Very behind on toot notifications, but I'll respond when able. XD

Got stuck in an #ADHD #Hyperfocus vortex trying to code my own version of Linux' free(1) in #ksh, because the free in the pkg repo isn't great.

I think I was at it for two hours until half an hour ago. 🤦‍♂️ 🥱

And NOW I just realized that the free I've been using in #FreeBSD is one of my own scripts as well, which I probably could have just adapted for OpenBSD with maybe minimal fuss, LOL.

Umm... WHAT??

rld@Intrepid:scripts$ ls -l jargon
-rwxr-xr-x  1 rld rld 1,443,874 Jun  2 06:51 jargon
rld@Intrepid:scripts$ ls -lh jargon
-rwxr-xr-x  1 rld rld   1.4M Jun  2 06:51 jargon
rld@Intrepid:scripts$ du -sh jargon
981K	jargon

Ok, that's enough computering for today. I can't even. Oh, wait...

It's #ZFS on #FreeBSD, so compression something something??

rld@Intrepid:~$ dd if=/dev/zero count=2048 of=blah1
2048+0 records in
2048+0 records out
1048576 bytes transferred in 0.007787 secs (134654119 bytes/sec)
rld@Intrepid:~$ dd if=/dev/urandom count=2048 of=blah2
2048+0 records in
2048+0 records out
1048576 bytes transferred in 0.012141 secs (86364101 bytes/sec)
rld@Intrepid:~$ ls -lh blah?
-rw-r--r--  1 rld rld   1.0M Jun  2 06:58 blah1
-rw-r--r--  1 rld rld   1.0M Jun  2 06:58 blah2
rld@Intrepid:~$ du -sh blah?
512B	blah1
1.0M	blah2
rld@Intrepid:~$ 

YES, COMPRESSION!!! XD

Well...

rld@Intrepid:scripts$ ls -lh jargon
-rwxr-xr-x  1 rld rld   1.4M Jun  2 06:51 jargon
rld@Intrepid:scripts$ du -sh jargon
981K	jargon
rld@Intrepid:scripts$ simplify $(gzip -1 < jargon |wc -c)
668.50 KiB
rld@Intrepid:scripts$ 

Not GREAT compression, but you know... gift horses! 😆

Looks like an RC2 got added to the schedule so things are pushed out a week.

https://www.freebsd.org/releases/15.1R/schedule/

#FreeBSD

@Tutanota so some things I've converted, some for decades (like Windows for Linux, and like @thorstenzoeller I've recently started trying out #FreeBSD). Outlook/Gmail for Tuta/Protonmail, ongoing. WhatsApp for Signal/Meshtastic/undecided, but currently required for work at least. GCalendar for DecSync w/ Syncthing. Bitwarden for KeePass atm. And Google Search for Brave Search.

I want to get a hostname for my email, so I can change backend in a whim.

@lobocode

I'm not "invested" in any appreciable sense, but I use them on laptops daily, and here's my overall impression as a basic end user:

#FreeBSD: More linuxy, lots of bells and whistles, amazing pdf/html handbook
#OpenBSD: More pared down, very choosy about what gets included in base (and particularly the kernel), much easier to just install and have a working laptop vs. having to configure X11/Wayland manually, great man pages

In FreeBSD's defense, they're adding a simple KDE install option to the installer system, so you'll have something of a ready-to-go system, if KDE is what you want. I'm not sure if there will be a simpler option, like openbox or whatever.

OpenBSD seems to have a little better hardware support, but FreeBSD has been making great strides in this area, and if you have a recent model Thinkpad or Framework, you might have a better time on FreeBSD.

My FreeBSD and OpenBSD laptops are 10 and 16 years old, respectively. 😅

They're both great OSes, and fun to learn on. It's a real #Yoda "You must unlearn what you have learned" moment when you realize that everything you've done for the past quarter century of writing shell scripts and whatnot was very much geared to the GNU and Linux world, and the rest of the world doesn't necessarily operate that way.

Of course, most Linux users don't care, but I'm partial to the idea of true portability, the Unix way. ;)

Aside from the security focus, could you guys sum up the main difference between #FreeBSD and #OpenBSD in a few words, and why you chose one over the other?

Note: i'd like to hear from those who are invested in the project.

#PeerTube upgrade to 8.2.0 on #FreeBSD isn’t trivial, but it seems like I managed to complete it.

Sorry for the outage on https://video.echelon.pl/videos/browse now I’m only struggling with missing thumbnails and some S3 objects.

#FreeBSD Foundation Executive Director Tries Daily Driving FreeBSD On Laptop

https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-On-Laptop-Driver

#privacy #FOSS

Wow, can't believe that FreeBSD 15.1-R is going to be dropping next Tuesday!

Going to be getting ready for the magnet generation!

#FreeBSD

Interestingly, #FreeBSD comes with #nvi2 in base, while #OpenBSD and #NetBSD seem to be running #nvi 1:

FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE-p12
~
~
~
Version 2.2.2 (2025-10-08) The CSRG, University of California, Berkeley.

OpenBSD 7.3
(7.9 is still running the same version)
~
~
~
Version 1.79 (10/23/96) The CSRG, University of California, Berkeley.

NetBSD 10.1
~
~
~
Version (1.81.6-2013-11-20nb4) The CSRG, University of California, Berkeley.

They all seem to have nvi2 available as packages, though, which #Debian, oddly, does not.

rld@Intrepid:~$ uname -sr
FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE-p12
rld@Intrepid:~$ pkg search nvi |grep '^nvi2'
nvi2-2.2.2                     Updated implementation of the ex/vi text editor
rld@Intrepid:~$ 

#(searching openbsd online)
rld@Intrepid:~$ searchall -o nvi |grep ^nvi
nvi-2.2.2                (list)   with wide         and files limited by
nvi-2.2.2-iconv          (list)   with wide         and files limited by

rldane@rosa.tilde.pink$ uname -sr
NetBSD 10.1
rldane@rosa.tilde.pink$ pkgin search nvi |grep ^nvi |grep -v nvidia
nvi-1.81.6nb13       Berkeley nvi with additional features
nvi-m17n-1.79.20040608nb11  Clone of vi/ex, with multilingual patch
nvi2-2.2.0           Multibyte fork of the nvi editor for BSD
rldane@rosa.tilde.pink$ 

~ $ head -1 /etc/os-release 
PRETTY_NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie)"
~ $ apt-cache search nvi |grep -E '^nvi2? '
nvi - 4.4BSD re-implementation of vi
~ $ 

Looking at the geom graph output (from confdot) and realized that color coding the circles that have non-zero the rwe counts would be useful, say red for exclusive, yellow for write and green for read. Or other colors that actually work well on white.

This would help draw your eye to devices/drives or paths that are active on the system

#FreeBSD

Those of you with terminal and plain text first workflows, how did you handle academia? I'm imagining a mix of git, pandoc, and vimwiki or org-mode.

Is there a good article on how to setup such a workflow? Any pitfalls?

#linux #freebsd #cli #terminal #vim #emacs #college #university #acadamia

Ugh, it's terrible when you need the BNF to understand the docs properly.

Tried to get ethernet filtering working on pf (on FreeBSD), and I kept getting syntax errors and the like. Turns out that the section on ethernet filtering completely neglects to mention that you need to prefix rules with ether for them to work properly.

Nor are there any examples that would have made things easier.

#FreeBSD

> epoll has a history of cves history of CVEs however, their exploitation is not documented and is very scarce.

So, decided to see how kqueue on FreeBSD fared, and there's only been one advisory back in 2002 due to a local user being able to cause a panic.

(At least one that were tags kqueue, it's possible that there is another one that was under another subsystem's umbrella.)

#FreeBSD

> https://guysrd.github.io/epoll-uaf

QEMU: all aarch64 FreeBSD guests no longer boot.

Virtual Machine Manager, Kubuntu 26.04.

#QEMU #FreeBSD #Kubuntu #Linux

Alt...

Screenshot: five virtual machines. Some show 'Display output is not active', other show 'Guest has not initialized the display (yet)'.

Alt...

Screenshot: Virtual Machine Manager.

FatGid+4 : A four-byte type, an eight-byte stride, one root shell. FreeBSD 14.x kernel local privilege escalation via setcred(2).

https://fatgid.io/

#freebsd #unix #opensource

#FreeBSD local privilege escalation via kernel setcred() - 14 kernels are exploitable, 15 panic.

https://fatgid.io

@sotolf @clouderst @amiablechief

I've used apt, dnf, pkcon, zypper, #NetBSD pkgin, #FreeBSD pkg, #OpenBSD pkg, flatpak, snap, rpm, yum, and homebrew.

pacman has the most obtuse syntax. I have a couple options memorized, 3-4 more in my crib notes, and the rest is hunting through the manpage. :P

@mwl

Hmm, looks like loader.efi(8) doesn't contain much help.

I think you have to set an efi var because FreeBSD puts its loader in a non-standard location. I'll dry to dig up more info since I remember having to deal with this a few years ago.

#FreeBSD

One of the few #sysadmin things that worries me any more is updating boot code after a zpool upgrade. #FreeBSD

I'm sure it'll be fine, but if I disappear forever you know what happened.

Fried my boot loader trying to update it.

#FreeBSD has decades of archives on boot loader updating, which means that searches are full of noise. "gpart bootcode" is not a thing today. Possibly complicated further because this was installed as 14.0 and upgraded to 15.0.

Reboot and got "missing boot loader"

Start over by hand:

gpart add -t efi -s 100M nda0

newfs_msdosfs -F 32 -c 1 /dev/nda0p1
attach to /mnt

mkdir -p /mnt/EFI/BOOT
cp /boot/gptboot.efi /mnt/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.efi

Reboot and again: "missing boot loader"

Anyone know the current incantation?

I wont lie.. I've been fascinated with #FreeBSD but also HATING it.

Like, I enjoy the minimalist cohesive way it's put together.. but everything else feels as painful as running Linux in the early 2000s.

Hardware support is trash, you're constantly jacking around with config files, available software is minimal.

I get why you might run a server or router on BSD.. but why would anyone run a desktop with this?

#linux feels 1000x more mature in my experience here

@ruari

That's interesting. I've noticed that #FreeBSD also does not have a -dev split. If you install a package, you get the headers and everything.

Embedded content

The Duke and the Beastie - Improving OpenJDK support for FreeBSD - Harald Eilertsen
by foss-north on PeerTube

My presentation from @FOSS North conference 🇸🇪 about improving OpenJDK for FreeBSD is now public!

#FreeBSD #BSD #OpenJDK #FLOSS #FreeSoftware #mywork

New #blog #post: Package Manager Tier List

https://rldane.space/package-manager-tier-list.html

1521 words

Note: this is a very off-the-cuff tier list, using speed as the main qualifier, but the article explains exceptions to that as it goes on.

cc: my wonderful #chorus: @joel @dm @sotolf @thedoctor @pixx @orbitalmartian @adamsdesk @krafter @roguefoam @clayton @giantspacesquid @Twizzay @stfn

(I will happily add/remove you from the chorus upon request! :)

#rlDaneWriting #blost #DeadLikeMe #Linux #BSD #RunBSD #FreeBSD #OpenBSD #NetBSD #Debian #Arch #pacman #AUR #Fedora #homebrew #flatpak #snap #OpenSuSE #RPM

Various #FOSS OS communities' reactions to joining them:

#Linux: "Hey, welcome to the fam! Here's a stack of CDs I burned, see which one boots for you."
#FreeBSD: "Hey, we're glad you're here! Here's an amazing handbook to get you started, holler if you need a hand!"
#NetBSD: "Of course it runs NetBSD! Welcome! :D"
#OpenBSD: "Don't expect a lot of hand-holding, but we're all having fun with it, and hopefully you will enjoy the process, too."
#9front: "Are... you... sure you want to do this?"

😆

(For the record, I love them all. I only regret I haven't had much of a chance to play with #Haiku, or interact with that community, yet!)

Subscribed to freebsd-hackers maillist … and looking at the horrors of vibecoded shell-script to automatically perform some kind of etcupdate

IMO, if you are vibecoding because you are unexpereinced in selected language — why not use the known language and write code with natural intelligence? At least the door to bugs and errors will not be so widely open, because you don't know the selected language and all things around it, and see some plausible looking code, stolen from StackOverflow or GitHub, which is missing some necessary checks for corner cases.

And if you are vibecoding — this is definitely not a hacking

#FreeBSD #hacking

Command:

echo hello,there |sed 's/,/\n/g'

Result:

#Linux:
hello
there

#FreeBSD:
hello
there

#NetBSD:
hello
there

#OpenBSD:
hellonthere

OpenBSD.... brah. 😓

Friends, I wrote a book. It's now out in its fourth edition.

More in "The Book of PF, 4th Edition: It's Here, It's Real" https://nxdomain.no/~peter/its_real_its_here.html

For background, "Yes, The Book of PF, 4th Edition Is Coming Soon" https://nxdomain.no/~peter/yes_the_book_of_pf_4th_ed_is_coming.html

Get the book: https://nostarch.com/book-of-pf-4e

@nostarch #bookofpf #pf #networking #openbsd #freebsd #networktrickery #cybersecurity

FreeBSD Device Drivers: From First Steps to Kernel Mastery by Edson Brandi · Version 2.0 (April 2026) https://github.com/ebrandi/FDD-book

#freebsd #unix #books

thyme

#openbsd #freebsd #runbsd #foss #comic

Alt...

fish and daemon examine old photos

#telephony #freebsd #phone

This looks rather interesting!

https://interfacecraft.online/blog/2026/desktop-phone-connected-to-freebsd-server/

Not sure if you've seen this, @lpbkdotnet -- but I thought of you...

@darth

In terms of what I use most of the time, my main OS at home is #FreeBSD, and my main OS at work is #Debian.

I also have an #OpenBSD laptop at home, but it doesn't get a lot of use. I also have a #Fedora laptop and an #OpenSuSE desktop, both at home.

Oh, and some random Raspberry Pi OS and Debian machines here and there.

Here's my quick perspective:

When Linux works (which it does most of the time), it is a dream. When it doesn't work, it's a nightmare of complexity, relatively poor documentation (I mean actual HOWTO documents, not just manpages and wikis), and technical churn.

When BSD works (which it does, but less often than Linux), it's totally fine, and you forget you're not running Linux. When it doesn't work, it's either because it's a technical problem that hasn't been solved yet (limited resources compared to the light-cigars-with-benjamins money that the Linux Foundation gets), or it's a simple configuration issue, and there's almost always a very helpful manpage, PDF manual, or someone on the fediverse to point you in the right direction.

BSD feels like an operating system that tries hard to be a good desktop, and succeeds to varying degrees.
Linux feels like a lovecraftian tale of runaway technical complexity and corporate intrigue that does an amazing job at cosplaying as a desktop, most of the time.

I love them both.

Now that the #arm64 boards are installed, it was time to use them as redundant #DHCP server and #DNS resolvers; using #dhcpd and #Unbound on both #OpenBSD and #FreeBSD.

https://www.tumfatig.net/2026/redundant-dhcp-server-and-dns-resolver-using-openbsd-and-freebsd/

For *BSD fans, I wish to understand something that truly bothers me.

You are a fan of one or more BSD os. Is that BSD (doesn't matter which one) your daily driver, your primary OS on your main computer?

#BSD #FreeBSD #OpenBSD #NetBSD

The BSDCan 2026 Schedule has been posted. 30 regular talks, one set of lightning talks, and one Audio BoF: https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/timetable/timetable-all.html

Both FreeBSD and NetBSD will be holding two day Dev Summits across the hall from each other in DMS.
https://wiki.freebsd.org/DevSummit/202606
https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/events.html#bsdcan2026

Just like last year, the reception on Saturday night is free if you register early. This year you must register before May 1, 2026: https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/registration.html

#bsdcan @bsdcan #freebsd #openbsd #netbsd

So I'm getting somewhere as I can launch them both if I start them like below.

doas seatd -u $(whoami) -l debug & mango

I know this is wrong but it seems like seatd isn't running as my user if I try and start mango or sway without that line hence the permission errors for the keyboard.
I have even followed the OpenBSD seatd man page and added my user justine to the _seatd group and then started seatd with doas rcctl start seatd but still the same no keyboard. If I look in /etc/group I see _seatd:*:564:justine so what am I doing wrong ?

OK #OpenBSD friends, Why when I install Sway or Mango ( #Wayland ) can I not get any keyboard control ? I can run them fine on #FreeBSD but on OpenBSD they both start but the keyboard does nothing on the mouse seems to work on waybar. I'm using known working configs for both.
I do see errors like permission denied for /dev/wskb* . I'm at a loss as I'm sure I had sway running last year ??
Even copied the startsway.sh and modified for mango but still no keyboard ???

Please boost for a larger reach. ❤️

@vlkrs@bsd.network Are you able to assist at all ? TIA

@dillo @bbbhltz

Scratching my head as to how to install libjpeg-dev in #FreeBSD. I'll try puzzling over it later.