BSD

I'm doing my first exploration of BSD. After some struggles with the OpenBSD installer, I installed FreeBSD instead. Here as some findings.

You can install software from source in /usr/ports and to do that, you need the portsnap command to fetch the tree.

My 1280x768 monitor is used as a 640x480 console. I tried the following in /boot/loader.conf which did not work:

kern.vt.fb.default_mode="1280x768"
efi_max_resolution="1280x768"

I tried to use hidraw using this in loader.conf which also did not work for me:

hidraw_load="YES"
hw.hid.hidraw.debug="9"
hw.hid.hidbus.debug="99"
hw.usb.uhid.debug="99"

My 12th gen Intel machine cannot boot version 13 of BSD. Instead I need to use 14-CURRENT.

I could only get the installer for 14-CURRENT to run by installing a discrete Radeon GPU, which then let me set the BIOS option CSM enabled.