From the first-ever conference I attended, I started picking up many tools and habits from other participants, speakers, and friends. It is still the same with many new conferences I go to, by meeting new people and learning about new technologies, or sometimes about technologies which are not so new.

I use Linux as my primary operating system at home over 15 years now, getting a good Internet connection helped to make it happen. It was the same for my servers too. I do run different distributions, depending on the kind of work that needs to be done. When I go to many language-specific or general technical conferences, I do always find some discussions related to which distribution is good for what. However, whenever I met Trouble aka Philip Paeps, his lines are always amusing, but, also making questions about how FreeBSD differs from Linux in every possible way. I had FreeBSD running in few VMs at home, which is okay to have an understanding of the basics. To know more in details, I decided to move my primary site https://kushaldas.in over FreeBSD around a year ago. Till now it is running fine, and as a simple static website, there is not much to do anyway.

Last week during rootconf I again met trouble and a bunch of old friends (who all are regular in the FreeBSD world). They helped me to understand how to upgrade to the latest release, and showed a few more tricks. I wanted to use it more to become familiar with command line tools.

I got a X230 laptop with CoreBoot and installed FreeBSD 12 on it. The necessary installation went very smooth. Then, I decided to have KDE as a desktop environment on it. I followed the guide. However, I failed to get sddm working. Even though friends at #freebsd and #bsdin tried to help/debug, only in the evening, we figured out that I was missing some critical Xorg related packages.

# pkg install xf86-input-keyboard xf86-input-mouse xf86-input-synaptics xf86-input-libinput xauth

Also, remember to upgrade the system to the latest.

# freeebsd-update fetch
# freebsd-update install

I have installed the regular applications I use in my standard Linux boxes, including FocusWriter. Remember to install the hunspell package and corresponding dictionary for your language, if you want to have spell checking in FocusWriter.

I am writing this blog post in the same tool in the FreeBSD system. I completely forgot how good the old X series ThinkPad keyboards were feeling nice to type on this. I will keep using this system for learning purpose and hoping to write more in the coming days.