Jenny’s Daily Drivers: FreeBSD 13.2

Last month I started a series in which I try out different operating systems with the aim of using them for my everyday work, and my pick was Slackware 15, the latest version of the first Linux distro I tried back in the mid 1990s. I’ll be back with more Linux-based operating systems in due course, but the whole point of this series is to roam as far and wide as possible and try every reasonable OS I can. Thus today I’m making the obvious first sideways step and trying a BSD-based operating system. These are uncharted waters for me and there was a substantial choice to be made as to which one, so after reading around the subject I settled on FreeBSD as it seemed the most accessible.

Most readers will be aware that the BSD operating systems trace their heritage in a direct line back to the original AT&T UNIX, while GNU/Linux is a pretty good UNIX clone originating with Linus Torvalds in the early 1990s and Richard Stallman’s GNU project from the 1980s onwards. This means that for Linux users there’s a difference in language to get used to.

Where Linux is a kernel around which distributions are built with different implementations of the userland components, the various BSD operating systems are different operating systems in their own right. Thus we talk about for example Slackware and Debian as different Linux distributions, but by contrast NetBSD and FreeBSD are different operating systems even if they have a shared history. There are BSD distributions such as GhostBSD which use FreeBSD as its core, but it’s a far less common word in this context. So I snagged the FreeBSD 13.2 USB stick file from the torrent, and wrote it to a USB Flash drive. Out with the Hackaday test PC, and on with the show.

Installing FreeBSD was as simple as booting from the live USB drive and running the install script. The feel is very old-school with a text-based interface, but it was all pretty plain sailing. There’s an option for automatically partitioning the disk, and then selecting some base services to install if you need them, and then it goes through the process of installation. At the end you have a working FreeBSD operating system.

A typical popular Linux distro install will try to configure your system and install the software you’ll need. So as part of the setup you’ll create users, and either select from a vast software library or let it install a lot of software among which will be the programs you need. The chances are it will also configure itself to boot into a graphical desktop, and once the install is finished there’s nothing more to do except get on with using it as a desktop machine.

If that’s what you expect from an operating system then it’s fair to say that FreeBSD is not for you, because it takes the approach of giving you a blank canvas upon which you can write your own story. You get FreeBSD, a command prompt into which you can log in as root, and that’s it.

Your first task is to add an everyday user for yourself using adduser, and before you can even give yourself sudo privileges you have to install sudo. This gives your first use of the pkg package manager, which as a long-time user of equivalent Linux distro package managers I found easy enough to use. I wanted a desktop environment, so it was off to pkg again to install X, then a desktop environment (I went with Lumina, but there are plenty of choices), and such useful applications as Firefox, GIMP, OpenSCAD, and KiCAD. None of this was particularly challenging, though I did have to search for a few online guides to configure the desktop environment.

So while it requires a little bit of familiarity with a UNIX or UNIX-like OS to get started, getting to a desktop computer for daily use in FreeBSD is pretty straightforward. And that meant that I was ready to write this article, with one exception. My video card is an Nvidia GT520, a pretty ancient GPU that had been dropped into my test PC as a replacement for a younger card that had gone on to new pastures.

FreeBSD doesn’t come with drivers out of the box in the way that a full-featured Linux distro does, so if you have something unusual then it’s up to you to find and install a driver. So I was stuck with VESA resolutions until I could install a driver, and here I hit a snag. Nvidia are good at supporting their cards with FreeBSD drivers, but one this ancient had dropped out of their support long ago. The last one I could find supporting it didn’t want to play ball, so I never managed to unleash my GPU’s potential. This is not in criticism of FreeBSD, it’s an ancient card.

Thus this piece has been written in a very retro-feeling 1024 by 768 VESA resolution, but aside from that I’ve come away rather liking FreeBSD. I like its stripped-down installation on which in contrast to a typical Linux distro you must install everything you need, I like it that the installation process was relatively painless for a medium-expertise Linux user like me. I like its speed, and I’ve found it a very acceptable daily driver indeed. There are certainly Linux distributions whose installation is far less easy.

I’m sure with a newer supported video card I would have had the full resolution, and it’s an OS I may even put on another PC with better spec to continue experimenting with. If I have a gripe with FreeBSD though, it’s in the documentation for newbies. I had my years of experience with Linux to help me find what I needed, but even though the installation process is relatively painless I found the answers to my few queries could be difficult to prise out. It’s definitely an OS to look at, but occasionally you’ll need to exercise elite Google-fu if you’re not a UNIX savant. Go on, give it a try!