602: The BSD Humbling

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 going to round out the show with some great boosts, some killer picks, and a lot more. So before we get into all of that,

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.

Oh, this is exciting.

Oh. This is huge for us, obviously, just because of the Nix journey we've been on. But this is the first Planet Nix. 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 LinuxFest 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 Phlox. They're making our coverage possible.

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 going to 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 launch of the relaunch of the launch happened very quickly and CG Bass 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, All right, boys, it is the end of the FreeBSD Challenge.

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.

Yeah, we were sitting there at the BSD bench as we were busting through all of this.

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 really quick. It does a fun little trick. 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.

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 FreeBSD distribution.

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 the very last moment.

Okay i.

Can um sympathize.

I mean there was no rule about that.

All right okay.

So uh 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 quiet, but it's Brent on Ghost BSD. all right i mean it kind of sounds like garbage but.

It does sound like garbage i.

Couldn't use it if you needed to record on it for the show if reality yeah.

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 0.5.

Point is fair oh.

Hey hey now.

And in previous.

Defense you know 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 uh 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, and, And I hook it up, and it never gets detected by FreeBSD or GhostBSD. I never got working audio out of this device.

Yeah, I'm in the same boat, so I think Brent and several audience members really smoked us on that point.

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, there's 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 are blasting with the lid down. And I thought, geez, that's not good. Sure enough, I peeled open the screen and it just had crashed, basically. It was on a prompt, command prompt, and nothing I can do, nowhere I can go.

Can I ask you something?

Yeah, please.

Uh, 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, uh, save this thing. It was just blasting heat.

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.

Yeah so i guess maybe no 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 um 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 minutes before the show but to be noted because that uh yeah it didn't feel too good, 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.

Really?

Yeah, really. The GhostBSD wiki has a nice FAQ where they mention how to troubleshoot Wi-Fi if you need it. But it 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.

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, the correct password for the network, but just marking it as WPA. So, it needs more work. Okay. But that's another little hiccup I ran into. And my experience is 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?

Yeah, I don't mind. I mean, really, the config files are pretty reasonable. You know, 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's over in this .conf, and this bit'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, okay, 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. I, you know, I don't know. You guys saw, 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. On Ghost, yeah.

That was a nice idea as well.

And that's true on some Linux setups, too. Not most of 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.

Which fits, right?

Yeah, yeah. Okay, Brett, let's...

Also, just point in favor in my mind, I think do-as 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 do-as 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 file is them warning you not to edit it directly.

Right, yeah. So just the simplicity, it's not as full-featured. You probably wouldn't want to use it in every situation, but you just want to have a normal user who can run things as root. Super easy. I mean, this is kind of why we're on Linux now, catching up in a way with the systemd run improvements in terms of CLI UX. So anyway, that's my little micro-soapbox on 2S.

Well, you know, Wes, because you had a micro micro soapbox last week and told me, Brent, it's do as. 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? Cause 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. So a few points here, I kind of tried to combine. So I figured, geez, 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.

All right. That's fine. That's kind of extra.

Yeah. You got the audio file.

So that said, I bailed on jails and just installed sync thing with, you know, normally and got it up and running and used it through tail scale. And I found tail scale 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, tail scale was the simplest because nothing works by default but tail scale had the least amount of shenanigans i had to go through to get it working and the combined with the fact that it's packaged upstream so it's really easy to get installed the free the free bsd 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 know oh is it packaged i know.

It is a port too but.

Yeah yeah yeah but it's a it's in the you can just use package install and it's fantastic super easy and you know you just change a couple things and it's up and running and you tail scale up it. Really impressed. See, every time I, 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.

Getting Tailscale working, I realized I needed access to my password manager, which I was like, oh, it's on my hard drive, like local hard drive. I had installed GhostBSD 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.

If you were a regular BSD user, you'd probably have, you know, this on ZFS. You'd be using some, yeah, you wouldn't, 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, 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 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. I think as Linux users, we start to take for granted how much stuff actually does work between distributions, commands, things like Lux encryption, the 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 in that way alone, it's an interesting technical challenge from just distro hopping.

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, a whole new way to use them, sometimes arguably better, depending what you value.

I do think you're definitely right that, you know, FreeBSD is deep enough that you could 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?

Well there are a couple more points here i'll just work through really quickly so get tailscale 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. Cause you didn't do jails. Sorry. Nevermind. Nevermind.

Nope. So I'm going to give myself a fail on that particular point. Um, 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. 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.

Good man. Good man.

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 going to push back on this one a little bit.

Question, 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 chapter.

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. No, I was going to give you the full point. Well, 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. I like this. All right, I see, because it's a double, because you compounded it.

It's true.

All right, let me do the math again. Okay, and have you done your totals? Let's see if, what do you have?

Well, my total here, it looks like if I've done this live properly, 25 and a half.

Oh, 25 points.

Yeah, let's see you guys 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 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 it's the number one onepassword.com slash unplugged okay let's be real Honestly, do your end users always, and I mean without exception,

Well, Wes, I'm curious to hear how your week went. Did you do as I did and BSD this week?

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.

Okay.

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. There's 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.

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, TCSH.

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 while 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, which got a port to FreeBSD. And then there's the IPFW, which is the one I tried.

Oh, OK. I did PF. Interesting.

I didn't do anything crazy with it. I'd like to play with it more, but that wasn't bad. Totally reasonable to use. Well documented.

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 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 servery stuff first.

Before the plague really struck you?

Yes. So I did manage to get Tailscale going.

Oh, yeah.

I just did the ports version, because I saw that was in there.

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 GhostBSD or NetBSD or OpenBSD, so I don't get any extra BSD points. FreeBSD only.

Are you tallying up right?

I'm tallying.

Yeah.

Sadly no video gaming or uh nix bsd okay.

Okay all right that might be something we come back to sometime i could see it's 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 oh in a vm oh 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 like crashed trying to pick the audio device so i don't know if it would worked i did get ardor working because that has a port um but once again i because i didn't get the audio parts all i didn't quite get that was the last stuff i was working on i.

Think i was passively using linux compatibility during uh 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 telling in those twos because like windows had to basically copy this with WSL v1. That's a great point. And then they ended up pivoting to a virtualization layer, whereas FreeBSDs, 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, you know, NT kernel is.

That would have been hilarious You did pretty good 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 featured, it was a pretty bare bones sort of Plasma setup.

527 release and all that.

Yes.

Yeah.

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, 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 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 Gpart and some of the ways that FreeBSD does storage on that layer. But then FreeBSD has also got the whole Geom framework.

Yeah, 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 were 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. That's not fair. He got really lucky. I installed it on a 4-gigabyte Pi 4B.

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? Install BSD, get online, that's two points. NTP, I think we'd give him that one for another two points. That's at least four points.

Yeah, and 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, 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, Hank.

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 free BSD. One of my early wins was tail scale. I was really impressed with that. Before I left the FreeBSD world, though, I did want to 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 at 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 IP tables commands under the hood. And 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 AMD64 or FreeBSD. And they didn't have a FreeBSD architecture available. I didn't really dig into this too much further because I, A,

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 GhostBSD, which is fantastic. These guys are really cooking. If you want to check out the BSD desktop world, just go right to GhostBSD. Mate Armate 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.

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 there, right there, is a great NES and SNES emulator.

Mizutamari?

Yeah. Okay. 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-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.

I didn't even think about trying that that is slick.

I really had no idea if wine would work you know i 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 do they have a version that just hooks into the necessary things on the FreeBSD side? Either way, very impressive.

Okay, Brent, 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 going to give it to him. And while he's not working on his fancy coding stuff, he's retro gaming.

Jeez.

Like we were together this week and i don't know where you fit all this in so i have a question for you sneaky did you get any audio recorded chris i did not get audio recorded all right so maybe you get half points yeah i did get audio.

I got audio playback once i enabled sound.

But i never got audio recorded.

Yeah i know.

Okay 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 uh get a service running you get two full points now moving ahead podman you got going so that's five points install a firewall well you had to do that too that's another five points oh get tail scale working yep five points there for you try out two bsds you sure did that that's another five points you did not try nick's bsd right correct correct correct

Doing the math, doing the math, doing the math.

Total of? 30 BSD points.

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 in the booths we're going to 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 want to hear how the audience did, so I do want to hear people's boost reports.

I also think that means we're going to need another challenge, right?

Yeah, 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 BSDs. I feel like Ghost BSD is kind of a star here, obviously because I'm coming at it from a Linux user's perspective.

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 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 free BSD release, future Ghost BSD versions will be based on free BSD release instead of stable. This will improve stability, reduce unexpected issues, and allow us to focus on more software updates and tool development.

Sounds like a big change, but also sounds good.

Yeah, it 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 GhostBSD. 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 free BSD 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 RockPro 64, XFCE that is, got some audio recorded, and also hosted a piehole in Podman along with Tailscale and DOSBox. 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.

I'm going to say at least 30.

Let's say 31 because I beat Chris out.

There we go.

So thank you for everyone for playing along with us. It was super fun and sharing what you learned and your struggles. Now we do have Sheetman here who is in Mumble via FreeBSD. Sheetman, 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, Sheep Man. Just because our challenge is over doesn't mean we don't want to hear your experiences. If you're still trying it out there or you 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.

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. That's a good guy. Regarding transcripts, I listened to the bootlegs, 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. Ironically.

And you hand transcribe 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's one of the places we first started experimenting. But because it's a private feed, some podcast clients don't show it.

Tebidog boosts in with 12,345 sets. Finally got 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, too, people's comment or experiences with the live stream. Always appreciate those boos.

Well, SatStacker number seven sends in 5,000 sats. Heyo, I finally got to set up Audiobookshelf for my Audible library. Really love it so far. and wonder, what is your workflow for transferring newly bought books? At the moment, I manually convert them using Libation and then upload them to Audiobookshelf. Would love this to happen automatically when I buy a new book.

Yeah, man. Me too. I was doing this last night. You know, pick up a couple audiobooks. I don't ever use the Audible app anymore.

I did not.

I think i did either actually darn that was one of our chris you and i We were low.

On HDMI cables, so we were sharing HDMI cables. And I was like, once you leave, I'm going to try that. And never got around to it, so that's so 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.

Jing continues, when I'm out and about, I generally use more than one screen of doing any real work. This little gem has come in super easy. And he 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- I really want this. I at home have a laptop mount, like a Visa 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 Visa mount and plug in the USB-C cord and I'm off to the races thank you for the feedback Gene Bean we're still curious too to get more feedback on people's multi-monitor use.

User 63 comes in with 10,000 SATs, This is kind of fun. It seems like we're getting some stream of consciousness boosts during the challenge.

I actually watched 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's root.

And then comes in with a second boost. Okay. 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 going to 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, Deezer. I love the stream of consciousness.

Well, Podbun sent us two rows of ducks to share a little feedback. 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, And 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've 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 hook 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 RV.

And it kind of reduces my need for multi-monitor at home. I find it works really well. And that's why I think Gnome Shell has worked so well for me at home. 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. I'm running my Framework 13 laptop plus two stacked ultrawides every day. Each ultrawide is 3440 by 1440.

Else can you look at logs.

Appreciate the boost and the love of the setup.

Tomato comes in with 8222 sats, Something seems to have gone wrong with my daemon update boost, which shows is 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 daemon 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 booze 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, no.

This week, I tried on a new machine, a more modern ThinkPad. Got rude on ZFS working, thankfully, which for me is kind of the whole point of trying FreeBSD. And eventually, X11, KDE, and sound. Alright. 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 favorite NetBSD, which I don't normally run as a desktop. But I have to say, getting the graphical environment working there was actually easier.

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 free bsd installed online audio recording uh apparently owes us a link to that or maybe we missed it that's totally probably in the chat yeah uh and sync thing 15 points for sync thing in a jail firewall configured and i also installed a net bsd desktop right i don't think i'll keep the free bsd installation all said and done but i am going to keep net bsd on this laptop it not only suspends which free bsd couldn't do it even resumes that's.

Definitely that's definitely good.

But in general i'm sticking with linux as a desktop yeah.

That was our take too like It was nice to visit. It's cool to see. Really impressive stuff over there. But Linux, you know, 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 Nick's BSD.

Yeah, I want to try Nick's BSD, I'll tell you the truth.

Well, VMAX came in with 10,000 sets. 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 plug-in system to let you choose a provider plug-in 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 Nebukasa 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.

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 I really appreciate the boost, Vey. Nice to hear from you. Caso Mears here with, I'm going to say, 4,000 delicious sats. Says they enjoyed the FreeBSD challenge. They scored a humble four points after getting KDE Plasma. It felt like cheating a little after the audio just worked for them. Hey, you're lucky. Sometimes you get lucky like that.

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 Strike 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.

I also think it was definitely one of those, you know, 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.

I'm curious about.

This yeah.

I will second just you know it's super easy to get going at least for v1 and um 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 and real-time editing yeah.

That's just it they like the eventual consistent sort of like merging things cleanly.

Yeah superb it's got it's got a bunch of great features around there too but if uh you know 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 applications. Like, you know how it just sort of doesn't quite fit? Not like Epiphany or Gnome Web does.

Oh, this is fun. I know there's been various like extensions or other ways to sort of go about the same idea.

Like a hundred years ago, I did like a guide. It was like, get this plugin, get this plugin, change this on the config add this extension here this is just.

A flat pack i can get with some.

Toggles okay 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 um up on flat hub and it doesn't that looks more like gnome web than it does firefox yeah, I used to do this, and I think I'm going to 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 make it look all awesome on one desktop,

I was just going to joke. Yeah, should we get it going on all of our KDE just because?

No, but if you are an all GNOME user, definitely add water. I give it a good recommendation.

Hey, okay, we've got to do our license check, as True Grits rightfully points out.

Oh, for Add Water.

Well, and HedgeDoc.

No, HedgeDoc is, yeah.

Yeah, GPL3, great.

Yeah, HedgeDoc is GPL3. Add Water, 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 GPL3.

This app is developed, yeah, GNU GPLv3.

Yeah, I had that, yeah, GPL3, yeah. Had that sort of GPL feel, you know? That sort of smooth, sort of velvety feel.

Software you can trust.

Yeah, I want to 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 Boots 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.

Jeff is that you? That's me Oh good I'm glad somebody ended up I thought for sure one of us would Here you go Jeff That's just for you Feels like home.