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Free the *BSDs
February 04th, 2025
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Sounding like a chant from some protest march, "Free the *BSDs!"
It only took me 4 (or was it 5) bare metal installs before I could say that I had freed it, in this case FreeBSD. Working with a 12 year old Acer C7/C710 "Parrot" ex-Chromebook has its issues.
Among other discoveries was a failed ethernet port. And, to the uninitiated, me, starting an install over was the only easy way to get to the WiFi choice. Simple noob issues, that's why I've always said that an OS or even a complex app needs to be installed a number of times until a "Clean" instance is attained. So, 4 or 5 times wasn't so bad, for me. Plus...
I got me some FreeBSD! Yeah baby. (Settle down you ol fool <=> F off! I have only the face of a clown. :-) )
Antique HW and its foibles aside, FreeBSD finally slid right in. It did stall over the broken ehternet adapter. Evidentlty the NIC is still identifable but the electronic's side appears to be fried. Yes, I tried a different cable first thing. I may be a *BSD noob but I am an old noob. The CLI prompt brought back my gut wrenching first exposure to *NIX, Linux. Just the prompt.Hell, in the early daze of Slackware you had to buy a book just to learn how to RTFM digitally. Yeah, I am a *BSD noob.
I did have the foresight to auto-start sshd as well as note the ip it had received via dhcp from the router. Armed with both I am able to ssh into this virgin FreeBSD box from my main $Driver. All to give me access to a gui browser and a graphical file system manager while working in a window. (Noobs are very visual, rely on DE instead of solid SysAdmin, but I'l larnin')
I managed to shoe-horn my ZSH config and my .tmux files. While circumventing the /bin/sh experience I now have most of my rudimentary tools. As I am the visual *nix learner my next goto is mc (Midnight Commander (?)) Now I can at least move through the file system and perform some of the pesky admin stuff. Oh yeah, and RTFM again.
