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Here I'm republishing an old blog post of mine originally from May 2013. The article has been slightly improved.
Background: The project changed its name to PacBSD in 2016 and about two years later most activity ceased. As of 2020 the domain vanished, too. Therefore I removed the dead links.
Today's post will deal with ArchBSD, a rather young project which brings the familiar Arch Way to the FreeBSD world.
First download the ISO. This review was done with the new one released in the beginning of this month.
If you're going to try out ArchBSD in VirtualBox you better enable the _IO APIC_ function for your VM first. Otherwise the FreeBSD kernel won't boot and it's not even going to give you any error message.
VM settings in VirtualBox (PNG)
Enableing IO APIC in VirtualBox.
Let's boot the ISO! The new boot loader (GRUB 2) is looking nice. The previous ISO still came with another boot loader.
ArchBSD's boot loader on the Live-ISO: GRUB 2.
It's a good idea to follow the official install guide. I only have two things to add:
pacstrap /mnt/ base
Mind that and you should be ok. I won't cover more of the installation here; except for those two things the guide is fine and the installation procedure is typical nowaday's Arch-style.
Downloading packages to install (PNG)
Pacstrapin' the "base" group.
The installation is a bit faster than that of Arch Linux since the base system is (currently) a little smaller. As you can tell from the packages and their download sizes, _ArchBSD_ could more or less be called "_FreeBSD with pacman_".
After setting it all up and rebooting, we're greeted by the ArchBSD boot screen. It features some very nice ASCII art and has a clean look. This is how things should be. Great work if you ask me!
The FreeBSD kernel boots a little slower than I'm used to with a Linux-based system. But when the system is up I find a familiar Arch environment where little shows that this is not Linux.
Working with a distribution that follows a rolling release model, our system is already up to date after installation and doesn't need to be updated. So what to do next? Let's see if ArchBSD provides Xorg! Does it? Of course it does. However it does not currently have _twm_ available so we can't simply get the traditional X11 - but who seriously uses that today?
So far nobody has packaged _GNOME_ or _KDE_ but since this is a nice slim system it's not like I'd miss them here. Currently I have the choice between _Xfce_ and _LXDE_ if I want a full DE. The latter is fine for me.
Installing the "lxde" group (PNG)
Having only LXDE installed, we really have a fairly light graphical system: Just look at the menu! There's almost nothing there (which is good since that means we can install whatever we want).
Alright. Next we have to populate that bare system a bit, right? One of the most important things today surely is a web browser. ArchBSD currently offers _Chromium_ and _Links_. Both are pretty nice browsers in their own regard, the first one probably a bit too heavy, the latter a bit too minimalistic. I'd like something in between - and that probably makes for a good next step! Let's install the development group and links so I can get some _PKGBUILDs_ from the Arch Linux site.
Preparing for package creation (PNG)
Installing “build-devel” and downloading PKGBUILDs.
Now things are getting a little more interesting. Just building the _FLTK_ packages on ArchBSD using the ArchLinux PKGBUILD doesn't work. The _sed_ utility from the BSD world works differently and packagers for ArchBSD are meant to translate the lines calling sed. Since I have no experience with BSD sed, I'd have to read how to do it. Fortunately ArchBSD comes with a _gsed_ package, too, containing the familiar _GNU sed_ utility. It's deprecated to use that but since I'm not an official packager and just want to get FLTK running, I guess it will be ok to simply use that. After calling gsed and commenting out the lines installing the LICENSE files as another quick and dirty "fix", FLTK compiles nicely and the packages are built.
Let's install FLTK and try to build _Dillo_, a very light-weight FLTK-based browser. The default Arch Linux configuration wants OpenSSL which is not (currently) available as a package on ArchBSD. So for this quick look at the system it will suffice to just build Dillo without SSL support. It works perfectly fine and after the package is built, I can run the application.
Running the freshly built Dillo (PNG)
Well, obviously building packages on ArchBSD works well. You can easily run into problems (like with the OpenSSL package) though since under the hood the BSD world is quite a bit different from Linux. In cases like these a bit more knowledge or will to dig deeper is required.
You have some time on your hands? You like what you've just seen? And think you're cool enough to be part of BSD? Why not give ArchBSD a try then? Head over to their forums sign up there and lend them a hand! They will surely appreciate it.
The next post will be something special. I won't spoil it here - but it has something to do with my favorite light-weight DE. Guess which one that is!
