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PlayOnBSD (run Windows software)

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PlayOnBSD has recently been added to the FreshPorts repository. See the full description of the port in the links below.

PlayOnBSD

This is a port of PlayOnLinux to FreeBSD. It allows you to easily install and use numerous games and apps designed to run with Microsoft Windows. The Windows emulation is provided by Wine. WWW: http://www.playonlinux.com/

SVNWeb : Homepage : Distfiles Availability : PortsMon

To install the port: cd /usr/ports/emulators/playonbsd/ && make install clean
To add the package: pkg install playonbsd
PKGNAME: playonbsd

Wine Reviews: http://www.wine-reviews.net/2016/03/playonbsd-easily-install-and-run.html

FreshPorts PlayonBSD: http://www.freshports.org/emulators/playonbsd

How-To: Install FreeBSD (with Gui!)

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User Lillian Lemmer of Hypatia Software Organization shows us how to get FreeBSD setup along with a GUI.

This goes over:

  1. Installing FreeBSD
  2. Setting up your GUI (windowmaker, xorg, rox-filer)
  3. Updates
  4. Terminal experience; zsh + oh-my-zsh
  5. Other goodies!

Why do we exist and who do we work for?

We help transgender women escape poverty through financially stable employment in software engineering. Meaning, we focus on impoverished transgender women.

Broadly, what work do we do?

Create a strong software engineering brand through our MIT-licensed open source software products, software engineering firm, and technical articles and talks. This brand is used, in conjunction with a carefully curated and nurturing community, to develop the professional connections required to get transgender women jobs.

Visit their website to learn more about Hypatia: https://hypatia.software/2016/02/28/how-to-install-freebsd-with-gui/

Why FreeBSD?

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docUser Hamza Sheikh speaks on his experiences with UNIX, and why he has decided to go with FreeBSD. You can read his full blog post in the link below.

I like to think of FreeBSD as the Debian of BSDs. It has a much bigger tent than others that results in more features available to its users. As I have found on the FreeBSD ARM mailing list its community is super helpful and friendly to new users. The community appears to be more open minded than say OpenBSD which makes a lot of difference.

My RPi2 kit worked out of the box on FreeBSD 11.0-CURRENT, including WiFi. ARM support is improving every day. It is still a Tier-2 supported architecture but I am optimistic for the future.

I can’t emphasize enough on how much I love the separation between base and ports. Unlike any other Linux distro I have ever used, third party applications get updates independent of the base OS. So the same ports are installable on 9.x-RELEASE, 10.x-RELEASE, and 11.0-CURRENT. I am not bound to the same version of Erlang until the next OS major release the way I am on Debian or Fedora. This freedom is truly liberating.

Why FreeBSD? – http://www.aikchar.me/blog/why-freebsd.html

Bonus articles:

Build Bootable FreeBSD Image for Raspberry Pi 2 with Vagrant, Crochet, and Salt

RaspBSD on Raspberry Pi 2 Model B

FreeBSD 10.3-RC1 Now Available

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freebsdlogoThe developers of FreeBSD have recently made available the first release candidate of 10.3. Notable changes are OpenSSL update, Hyper-V driver updates, as well as nvme(4) and pf(4) fixes. See the link below for the full release information.

The first Release Candidate build of the 10.3-RELEASE release cycle is now
available.

Installation images are available for:

o amd64 GENERIC
o i386 GENERIC
o ia64 GENERIC
o powerpc GENERIC
o powerpc64 GENERIC64
o sparc64 GENERIC
o armv6 BEAGLEBONE
o armv6 CUBOX-HUMMINGBOARD
o armv6 GUMSTIX
o armv6 PANDABOARD
o armv6 RPI-B
o armv6 WANDBOARD

Installer images and memory stick images are available here:

    ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/ISO-IMAGES/10.3/

The image checksums follow at the end of this e-mail.
PGP-signed checksums for the images are also available at:

    https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/10.3R/signatures.html

If you notice problems you can report them through the Bugzilla PR
system or on the -stable mailing list.

If you would like to use SVN to do a source based update of an existing
system, use the "releng/10.3" branch.

A list of changes since 10.2-RELEASE are available on the stable/10
release notes:

    https://www.freebsd.org/relnotes/10-STABLE/relnotes/article.html

Official announcement: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2016-March/084296.html

Speaking on BSD: The Waiting Is the Hardest Part

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larrybsdguyLarry the BSD Guy is back with another blog, this time speaking on his experiences of hosting a BSD talk. With the many similarities between open source operating systems, he speaks on the obstacles faced when presenting a specific subject to the community. Read his full blog at the link below.

The BSD devil resides in a penguin’s DNA.

After answering various calls for presentations to a few upcoming shows, it stands to reason that Tom Petty is right: The waiting is the hardest part.

Because I now use PC-BSD on a daily basis, the idea going forward is to pitch talks about the conversion from one side of the Free/Open Source Software street to the other; the uplifting situations and occasional hurdle such a conversion brings, and to outline the similarities (lots) and differences (few, but relatively significant) between Linux distros and BSD variants.

Full disclosure: No one realizes more than I do how difficult this talk is to compartmentalize among the specific categories that some shows have. This talk can best be described as a verbal Venn diagram showing the overlapping advantages that Linux and BSD provide, and then point out the differences between the two.

Full blog: http://fossforce.com/2016/02/speaking-bsd-waiting-hardest-part/

RootBSD introduces BSD Developers hosting option

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RootBSD_LogoRootBSD, a host provider for various BSD solutions, has introduced new options for BSD Developers. Check out their website for a full catalog of hosting options, with the Lambda being the most popular: https://www.rootbsd.net/

While other hosting providers offer limited *BSD options, usually Linux and with limited scalability, RootBSD goes online, offering rock-solid *BSD-based hosting services that’s reliable that’s designed to meet the needs of professional and business clients.

OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD are supported by RootBSD. The company offers the global presence in 25 datacenters located in North America, South America, Europe and Asia that boost customers’ global presence and that’s usually offered by hosting providers who are not as *BSD-friendly. Bare metal FreeBSD servers are deployed, instantly, to any of RootBSD’s data centers, no matter where they are.

Full announcement: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2016/02/prweb13228842.htm

FreeBSD and ZFS

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zfsxCheck out this post from the FreeBSD Foundation, regarding ZFS. There is also a lengthy discussion on ycombinator regarding the licensing issues surrounding the filesystem.

ZFS has been making headlines lately, so it seems like the right time to talk about the longstanding relationship between FreeBSD and ZFS.

For nearly seven years, FreeBSD has included a production quality ZFS implementation, making it one of the key features of the FreeBSD operating system. ZFS is a combined file system and volume manager. Decoupling physical media from logical volumes allows free space to be efficiently shared between all of the file systems. ZFS introduced unprecedented data integrity and reliability guarantees to storage on FreeBSD. ZFS supports varying levels of redundancy for tolerance of hardware failures and includes cryptographic checksums on all data to guard against corruption.

FreeBSD Foundation – FreeBSD and ZFS: http://freebsdfoundation.blogspot.com/2016/02/freebsd-and-zfs.html

Discussion on ycombinator: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11185581

How-To: Install Qemu on FreeBSD 10

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Qemu-logo
Thanks to user Johnson D, we can get Qemu running on FreeBSD 10. See the link below for the full instructions.

QEMU is a hypervisor, that can emulate many number of architectures.Some of the architectures include:

  • i386
  • x86_64
  • Alpha
  • Arm
  • MIPS
  • MIPS64
  • PPC
  • PPC64
  • Sparc
  • Sparc64

In this article lets look at, how to install QEMU on FreeBSD 10. By default, QEMU on FreeBSD supports the following architectures.

  • i386
  • x86_64

Install Qemu using the following command.

pkg install qemu

Full tutorial: http://fosskb.in/2016/02/21/installing-qemu-on-freebsd-10/

FreeBSD 10.3-BETA3 Now Available

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freebsdlogoThe third BETA of FreeBSD 10.3 is available. Notable changes are em(4), igb(4), qlxgbe(4) driver updates, SCTP stack fixes, support for mounting linprocfs(5) and linsysfs(5) file systems, ZFS fixes, and many more. Please see the release notes below for the full list of changes.

The third BETA build of the 10.3-RELEASE release cycle is now available.

Installation images are available for:

o amd64 GENERIC
o i386 GENERIC
O ia64 GENERIC
o powerpc GENERIC
o powerpc64 GENERIC64
o sparc64 GENERIC
o armv6 BEAGLEBONE
o armv6 CUBOX-HUMMINGBOARD
o armv6 GUMSTIX
o armv6 PANDABOARD
o armv6 RPI-B
o armv6 WANDBOARD

Installer images and memory stick images are available here:

    ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/ISO-IMAGES/10.3/

The image checksums follow at the end of this e-mail.

If you notice problems you can report them through the Bugzilla PR
system or on the -stable mailing list.

If you would like to use SVN to do a source based update of an existing
system, use the "stable/10" branch.

A list of changes since 10.2-RELEASE are available on the stable/10
release notes:

    https://www.freebsd.org/relnotes/10-STABLE/relnotes/article.html

Please note, the release notes page is not yet complete, and will be
updated on an ongoing basis as the 10.3-RELEASE cycle progresses.

Official announcement: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2016-February/084238.html

Thanks to Larry the BSD Guy and Phoronix for the report on FreeBSD 10.3-BETA3 also.