Episode: 3671
Title: HPR3671: Response to Episode 3655, "BSD for Linux Users"
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3671/hpr3671.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 03:20:41

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,671 from Monday the 29th of August 2022.
Today's show is entitled, Response to Episode 3,655, the SD for Linux users.
It is hosted by Claudio Miranda and is about 11 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is Claudio responds to binarcees, episode on the SD for Linux users and rambles,
on about other BSD stuff.
Hey everyone, this is Claudio M. I'm recording this episode as a response to episode HPR 3655
BSD for Linux users, which was submitted by binarcee.
I actually enjoyed that episode, it was really good, it pretty much nailed it on introducing
BSD for Linux users, in my opinion.
I thought it was a great episode and now I was going to write a comments, my original
comment for that episode.
I actually ended up putting a comment on there, but my original comment ended up being
so long that I figured I might as well just record a show as a response to it, so here
it is.
Yeah, Ken, he says, if your comment is longer than a few sentences, it's a show, so here
it is.
Anyway, it was a great episode about BSD and the descendants.
I personally use open BSD mainly, but I do also use free BSD and net BSD.
I have free BSD actually running on my desktop, which also runs for Dora, I have each operating
system in its own hard drive, so I just use the BIOS boot into whichever one I pick.
And then I have net BSD running on my Raspberry Pi Model B, the first generation, but this
one has the 512 megabytes of RAM.
And it runs like a champ, I just recently upgraded it to net BSD 9.3, and it runs very well.
As I prior to that, I was messing around with 9.0, one of the daily snapshots, so I may
eventually go to that, but for now I think I'm okay with the 9.3 on there.
But yeah, it's been fun tinkering around with the BSDs.
I actually did use free BSD at work when at my previous work locations where I had,
I think I've mentioned it before, I've set up a server at each site running free BSD
to replace the old Windows Server 2003 boxes that were running there and they were in
the life already, so I needed to pull those because of obvious security issues, so I went
ahead and I said, well, I need to provide
something for my users, so I went ahead and I created a Samba box using free BSD as
the operating system, and let me tell you, they both were rock solid, no one noticed
the difference, everybody was still able to access their file like before and it was wonderful.
I had thought about using Linux, but I just seemed more straightforward for me using
free BSD as the base operating system, so that was a fun learning experience, and lately
I've actually been playing around with Beehive, which is free BSD's virtualization software,
it's kind of like a QEMU or something like that, but this one's more in line with free BSD,
so it runs on free BSD, and I've got Windows running on it, I've played around with other
free BSD derivatives or distributions, and that sounds actually, such as Hello System,
which emulates a macOS desktop environment of sorts, and it's pretty neat, it's pretty neat,
I got that going, I've been trying to get Haiku running on that, but I haven't been as successful
with that one, so if anyone knows how to get Haiku running on Beehive, please record a show,
and put that up, because it would be really nice to hear and get that going, but I've also,
I did get Windows, I think I was playing around with trying to get Slackware running on Beehive,
but I couldn't put too much time on that one, so, but it's been fun, it's definitely been fun,
so regarding, as far as my usage, I just use it as a desktop OS, aside from that time I
use it as a sombre server, but just as a desktop OS, so on free BSD and Open BSD, I've run
Mate desktop, I've always run it, I've run it on Linux, on my Fedora installs, it's
my go-to desktop environment, and it runs very well, it runs very well, it's pretty quick,
it runs real nice, it gets out of the way, I do like CWando, so since that comes with Open BSD,
I got to think around with that, and it was kind of neat playing around with it, but I don't use
it much anymore, what I really use now is FluxBox, I've always used FluxBox as a window manager,
especially on the more resource limited machines like my old ASUS EPC 901, which I actually
blogged about, and I think I've talked the idea, I've done the my geeky experiments episodes on that,
and yeah, it runs Open BSD, and it runs super well, FluxBox, and everything is supported on that
out of the box, well, except for Bluetooth, since Bluetooth support isn't available on Open BSD,
but if I were to run Free BSD on, I'm sure Bluetooth would work without a problem.
As far as hardware support, I know that, as mentioned, the BSD may not have as good a support
as Linux does, but it's getting better. Free BSD for sure has a lot of support for hardware,
and that was definitely improving, but Open BSD actually is catching up. They've got a lot of
hardware support, as a matter of fact, their IWX wireless driver is actually really well done,
and it's actually working, it's been actually supported the Intel X200 series Wi-Fi network cards for
a good while now, and just recently with Free BSD 13.1 is that they got support going,
for those type of cards, but for a while, with 13.0, they did not have it, so I actually just
upgraded over the weekend the hard drive because it was stuck on 13.0, and I hadn't really
booted into it much, so yeah, I upgraded that to 13.1, it was super easy to do, very simple,
if you follow the Free BSD handbook on doing an upgrade from one version to another, it is just
straightforward, so yeah, but that's actually working right now, and it's running very well,
and actually I just recently got a new laptop, which I also blogged about, I'll put the links in
the show notes for the blog, this one is an EVU, EVC 141-12bK laptop, and the BK is because it's
black, there's another model that actually is silver, and I think it's SL or something like that,
so they come with, you won't find them, they're very hard to find, especially because they came with
decent components, and for a very cheap price, this is actually a warmer branded laptop,
you might also see it under the name Motile, it's the same design, so this one comes with a
Ryzen 5 3500U CPU from AMD, it has the Vega GPU, it comes with eight gigabytes of RAM, and it has
a 256GB SSD, but that one, it comes with Windows, so I left Windows on that, but it does have an
available NVMe slot, so I was able to purchase a SSD for that slot, and I put Open BSD on that,
and it runs very well, there's a couple little things here, and I may want to go ahead and
and post it on the bugs, Open BSD bugs mailing list, but we'll see, we'll see, but for
what I paid for it, $275 US refurbished, it really is a nice machine, and it's very hard to find out,
the only problem is that it only has one RAM slot, so your RAM is going to be single channel no
matter what, so it's going to be a performance spot, but otherwise it's a great beta laptop,
runs Open BSD well, as a matter of fact, I'm actually recording this on this on this laptop,
running Open BSD using Audacity, and I actually wrote a little script to make some changes,
which I'll probably do an episode about a short little episode, so be on the lookout for that one,
anyway, I just want to say thank you again to BNRC, wonderful episode, you really nailed it on
the head, and yes, the BSDs are not called distros, they are actually referred to as flavors,
they're BSD flavors, so net BSD, Open BSD, free BSD, Dragonfly BSD, all those major BSDs
are flavors, because they are a flavor of BSD, they are based on BSD, and they are not
compatible with one another, now Ghost BSD, which is actually a desktop focused and user focused
distribution of free BSD, is a distribution of free BSD because it is based on free BSD,
so if you compiled something on vanilla free BSD and wanted to run that on Ghost BSD,
it theoretically will work, however, it will not run on Open BSD, you'd have to recompile it,
because they are different, they are different, even though their lineage points back to BSD,
so yeah, I just wanted to kind of expand a little on that, so yeah, definitely nailed everything,
I'm looking at the show notes here for the BNRC's episode, and yeah, pretty much nailed it on the
head, so thank you so much for this great episode, I really enjoyed it, and hope to hear more
from you about the BSDs in the future, BNRC, if you're listening to this, anyway, it's going to
do it for me, I've rambled along enough, so hope you enjoyed this, and if you didn't, well,
you know, whether you did or didn't, just put it in the comments, I guess, all right, y'all,
you have a good one, bye-bye.
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