A fellow Nutanix Technology Champion Jonathan had asked if anyone had tested FreeBSD 14 on AHV yet, FreeBSD 13 is shown on the compatibility matrix fine. (I am using AOS 6.8 here)
I’ve not used FreeBSD in many, many years other than via an appliance such as NetScaler so I thought it’d be a useful little trip down memory lane.
First things first, I grabbed the ISO from the FreeBSD site, and imported it into Prism, made a small 4vCPU/8GB/80GB VM, with UEFI enabled (but not secure boot per compatibility matrix).
The ISO booted up fine
Clicking through the installation, selecting defaults, and opting for ZFS (horrid memories of UFS + power cuts on Solaris), I was glad to see a working VirtIO network card and I opted for DHCP to give it a functional test.
Installation took a few minutes and completed successfully.
Upon reboot I was greeted with a familiar console, all happy and working.
I thought I’d give it a bit of a work out by installing a GUI (knowing KDE would come with loads of packages and give the whole thing a bit of work to do) off I went with ‘pkg install kde5‘ which didn’t disappoint. (of course you wouldn’t install a GUI on a server)
Post installation we needed to install a couple more packages for KDE to run on boot up:
sysrc dbus_enable=”YES”
sysctl net.local.stream.recvspace=65536
sysctl net.local.stream.sendspace=65536
pkg install sddm
sysrc sddm_enable=”YES”
A reboot later, and I was disappointed to see KDE didn’t start on boot 🙁
Looking on the console and running ‘startx‘ by hand I could see a familiar framebuffer error I’d seen years ago, I stumbled upon Muktadiur’s Blog that suggested creating a file /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/driver-intel.conf containing:
Section "Device" <- I fixed the typo here in my copy Identifier
Indentifier "Card0"
Driver "scfb"
EndSection
A reboot later, we were greeted with this delight:
Unfortunately, no working mouse!
A quick pkg install utouch-kmod and added of utouch_load=”YES” to /boot/loader.conf and another reboot we were off to the races. (Thanks to The FreeBSD forums)
