our challenge check-in. Right on. Thank you, dog. Nice to hear. I always appreciate two people's comment or experiences with the live stream. Always appreciate those boosts. Well, SatStackert number seven sends in 5,000 sats. You're so boost! Hey, oh, I finally got to set up Audiobook Shelf for my Audible library. Really love it so far. I wonder what is your workflow for transferring newly bought books?

At the moment I manually convert them using libation and then upload them to Audiobook Shelf. Would love this to happen automatically when I buy a new book. Hahaha. Yeah man, me too! I was doing this last night. You know, pick up a couple audiobooks. when I buy a new book. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha a bookmark in my file manager, both in Dolphin and in files. That is just an FCS FTP mount to my audio books director. And then once they download, I just copy them over. I would love an automated process. As far as I know, there is libation CLI, but I've never seen a way

to do it automatically. That'd be it'd be so sweet to just buy an audible and show up an audio bookshelf. Does anybody know? Let us know. Gene Beans here with 4,444 sats. I fly. Says I use my laptop screen plus two external monitors every day and have for more years than I count. Okay, so checking in on the multi monitor.

We didn't get a lot of responses to this. Did any of us end up trying multi mon? No, I did not. I think I did either actually. Darn, that was one of our, Chris, you and I were, We were going to. We were low on HDMI cables, so we were sharing HDMI cables. Oh yeah.

And I was like, once you leave, I'm gonna try that. And never got around to it, so that's a sad. The Battle Bench definitely had a HDMI shortage. Also ether. And that was a problem. Yeah, yeah. There's room for improvement on the bench. There's that. It's new.

Gene continues, when I'm out and about, I generally use more than one screen if doing any real work. This little gem has come in super easy. And it links us to a Vision Owl portable monitor, which is a 15.6 inch travel screen. And it's USB-C 1080p. And it even has speakers built in.

I've actually used something very similar to this. Yeah, I don't hate this idea. Yeah. I at home- Really want this. I at home have a laptop mount, like a VESA mount, that's just a laptop tray, and then it's all on one pole, and then the other mount is one of these little portable monitors.

So I just put my laptop on the VESA mount and plug in the USB-C cord and I'm off to the races Thank you for the feedback gene being we're still curious to get more feedback on people's multi-monitor use User 63 comes in with 10,000 sats. Yeah, I got answers and I want some questions This is kind of fun. It seems like we're getting some stream of consciousness boots. Yes during the challenge I actually watch these ones come in live. I knew what he was up to. The first one? No way. Xorg didn't work because the root account was not in the video group, which is insane, as root should have access to everything.

Yeah, you're not really supposed to run X as root. Ha ha ha. And then comes in with a second boost. OK. I give up. Well, I mean. I give up. Well, I mean, I don't. Like DJ Khaled famously said on Hot Ones,

I promise you, if I stop, it doesn't mean I gave up. I'm gonna teach you something today. We can't play ourselves. We can't hurt ourselves. We can't hurt our health. Now you see, that's the key. That's some wise sounding stuff. I don't know if it's wise in itself, but it's wise sounding.

Thank you very much. I appreciate that user. I love the stream of consciousness. Well Podbun sent us two rows of ducks to share a little feedback. Things are looking up on all the duck. Here's one about our little YouTube rant. So many times podcasts that upload to YouTube aren't very audio friendly. They'll refer to stuff that the YouTube audience can see and seemingly

as an afterthought describe what's happening in the video quote for audio listeners. Yeah, it's the worst when an audio podcast transitions to a YouTube live stream and starts doing that. And YouTube just did last week this round of publicity about how they're taking over podcasting, how proud they are that YouTube is the place for all forms of entertainment now, the number one place for all forms, including podcasts, and that they're going to give out more money to more podcasters to get them to move to YouTube next year or this year. Bob Budden continues here, after working with two monitors at work, I've not been able to go back to computing

on a single monitor. I have a main high hertz monitor and a lower hertz monitor on the side. I'm stuck with 1080p as I don't see the use for 4K for me. I do like 1440p. I do think that's a nice sweet spot. So the way I've gotten by at home, because now I'm using the B-Link

and I'm no longer bringing the laptop home since the laptop is a goner, I hooked the B-Link up to one of those Samsung crazy ultra-wide monitors, the curved ultra-wide ones. It's just ridiculously wide and you can fit like three full window applications in the screen.

It's like the enterprise view screen for the RE. And it kind of reduces my need for multi-monitor at home. I find it works really well. And that's why I think GDOM shells work so well for me at home, where I, everywhere else, where I have multi-monitor, I have to have plasma. Thank you for the boost. Appreciate the feedback on the multi-mon.

FabBean comes in with 5,000 SATs. Use the boost. I'm running my Framework 13 Laptop plus two stacked ultra-wides every day. Each ultra-wide is 3440 by 1440 That sounds normal, right? I mean it sounds like the kind of setup I'd like now what you got to do is turn those things on their side right make them go vertical fab That's what you got. How else can you look at logs?

Appreciate the boost and I love the setup Tomato comes in with a thousand and two hundred and twenty two sad. This is a tasty burger. Something seems to have gone wrong with my demon update boost which shows as anonymous on the fountain website. But that was me, tomato. All right, all right, thank you. Oh but, oh here we go, now we're getting a demon update. Last Saturday night I sat down to install freeBSD. I hadn't really done so since 4.something but I'm sure it'll be easy. I'm a NetBSD user after all. Okay.

Well, the FreeBSD installer is not as easy as NetBSD. I eventually gave up trying to get ZFS to bouge on my T440P and started thinking about Comic Sans. Didn't boost in last week, out of shame. There's no shame in the game. and started thinking about Comic Sans. Didn't boost in last week, out of shame. Oh, there's no shame in the game, no. This week, I tried on a new machine, a more modern ThinkPad, got root on ZFS working,

thankfully, which for me is kind of the whole point of trying FreeBSD, and eventually X11, KDE, and sound. All right. I still can't get my preferred keyboard layout though. I went for a sync thing in a jail to get seven points instead of just two. Hey that's not fair. No that's good that's good game strategy was what that is right there. I also did a fresh install of my favored NetBSD which I don't normally run as a desktop but I have to say getting a graphical environment working there

was actually easier. In general, I find the NetBSD installation process much more pleasant, though I'm of course more familiar with it. Sure. Wes, you might enjoy looking at the NetBSD boot process. It's wonderfully simple. You can even get root on ZFS, though it's a manual process that makes for a slightly janky boot procedure. No worse than how Linux boots though. Yeah, that's good. And also you see he did his own math for us there too.

You see that? Oh, look at that. Yeah, okay. Six points for FreeBSD, installed online audio recording. Apparently owes us a link to that. Okay. Or maybe we missed it. That's totally possible.

It's probably in the chat, yeah. And Syncthing. 15 points for Syncthing in a jail, firewall configured, and I also installed a NetBSD desktop. Right. I don't think I'll keep the FreeBSD installation all said and done, but I am going to keep NetBSD on this laptop. It not only suspends, which FreeBSD couldn't do,

it even resumes. That's definitely good. But in general, I'm sticking with Linux as a desktop. Yeah, that was our take too. It was nice to visit. It's cool to see really impressive stuff over there. But Linux, there's just a whole world of compatibility and options over here, and things work much easier.

Although now I'm kind of thinking, I do want to try NixBSD. Yeah, I want to try NixBSD, to tell you the truth. Well, VMAX came in with 10,000 sets. I'm kind of thinking I do want to try NixBSD. Yeah, I want to try NixBSD, to tell you the truth. Ha ha! Well, VMAX came in with 10,000 sets. All systems are functional. If any of you out there do multi-room audio, or even any audio through Home Assistant, try out Music-Assistant.

It has an incredibly well-designed plugin system to let you choose a provider plugin, and then a player plug-in. I verified it works very well with Spotify and LMS, Squeezebox, Chromecast, Snapcast. Now that is compelling. I really do, really do, really do want to get into Music Assistant this year, especially now that the Nebuchadnezzar folks are selling the voice assistant preview hardware that has an audio

out jack. And each one of these can show up in Home Assistant and thus probably Music Assistant as an output destination. And you could do synchronized audio across all of these things. And they're like, you know, 20 bucks a puck. So I really could change the synchronized audio game. I think on our goal list for this year is to get both Wes and Brent on Home Assistant. Absolutely.

And then together, we'll for a first time all look at Music Assistant, which could be a blast. Done deal. So it's not in the works at the moment, but it is in the planning stages. And really appreciate the booze, right? Nice to hear from you. Casso Mears here with, I'm gonna say,

4,000 delicious sets. Coming in hot with the booze. Says they enjoyed the FreeBSD challenge. They scored a humble four points. After getting KD plasma, felt like cheating a little after the audio just worked for them. Hey, you're lucky. Sometimes you get lucky like that.

Love the reports, keep them coming if you tried it, and also want your ideas on future challenge ideas. Ideas on ideas, but you know what I mean. And thank you everybody who boosted in above 2000 sets. That is our cutoff line. We had our sat streamers come in with 31 of you streaming 59,569 sets. Thank you.

Sat streamers doing a nice heavy lift today. Really appreciate that. And then of course, when you combine that with our boosts, we stacked a grand humble total of 144,224 Sats. Not a killer week for us, but after a couple of great weeks, we just really still appreciate the support. That consistent support. We appreciate it very much. In fact, if you'd like to join in and get your message on the show and boost us, just grab something like Strikes so you get some Sats or whatever you prefer to buy your Sats,

maybe something like the Bitcoin Well or River. Then get a podcasting 2.0 app like Fountain or Podverse. There's lots. Listen to podcastapps.com and then you can boost in and support the show. And you can also check out all the cool new standards and stuff that's getting worked out as an open source community. And there's more things coming all the time. And if you have one of those podcasting 2.0 apps, you now have transcripts for this here Linux podcast. And that's always nice, because you can look things up, see what we said word for word, or get the name of something that hopefully it got right.

That's now available in podcasting 2.0 apps. I also think it was definitely one of those V for V weeks where if the value wasn't totally in the SAT column, it was most definitely in the experience report column. Definitely. And the contributions to the show, that's always a great way to also send value back. It's not just treasure, it's time and talent too.

All of it keeps the show going, and it together helps us create the world's largest Linux podcast, keeps it on the road with the listeners as the biggest customer. I wanted to give a shout out since it's sort of beginning of the year. We haven't mentioned it in quite a long time. We have told you about this pick before, but because we use it so extensively to produce the show, it felt only fair that we give them another plug and it is

HedgeDoc, H-E-D-G-E-D-O-C, H-DOC, which lets you create real time collaborative markdown notes licensed in GPL 3. HEDGE-DOC 1 is nice and stable. We've been using it for years. Love it, depend on it. And HEDGE-DOC 2 is coming along very nice. It's a rewrite of HEDGE-DOC completely from the ground up. It's got some new improvements in the UI, just sort of a refactoring of the way they do things. And so HedgeDock 1 is in maintenance, and if you've been curious about HedgeDock at all, I think it's worth now to start tracking HedgeDock 2.

They're both improvements in how it's built, but also they refactored into two components, the backend and the frontend. You can run both together or run them independently. Ooh, I'm curious about this. Yeah, I will second just, you know, it's super easy to get going, at least for V1, and where it really shines is

it's just got great Markdown support. It's a Markdown implementation, supports all the things that you're used to having in Markdown. And it's good as Google Docs in real-time editing. Yeah, that's just it. The eventual consistent sort of like merging things cleanly is superb. It's got a bunch of great features around there, too.

But if a collaborative Markdown editor that runs a web browser doesn't interest you, then perhaps, if you like me, do have a GNOME system from time to time, you might want to add water. This is a utility that makes Firefox look like a native GNOME system from time to time, you might want to add water. This is a utility that makes Firefox look like a native GNOME application. Like you know how it just sort of doesn't quite fit, not like Epiphany or GNOME Web does.

It just sort of looks a little bit out of place. Well, when you add water, which is the name of the app, it helps you with just a few check boxes, keep Firefox GNOME-ly fashionable and fit right in with the old GNOME design ethos. Oh, this is fun. I know there's been various extensions or other ways to sort of go about the same idea.

Like 100 years ago, I did a guide. It was like, get this plug-in, get this plug-in, change this on the config, add this extension. But this is just a flatback I can get with some toggles? OK. Yeah. Yeah, it's really pretty nice. And it makes Firefox look like it belongs

on your GNOME desktop. You can see they'll have some screenshots up on FlatHub. And that looks more like GNOME Web than it does Firefox. Yeah. I used to do this, and I think I'm gonna do it. The only problem is that I run Plasma and I run GNOME, and I run a lot more Plasma than I run GNOME, and it syncs.

My Firefox syncs. So when I when I make it look all awesome on one desktop, it looks out of place on the desktop. So I just kind of go for the baseline look. I was just going to joke. Yeah, should we get it going on all of our KDE just because? No. But if you if you know, if you are an all GNOME user, definitely add water. I give it a good record. Hey, OK, we've got to do our license check. Is true grits rightfully points out.

Oh, for Adwater? Well, and HedgeDoc. No, HedgeDoc is, yeah. You did it, yeah, GPL3, great. Yeah, HedgeDoc is GPL3. Adwater, I could go, are you pulling it up right now? I'm looking. I'm feeling like it's also GPL, you know?

I'm feeling GPL. This app is developed, yeah, GNU GPLv3. Yeah, I had that, yeah, GPL 3, yeah. Had that sort of GPL feel, you know? That sort of smooth, sort of velvety feel. Software you can trust. Yeah, I wanna take a second before we run and just say thank you everybody who decided to get

into the FreeBSD challenge with us. It was a lot of fun to do it with you. And to see some of you updating us in the matrix or via boost or email. All the avenues of communication were popping throughout the couple of weeks that we did this with people's experiences. And it lets us get a better, you know, sense of it. We can't, again, we've been complaining. There's just not enough time in a two-week challenge, but we kind of get more of the landscape thanks to everyone else doing it in parallel. Totally. Yeah, I'm really,

I don't know what our next challenge will be. I'm really looking forward to doing it. This one sort of reinvigorated my interest in it. So we'd love to hear your ideas. Please do send those in to us. I would also love to hear if anyone ended up losing the challenge and needs to run Windows with Comic Sans. Let us know.

Oh yeah. Jeff, is that you? That's me. Oh good. I'm glad somebody ended up, I thought for sure one of us would and then nobody does. Here you go, Jeff. That's just for you. Ah, thanks. I'm glad somebody ended up. I thought for sure one of us would, and then nobody does. Here you go, Jeff.

That's just for you, buddy. Ah, thanks. Feels like home. Ugh. Oh, all right. We'd love to have you join us live, too. It always makes it a lot of fun. Of course, we make it a Linux Tuesday on a Sunday. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad state. Yeah, that's right.

Noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern, over at jblive JBlive.tv in your web browser or JBlive.fm and whatever can stream an MP3 stream, just go to JBlive.fm directly. And of course the Mumble Room has that low latency, high quality opus stream coming right off the mixer, details at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash mumble. And don't forget the launch is going to have a live stream 1130am Pacific and we'd love to have you come and hang out for the open mumble hour or half hour, whatever it is. Links to what we talked about today, linuxunplugged.com slash 602. Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of your unplugged program.

We'll see you right back here next Tuesday as in Sunday. Hey! Thank you. you