2025-07-14 19:34 (Monday)

I have bought myself a "new" refurbished Dell Laptop 7390 to use as
a *nix general purpose machine (web, email, news, gopher etc).

I thought I'd do something different this time, though, and install
a *BSD OS.

I've decided initially to try FreeBSD and I've installed the base
system (I'm using it now to SSH to my gopher VPS). 

The next step is to install X and my preferred Window Manager of i3

It's a long time since I installed X by hand, from scratch. My
recent Linux installs have all included X (apart from headless
Raspberry Pi, where X is unnecessary).

I'll update this post as I proceed with the install

=====================

UPDATE 2025-07-15

The install went fairly smoothly, and I got X and i3wm running. All
seemed good, if confusing - the filesystem structure is a bit
different to Linux.

BUT.... there were many random crashes. No obvious pattern, just
BANG... OS crash. Reboot ok. Might survive an hour or more, might
crash several times within  2 minutes of rebooting....

I gave up and install Devuan 5.0 - a Systemd-free fork of Debian.

Everything went relatively smoothly - once I used the "Expert"
Installation to make sure a partition was made for UEFI booting.
I'm not fully sure how UEFI works, but it makes things a bit more
complicated.

I now have a working Linux laptop. There's no "Display Manager" -
it boots to the console and X is started in the traditional way
with "startx" - and uses a .xinitrc to start a Window Manager (and
set the X environment keymap) 

I've installed:

vim slrn alpine irssi i3wm - including the "autotiling" python
script lxterminal ranger firefox - including NERD fonts for file
icons hexchat connman UMN Gopher sacc bombadillo lynx kristall
filezilla minicom putty

I disabled ipv6 via grub - otherwise connman seems to mess up DNS
resolution - some sites are found (via ipv6) and some aren't
(including the devuan deb repository!) disabling ipv6 means
everthing is done via ipv4 and works.

The ipv6 is disabled in grub by

edit /etc/default/grub and add "ipv6.disable=1" to the CMDLINE
thus:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet ipv6.disable=1"

run 'update-grub' (or was it 'update=grub2' ?? to configure the
kernel boot parameters.

reboot

ipv6 gone!

== UPDATE Fri 17 July ==


= brltty =

I removed 'brltty' as there was some conflict when I tried plugging
in a USB Serial adaptor.

Some warnings on boot from "startpar" that it failed to start
'brltty' were solved by

1) remove redundant 'brltty' init script from /etc/init.d 2) remove
/etc/init.d/.depends* files, which tell 'startpar' what scripts to
run in parallel at boot 3) regenerate new .depends* files by
running 'sudo insserv'

Boot now shows no 'startpar' warning/failure

= exim4 =

I got mails from exim4 about a "panic" due to no ipv6...

These were stopped by editing /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf

and removing the ::1 from dc_local_interfaces such that it's this:

dc_local_interfaces='127.0.0.1'

also added 

disable_ipv6='true' for good measure.

run 'update-exim4.conf' toset the new config.

= firmware i915/kbl_dmc =

Boot messages 

firmware: failed to load i915/kbl_dmc_ver1_04.bin (-2)

resolved by installing firmware-misc-nonfree

the missing firmware is for powermanagement (CPU speed??) and the
system functions without it, but perhaps it's worth having in a
laptop that runs on battery?

== Software ==

Installed 'dillo' to use for browsing 'smolWeb' sites - to see how
they render in a simple browser.

Installed 'gimp' to use for preparing Kate's artwork for sending to
the printers. This is a steep learning curve!

== Lid Switch turns off WiFi etc. == 


vi /etc/elogind/logingd.conf

==================================== 
HandleLidSwitch=ignore
HandleLidSwitchExternalPower=ignore 
HandleLidSwitchDocked=ignore
====================================


service elogind reload


= Colour Man Pages =

I vaguely remember having colour in Man pages in the past, and saw
a few examples on You Tube videos, so it /is/ possible...

I installed "most" as a pager to replace "less" and set it as PAGER
in .bashrc

export PAGER='most' 


after reloading .bashrc (log out/in, or just " . .bashrc "

I have coloured man pages.

= Hexchat - warning on startup about notification = 

Failed loading notification plugin:
GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name
org.freedesktop.Notifications was not provided by any .service
files

found it was due to missing "dunst" (or another
notification-daemon).

After installing dunst there is systray icon in the i3status
bar when I start hexchat.

I also installed libnotify-bin and tested with ;

notify-send "test"