 Today I'm gonna be taking a look at the recently released FreeBSD version 13.0. FreeBSD is the most popular of the BSD operating systems. FreeBSD is a Unix-like operating system. It runs on virtually every kind of CPU architecture known to man. FreeBSD, it comes with like 20 something thousand packages already pre-compiled and ready to go. So it's got pretty good software availability and it's rock solid stable. So it's very popular in the server space. It's used for spinning up web servers and databases, but I mean you can use FreeBSD on the desktop, on the laptop. It is not quite as mature as Linux because the Linux kernel is much much bigger than the FreeBSD kernel. So you do have better hardware support when it comes to things like running on the desktop, but still you've got some basic desktop software and most of the basic desktop software that you expect to be there. You can get running in FreeBSD. You can even run games on BSD if you really want to. So about four days ago we had a release announcement from the FreeBSD team announcing version 13.0 which is the first release of their stable 13 series. Now when you go to FreeBSD, if you're new to how things work with FreeBSD and you go to their download page, you're going to see a number of different ISOs available for download and you're going to wonder why they have so many different versions and these versions are going to be labeled as stable or current or in this case release. What does that mean? Well, when something is labeled as stable, so FreeBSD 13.0 stable, what does that mean? It means that is the latest stable version of the operating system and it's officially supported. If you download an ISO and it says current instead of stable, current is essentially beta. That means it's not necessarily officially supported. So it's a little newer, but what you really want to be on is the stable branch and that's what this is, the 13 series. This is a major release for the FreeBSD team, which is why I'm taking a look at it today. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take a look at it inside a virtual machine today. So let me go ahead and switch over to the VM here and I'm going to go ahead and boot into multi user environment. Just hit one on the keyboard. I'm just going to very quickly run through an installation. I'm just going to speed through this installation of FreeBSD. We may not even install a desktop environment or anything like that. But let's go through the base install process. Now the very first screen is the key map. By default, the US key map is selected so I can just hit enter here for US. But if you need to change it, then you need to go through the list and choose the key map that is appropriate for you. For me, I'm just going to hit enter. Now please choose a host name for this machine. Now the host name does need to be in a standard kind of domain name kind of format. It doesn't matter if this actually exists, but it does need to be something like I don't know my home.mydomain.home, right? Not really a domain, but it doesn't really matter. It just needs to be in a correct format. So there needs to be a period or two in it. Otherwise, the send mail program that will be installed during this installation process, it won't actually run correctly and it's going to complain. So let's go ahead and choose some optional components to install. Now at the top, there's some debugging stuff. I'm not going to do any debugging, but I do want the ports tree. I do want the system source tree. I don't really need the test suite. Let me just go with that and hit OK. Now let's go ahead and set up our file system. Typically, people on FreeBSD use ZFS. If you wanted to, you could use UFS. You could also do manual partitioning. So if you needed to set up partitioning yourself, you could do that, but I'm going to do automatic partitioning with the ZFS file system. All right. And we could go ahead and change some configuration options for ZFS, but I'm going to go with their default. So I'm just going to choose the top option installed and hit enter. If you wanted to set up RAID, you could do that. And there's no point in me doing that here in a VM. So I'm just going to choose the first option, which is no redundancy. And then we need to choose the device to actually install the file system too. In this VM, I only have the one device. So I'm going to hit the spacebar to toggle that on and then tab to get down there and hit OK. And then ZFS configuration. Last chance. Are you sure you want to destroy the contents of the following disk? So it's warning me that it's about to format that disk and destroy all the content that is on it. If it has any content on it, there's no content on this because it's a brand new virtual machine with a brand new virtual hard drive. So no harm, no foul here. So I'm going to choose yes. And now it should set up ZFS on our disk for us. This may take a minute or two. I'll pause the video. I'll be back once this portion of the installation has completed. So that portion of the installation did take a couple of minutes. And now it's asking us to set a root password. So this is the sue password, SU password or the sudo password. So create a strong and complicated password and hit enter and then retype that strong and complicated password and hit enter. All right, please select a network interface. There's only one network interface to choose here in this VM. So I'll hit enter. Would I like to configure IPv4 for this interface? Absolutely. Would we like to use DHCP to configure this interface? Sure. That just makes things easy. It's automatically going to set up everything for us as far as our Ethernet and everything. Would we also like to configure IPv6 for this interface? I could choose yes for purposes of this VM. I'll just skip that step and going to hit OK. Now time zone selector. So this is setting our locale. I'm going to choose America. And then I'm going to page down to the bottom of the list here and go to United States of America. And then central most areas. So that's the central time zone here in the US. Click OK. Does the abbreviation CDT look reasonable? It does. All right, the time and date. So is that the correct date? Yep, I'll set the date. Is that the correct time? Let me double check. Yep, that's the correct time set time. All right, choose the services you'd like to start it at boot up. So if I was installing this on real hardware, I would definitely want SSH installed because I use SSH all the time. It's already going to be installed by default. That's fine. I don't really need any of these other options, not for this VM. So I'll skip all of that. Choose system security hardening options. So especially if you were installing FreeBSD on a server, you really want to investigate these options and you may want to enable some of this stuff. For purposes of this VM, I will skip setting any of that up. Would you like to add users to the installed system now? So all we have is the root user. I want a regular home user. I want his name to be DT. His full name is DT. His UID. It will just create one for us. His default login group will be DT. That's fine. Do we need DT to be a member of another group other than the DT group? Yes, we want him to be a member of the wheel group. So he has sudo privileges and login class. Just go with the defaults shell. We'll go with the default shell. Home directory slash home slash DT is the default. We'll leave that. Permissions are fine. Password based authentication. Yes, we want to have to enter our password. Do we want to use an empty password? The default is no. I'll just hit enter. Use a random password. No is the default. I'll hit enter. I'm just going to go with most of the defaults. The only thing I really wanted to change was adding us to the wheel group. Now, the important part here is entering our password. So for privacy reasons, your home user should have a strong and complicated password. And then retype it. Do we want to lock out the account after creation? No is the default. So go with that. Is everything okay? I'm going to assume yes. And do we want to add another user? Nope. I think we're good. All right. And this is the final step of the installation. So we can just hit enter on exit and it will complete the installation for us. If you needed to go back and change anything you previously did, you can go back to add user root password, host name and all of that. But I think everything we did was okay. So I'm going to hit exit and finish the installation. The shell is operating in a charoot in the new system when finished making the configuration changes type exit. Sure. And now let's reboot. So we have rebooted and now let's go ahead and I'm going to click one to boot into multi user environment again. And yeah, it looks like everything is booting up just fine. We're getting some net system information. So I think that really basic install of free BSD work just fine. We could log in. Let's log in with our DT user. And there is DT at my home. And from here, we don't have a graphical environment xorg was not installed. So the x11 display server is not here. But obviously without xorg, we don't have any desktop environments or window managers or anything like that. Now if I wanted to, I could try to install some of that stuff. So I don't think sudo is automatically on the system. We could install it. But I don't think like if I did a sudo package install xorg. Yeah, sudo is not on the system. So instead of using the DT user, what I want to do is go ahead and switch back over to the root user. And now let me do a PKG, a package install xorg. And the package manager tool is not installed on the system. Do you want to fetch and install it now? Yes. Can we do that? I would very much like that. I don't know how long this will take. This may be a lengthy sync. I'll pause the video and well I don't need to pause the video. So it's going to install the various x11 packages. Now xorg is kind of a big installation. So this may take a minute or two. I'll pause the video until xorg finishes downloading and xorg finished installing just fine. That installation of xorg took about five minutes. So there was a lot of packages to download and install installing xorg. Now let's do a PKG install of our desktop environment. And I'm going to do XFCE just because I don't think XFCE is quite as large as GNOME and plasma. So maybe it will install a little quicker. We'll see. 160 packages. Once again, I'll pause the video until XFCE has finished installation. And XFCE finished installation. It took three or four minutes for installing XFCE. And then do we want a login manager? I mean I guess I could just use startx. But if I wanted a login manager, I guess I could package install lightdm. If I wanted to take the time to set up lightdm and configure lightdm. If I wanted something I guess really minimal and lightweight for a login manager, I could do slim. The problem with slim. I don't like using slim. It's because it's unmaintained. I don't think it's been maintained for years. But hey, let's install it because I know this will be a very quick installation and the slim's pretty easy. Like we really didn't require any configuration to use slim. And then other than that, I wonder, I wonder if I could just do a slim. There we go. There is the slim login manager. And let me go ahead and log in with my DT user and his password. And did we actually log into anything? This is not XFCE obviously. Is this TWM Tom's window manager? I hope not. What is this? It is nothing. So what I'm going to have to do is I'm going to have to kill this VM and reboot. And there obviously was an error. Let me let me investigate the situation. All right, I took a few minutes to investigate the issue. I really didn't play with the slim config. So the login manager slim. So that was part of the problem. Also we didn't really add the DT user who of course our login is the DT user. You never want to log in as root. Well, we only added DT to the wheel group. We didn't add DT to the video group. So we needed to do that since obviously we want to be able to have a display for DT. So some of the files that I ended up playing around in here off camera. Let me zoom in here a little bit. And Vim is not installed. There is VI and there is nano, but I went into slash user slash local slash etsy slash slim dot com. That's your slim config. And what I ended up doing is there was one line in here about the default user. That line right there that line by default is commented out and the default username is Simone. You need to uncomment that line obviously. Why is VI? I don't really know how to use VI. I'm a Vim user. I should just go ahead and install Vim. But make sure you uncomment that line and change Simone to your actual user and then of course write and quit. And I had to do a colon Q exclamation point because I can't actually do a write and quit because I'm logged in as the DT user. Obviously you have to edit that as the root user. Let me go ahead and issue over to the root user. So other than editing the user local etsy slim dot com. Another thing I had to add my user to the video group and you do that with the pw command here in FreeBSD. So you want to run pw and then group mod space and then the name of the group you want to add your user to. So I wanted to add my DT user to the video group and then dash m and then the name of your user. In my case it was DT. So I needed to do that. Add DT to the video group. Make sure slim knows what user is the default user in the slim config. The other thing I did is I went ahead and checked the dot x and yet RC. Which is the file that lets you know when you do it like a start x. What is start x actually executing. So this is where you would have it execute your desktop environment or window manager. In my case I'm executing user local bin start xfce4 and all of that works just fine. I don't have a good screen resolution here in this VM because we haven't installed any proper video drivers or anything but again this is not a this is not necessarily a review of a desktop environment or anything because FreeBSD is very much like Arch Linux. When I say it's very much like Arch Linux. You know there's I don't need to go through and show you guys what programs are installed by default on FreeBSD13.0 because no programs are installed by default in FreeBSD. Kind of like in Arch Linux no programs are installed. You install the programs you want the desktop environment window managers you want your text editors your terminal emulators. So that was just a very quick look at FreeBSD13. A very quick installation. I know I kind of rushed through the installation a little bit but the FreeBSD installation process is not hard for those of you that have played with Linux and you've installed minimal Linux distributions like Arch Linux. If you've ever done a command line Arch install you can install FreeBSD no problem. Now before I go I want to thank a few special people. I want to thank the producers of this episode. Absi Dallas Gabe Lou Mitchell Alan Akami Arch feature out 30 chose David the other David Dylan Gregory Louis Paul Scott Steven Wesson Willie these guys they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys this quick installation of FreeBSD it wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. Each and every one of those ladies and gentlemen help support my work over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I just have you guys the community. I'm asking you to help support my work look for DistroTube over on Patreon. All right guys. Peace. I should have installed Xmonad.