MidnightBSD

[skullassfreak]

I am thinking about switching from mint to a bsd distro. I hear that BSD unlike linux distros do not go out of date. The distro (or the bsd equivalent) i have been looking at is MidnightBSD because it can have enlightenment installed out of the box. This hasnt had a new release since 2008 though.

Is midnightBSD still up to date or is there a better bsd with enlightenment?

[jggimi]

I don't know where you "heard" about the timeliness of the BSDs, but all of them will require updating, in order to be both supported and secure.

MidnightBSD is a pre-packaged variant of FreeBSD. The "download" page has a nearly year-old "late breaking news" statement recommending rebuilding the OS (kernel, userland) from source code after install. It would seem to me that this defeats the purpose of a pre-packaged system, as this is far more complicated than installing Enlightenment on any of the major BSDs.



Since you are looking for prepackaged systems, perhaps you should choose one that has regular updates.

[ocicat]

Originally Posted by skullassfreak

Is midnightBSD still up to date or is there a better bsd with enlightenment?

"Better" is a relative word. "Better" also depends upon how the system will be used.

...but you seem like a smart guy. Take the time to study the documentation associated to the main three variations of *BSD:

• http://www.freebsd.org/docs.html
• http://openbsd.org/faq/index.html
• http://netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/

...and decide for yourself which member of the *BSD family best meets your needs. None have Enlightenment configured as part of their base systems, but smart people take the time to read & understand about the package systems available in each of the *BSD's as each contains Enlightenment. Once you have the base system installed, you can have Enlightenment installed within five minutes assuming you have a reasonable Internet connection, but studying the documentation first is necessary.

So be a really smart guy. Study the documentation. Make an informed decision. You will get more out of your system by making the effort.

[faysal76]

You can use enlightenment on any BSD distribution.
It is present in every distro.But i don`t know how much experience you have on BSDs.
The most easiest and best for beginer is OpenBSD and NetBSD.
I will recomend OpenBSD if you are a starter.I am recommending due to its packages collection which is easy to find and stable.
The most Flexible is NetBSD.You can alter this according to your needs but you must have
some expert level.
If you want to Use BSD on "as it is" basis then Use FreeBSD 8 version and install all of your required packages online.Once ready i hope you will not need to change something.
And if you are a Nix Expert then use DragonFlyBSD.

[Broodjegehaktmetmayo]

Originally Posted by faysal76

You can use enlightenment on any BSD distribution.
The most easiest and best for beginer is OpenBSD and NetBSD.
I will recomend OpenBSD if you are a starter.I am recommending due to its packages collection which is easy to find and stable.

This is new to me: I always thought OpenBSD was way more difficult ().

[Carpetsmoker]

"Difficult" is not an absolute concept. It depends both on personal preference & experience as well as what exactly you are trying to accomplish.

If you want to use flash 10 with OpenBSD then I guess this could be labeled as "difficult".
If you want to get your wireless working, then I would say this is very "easy" on OpenBSD.

[tetrodozombie]

I would try using Fluxbox on a BSD and see how you like it compared to Englightenment. I find the minimalism a great turn on because all this extra functionality is distracting that's why I use OpenBSD with Fluxbox.

[lucho]

The "mport" package manager is fatally broken. Its "autoremove" command removes too many packages, but that's nothing compared to the unrecoverable error "mport" finally gave me on any attempt to do anything with it:

Invalid master database version

Given that, I don't think that MidnightBSD is usable, alas!

[bsd-keith]

I would also suggest either OpenBSD or NetBSD.....

[blackhole]

Just download the latest FreeBSD release.

[lucho]

Thanks for the suggestions, but I do have these operating systems installed. The topic here is MidnightBSD. I tried to install it again, this time taking care not to "autoremove" anything. And it worked! But there are some nasty problems. I'll repeat the "autoremove" issue here too:

1. The "autoremove" command of "mport" deletes too many packages.
2. Some files get damaged in time, including the package archives.
3. To "wake up" the display, one must press Ctrl-Alt-F1...F8.

The second issue is even more dangerous. I thought it's caused by my microSD card reader (the card where MidnightBSD is installed is brand new) and replaced it, but the problem continues. So, it may be a kernel bug. (No, it's not!)

[Onauk]

Originally Posted by lucho

I thought it's caused by my microSD card reader (the card where MidnightBSD is installed is brand new) and replaced it, but the problem continues. So, it may be a kernel bug.

I have also had a hard time with microSD cards. I think it is not recommended to use them to install an OS. There are multiple instances of Raspberry Pi (which uses an SD card by default) users who have discovered this flaw.

[blackhole]

Originally Posted by lucho

Thanks for the suggestions, but I do have these operating systems installed. The topic here is MidnightBSD. I tried to install it again, this time taking care not to "autoremove" anything. And it worked! But there are some nasty problems. I'll repeat the "autoremove" issue here too:

1. The "autoremove" command of "mport" deletes too many packages.
2. Some files get damaged in time, including the package archives.
3. To "wake up" the display, one must press Ctrl-Alt-F1...F8.

The second issue is even more dangerous. I thought it's caused by my microSD card reader (the card where MidnightBSD is installed is brand new) and replaced it, but the problem continues. So, it may be a kernel bug.

Maybe ask here? https://www.midnightbsd.org/community/

This site is very low traffic as it is and the last time someone posted a question about MidnightBSD was in this thread 15 years ago.

[lucho]

There are many BSD operating systems. While attending their respective forums is a good idea, the strength of this forum is that it gets them (and us) together.

Hmm, the kernel must have been "scared" by my last post here, because the browser files were not damaged today By the way, the browser is "Pale Moon":

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; MidnightBSD amd64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Goanna/6.5 Firefox/102.0 PaleMoon/32.5.0

And perhaps surprisingly, I don't have problems with it!

P.S.:

Some files get damaged in time, including the package archives.

After it was damaged so much that some programs started to give strange "Bus errors" and "Segmentation faults", I had to reinstall it again. I noticed that the message "WARNING: / was not properly dismounted" was appearing each time, although I do shut down the system properly. That's why the UFS filesystem gradually was getting corrupted, even though it has a ".sujournal"!

That was because I had renamed the devices in "/etc/fstab" to their UUID names in fear that as the drive is removable, it won't stay "/dev/da0" if I add other removable drives but may become "/dev/da1" or "/dev/da2". When I renamed them back, the problem vanished!

I also noticed that unlike "mport", "ravenport" (which also gets installed) does contain a rather new Firefox. So I decided to not use "mport" but install all packages via "ravenport".

P.S.: Unfortunately, the inability to dismount filesystems on shutdown/reboot has resumed, which caused irreversible damage to the UFS filesystem. Had to reinstall again, this time on a ZFS, which should survive the lack of proper dismounting. And alas, when I tried a ZFS install on the same microSD card + USB 2.0 reader, the kernel couldn't be loaded. It became obvious that I had to install it on a HDD or better, an SSD.

Since I had no free SATA sockets and no NVMe socket on the main board, I had to buy a PCIe-to-NVMe converter card and a NVMe SSD. When I then did my fourth installation attempt on it, it turned out that the ZFS doesn't take much memory and gets really properly unmounted this time. (As the BIOS doesn't support NVMe, I had to boot via "Clover".) But the post-installer which offered installation of a GUI failed with "Segmentation fault" and I had to install a GUI myself.

XDM couldn't find "chown". It turned out that it's in "/usr/sbin" where it really belongs, not in "/usr/bin" as in Linux, and that's the reason. When I created a "/usr/bin/chown -> "/usr/sbin/chown" symlink, XDM was able to start my ".xsession" at last. Initially, it was executing "start-lumina-desktop", but the latter was failing without an error message in ".xsession-errors". Finally I got it to work using this ".xsession" file:

exec env PATH="/raven/bin:$PATH" dbus-run-session start-lumina-desktop

[lucho]

After using MidnightBSD on the NVMe SSD and ZFS (see the above P.S.) for a few days, a couple of issues:

1. Booting with Clover, the boot menu remains invisible, only a non-blinking underline cursor is seen.
2. After inactivity of 10 minutes, Fluxbox gets killed, closes all open windows, and XDM retakes control.
3. The above occurs also if I try to lock the screen manually from the Lumina desktop menu.

The second one is was very annoying, because I don't know how to disable the idle timeout (meanwhile, DPMS screen blanking works). "xlock" can lock the screen instead but needs "xautolock" to trigger it, which isn't available as a package and must be built (see below).

A clue to the reason for the second issue could be the following record in "/var/log/messages":

kernel: pid 1173 (lumina-desktop), jid 0, uid 1001: exited on signal 6

P.S.: It turned out that if Firefox isn't in the foreground, Fluxbox doesn't get killed! But if Firefox is in the foreground and there is no mouse or keyboard activity in 10 minutes, it does!

Also, I built "xautolock-2.2":

cc -O2 -D__GLIBC__ -Iinclude -I/raven/include -o xautolock -L/raven/lib -lX11 src/*.c

and start it in a ".config/autostart/xset_command.desktop" file:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Xset command
Type=Application
Exec=/bin/sh -c "xset r rate 250 30 dpms 0 0 605 && xautolock -noclose"
X-KDE-AutostartScript=true
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true

Why does Fluxbox get killed if Firefox is in the foreground and there is no activity in 10 minutes, and by what?

P.S.: I suspected XDM, but it turned out that I was wrong! When I disabled XDM in "/etc/ttys", prepared the following "/usr/local/bin/MK_COOKIE":

#!/bin/sh
dd if=/dev/random bs=16 count=1 2>/dev/null | od -x -An | tr -d ' '

ran "startx" and Firefox 14½ seconds later and waited, 600 seconds later Firefox killed Fluxbox (see X log):

[ 1943.633] (II) event4 - PixArt HP USB Optical Mouse, class 0/0, rev 2.00/1.00, addr 3: device is a pointer
[ 2558.136] (II) event0 - System mouse: device removed
[ 2558.136] (II) event1 - System keyboard multiplexer: device removed
[ 2558.137] (II) event2 - Power Button: device removed
[ 2558.137] (II) event3 - AT keyboard: device removed
[ 2558.137] (II) event4 - PixArt HP USB Optical Mouse, class 0/0, rev 2.00/1.00, addr 3: device removed
[ 2558.154] (II) UnloadModule: "libinput"
[ 2558.154] (II) UnloadModule: "libinput"
[ 2558.154] (II) UnloadModule: "libinput"
[ 2558.154] (II) UnloadModule: "libinput"
[ 2558.155] (II) UnloadModule: "libinput"
[ 2558.185] (II) Server terminated successfully (0). Closing log file.

And here's the corresponding excerpt from "/var/log/messages":

May 7 09:06:46 prodesk600 kernel: hdac0: Unexpected unsolicited response from address 0: 00000000
May 7 09:06:46 prodesk600 syslogd: last message repeated 221 times
May 7 09:12:16 prodesk600 ntpd[1023]: 1 out of 4 peers valid
May 7 09:12:16 prodesk600 ntpd[1023]: bad peer 0.midnightbsd.pool.ntp.org (195.85.215.215)
May 7 09:12:16 prodesk600 ntpd[1023]: bad peer 1.midnightbsd.pool.ntp.org (78.159.131.45)
May 7 09:12:16 prodesk600 ntpd[1023]: bad peer 3.midnightbsd.pool.ntp.org (84.54.128.102)
May 7 09:38:51 prodesk600 devd[748]: check_clients: dropping disconnected client
May 7 09:49:10 prodesk600 kernel: pid 1407 (lumina-desktop), jid 0, uid 1001: exited on signal 6

So the "killer" is found – Firefox! But it probably merely tries to lock the screen and if the third issue above didn't exist, the second would also be irrelevant since "xautolock" locks the screen after 10 minutes of inactivity anyway!

P.P.S.: When I replaced "start-lumina-desktop" with "lumina-desktop" in the above ".xsession", it started without the Fluxbox windows manager, and in this case Firefox in the foreground doesn't kill anything! So, the "victim" is Fluxbox, not Lumina.

[lucho]

Originally Posted by Onauk

I have also had a hard time with microSD cards. I think it is not recommended to use them to install an OS. There are multiple instances of Raspberry Pi (which uses an SD card by default) users who have discovered this flaw.

My Rasbperry Pi 5, Orange Pi Zero and RockPro64 use microSD cards, and there are no such problems. So I think that the problem isn't the microSD card itself, but the USB-2.0 port to which I connected it via a card reader ('cause I was out of USB 3.0 ports). Unlike the full-duplex SPI (used by SD cards) and USB 3.0 (with its separate data channels, each consisting of 2 wires for both transfer directions), the half-duplex USB 2.0 has only one common channel (2 wires) for both directions. IMHO, the USB 2.0 flash drives and card readers should have waited for USB 3.0. I can compare (very roughly) USB 2.0 to the coaxial Ethernet cables from the past (with CSMA/CD), and USB 3.0 to the later dual twisted pairs.

P.S.: Having said that, I must add that had put the user space of Loongnix on my LS2K500 LoongArch64-based nanocomputer on a microSD card, connected via a USB-2.0 card reader. And the "ext4" filesystem (without a journal) works there without problems even after power outages.

[lucho]

With redirected standard output and standard error to a log file, after 10 minutes of waiting in the foreground and just before killing Fluxbox, which in turn killed Lumina and the session, Firefox "said":

[Parent 1422, Main Thread] WARNING: g_dbus_connection_unregister_object: assertion 'G_IS_DBUS_CONNECTION (connection)' failed: 'glib warning', file /construction/firefox/firefox-134.0.1/toolkit/xre/nsSigHandlers.cpp:201

(firefox-default:1422): GLib-GIO-CRITICAL **: 17:07:53.271: g_dbus_connection_unregister_object: assertion 'G_IS_DBUS_CONNECTION (connection)' failed
[Parent 1422, Main Thread] WARNING: nsDBusRemoteServer: Unable to unregister root object from within onNameLost!: 'glib warning', file /construction/firefox/firefox-134.0.1/toolkit/xre/nsSigHandlers.cpp:201

** (firefox-default:1422): WARNING **: 17:07:53.271: nsDBusRemoteServer: Unable to unregister root object from within onNameLost!
Exiting due to channel error.
Exiting due to channel error.
Exiting due to channel error.
Exiting due to channel error.
Exiting due to channel error.

The above doesn't reveal the cause for the "exiting", the more so that Firefox records its crashes, and on the next run it would say it crashed if it really did. And since Fluxbox is a parent process to Firefox, the conclusion is that it's Fluxbox that kills Firefox and not vice-versa. Why, for example, as it now turns out, the session is terminated even if no program is running?!

P.S.: Alas, after installing Openbox and replacing Fluxbox with it from Lumina General Options, there is no change! So, I switched back to Fluxbox.

P.P.S.: What's common between nothing in the foreground and Firefox in the foreground? The lack of a foreground title bar! (Because Firefox hides it by default.) So, right-clicking the toolbar, selecting "Customize", and enabling "Title Bar" at the bottom (see screenshots) restored the title bar... and it turned out that this solves the problem with closing the X session after 10 minutes of Firefox inactivity at last!!!