= 2026-05-13 Wednesday = 

=== Migrating to FreeBSD on my laptop ===

I've played with many different *nix setups over the years. Mostly
linux of various distributions:

Mandrake
Red Hat
Debian
Ubuntu
Antix
Mint
Arch
Devuan

Last year I switched my laptop to Devuan after using Antix and
wanting to return to "Debian" but avoid systemd.

I was happy with the Daedalus release after I'd tried the current
stable release: "Excalibur" and I found my Dell 7390 would randomly
crash - just froze solid. I'd seen the same symptoms with an
install of Arch, I assumed a kernel bug/issue. Downgrading Devuan
to "Daedalus" solved the issue.

That was a year ago, so this week I though it was time to try
again, surely the bug would have been caught & fixed and the
current kernel in Excalibur would be ok?

I did a dist-upgrade to Excalibur and all seemed okay for the
first couple of hours, then I found it had crashed/frozen, just
like the previous time.

This time I wasn't interested in re-installing a fresh "Daedalus"
which is now marked as "Old Stable". 

Time to move away from Linux completely. I've got a couple of *BSD
systems here - two old Samsung netbooks running FreeBSD and
OpenBSD. Just a "servers" - headless, stashed away in my shed on
the LAN.

I thought it was time to try FreeBSD as a user - on a laptop I use
for all my everyday computing. A Dell 7390. 

All my $HOME directory is backed up in several places, so I have
access to all my files/documents and dotfiles. So I did a full
fresh install of FreeBSD 15.0.

Lots of time passed as I got to grips with the minor differences
between Linux and FreeBSD, but I've got it sorted now and
everything I want is working fine.

I've got X and the i3 window manager - as a change from DWM (I did
compile and run my own patched DWM ok, but I fancied a change, back
to i3 for a while).

I've got my HP network printer working via CUPS and HPLIP.

I like to mess about with old network protocols, so I got these
services running:


fingerd
ftpd
telnetd
rwhod
ntpd

as well as 

sshd
cups

I've installed (among other stuff):

xorg
xscreensaver
dbus
nano
most
pulseaudio
tmux

Console clients:

compiled and installed urxvt v9.30 
alpine
slrn
gopher
bombadillo
sacc
lynx
vf1

Graphical clients:

i3
librewolf
claws-mail
thunar
gnucash

and various other bits 

fusefs-jmptfs - to allow mounting a mobile phone as a USB drive

I'll leave a list of all the packages in the /computer/notes area

=== Irritations ===

Suspend / Wake doesn't work. 

Suspend (S3) seems to work but the machine won't wake up, it needs
a full reboot to bring it back to life. So I'll get used to
managing that - in fact until recent experience with Devuan on this
laptop I've never used Suspend-to-RAM before anyway, so it's hardly
a major problem.

Otherwise I like it!

It's nice to try and move away from the ever-changing-never-stable
Linux world. 

Let's see how I get on with FreeBSD as a "desktop" user!

J