FreeBSD – Page 11 – Trond's place

Over the last few days have I experimented with UEFI and GPT in VirtualBox 4.3.26. The goal was to multiboot various operating system, in this case Windows 10 Enterprise Technical Preview 9926 x64 and FreeBSD/amd64 stable/10. First, I thought of persuading the UEFI firmware to always present its boot menu. It sure beats remembering to […]

VirtualBox 4.3.24 is out, so I wanted to try out the UEFI version of the latest FreeBSD/amd64 stable/10 snapshot. It didn’t go well until I realised something important, however strange it may be.

I had a FreeBSD setup I wanted to replicate to another, identical computer. The source system runs ZFS and so should the receiving system. A recursive snapshot in combination with the zfs send and zfs receive commands proved most fruitful.

… FreeBSD gives you the ability to make a choice how you want your boot prompt, splash screen, X login, desktop environment and applications. This, in my opinion, makes it very professional compared to systems that force a given set of settings upon the user, and there is no way to make a different choice. […]

Configuring X11 is more or less a dark art, and you must almost be a wizard of the Slytherine House to get modern X.org 1.14.7 working on a FreeBSD guest in VirtualBox. Nonetheless, through lots of experimentation this evening, have I finally arrived at this configuration file: Somehow, you need both the InputClass and the […]

I have (successfully) attempted to migrate a running i386 stable/9 system into a running amd64 stable/9 system, and attempted to migrate a running i386 stable/10 system into a running amd64 stable/10 system, only to see if these tasks are in fact feasible. The results speaks for themselves, given the boundary conditions outlined below. If your […]

Update 2015-01-23 Order has once again been restored. I have successfully upgraded 8.4-RELEASE (r251259) to stable/8 r277528, and further to stable/9 r277528, and finally to stable/10 r277559. Update 2015-01-14 Work is underway enabling latest stable/8 to go directly to latest stable/9. All my FreeBSD systems have run stable/something-something, compiled from source, for as long as […]

The removal of BIND from base in stable/10 left us with the option of running BIND from ports either in a jail, or as an ordinary service. The old BIND in base was able to run in a chroot environment, isolated from the rest of the system. Some of us believe a chroot is a […]

Enabling encrypted swap has changed in FreeBSD stable/10. I was interested in running AES-XTS with a 256 bit random key and a simulated blocksize of 4096 bytes. I had to change the line in /etc/fstab for the swap partition from to The kernel could then happily report:

The 20141214 entry in ports/head/UPDATING says: 20141214: AFFECTS: users of TeXLive AUTHOR: hrs@FreeBSD.org Several scripts in print/texlive-base have been moved to devel/tex-kpathsea. Upgrading them can fail because texlive-base depends on tex-kpathsea, and the new ex-kpathsea tries to install files which were installed by the old texlive-base. The following error message indicates this situation: pkg-static: tex-kpathsea-6.2.0_1 […]

Category: FreeBSD

UEFI, GPT, Windows 10, FreeBSD 10, and rEFInd

UEFI booting FreeBSD/amd64 stable/10 in VirtualBox 4.3.24

Replicating an entire FreeBSD system using ZFS

FreeBSD – the ability to make a choice

Configuring X.org on FreeBSD guests running in VirtualBox

Migrating FreeBSD from i386 to amd64

Upgrading FreeBSD from stable/8 to stable/9, and to stable/10

Missing chroot for dns/bind9{9,10}?

Enabling encrypted swap in stable/10

Solving conflicts between print/texlive-base and devel/tex-kpathsea