Firefox 45 is GTK3 by default in FreeBSD! Finally, I don’t have to build it from ports to get GTK3, just pkg install firefox :)

Also, I’ve enabled e10s (multiprocess) + OpenGL acceleration + OMTC (off-main-thread compositing) + APZ (async pan & zoom). On the stable version. It’s great.

This day in “computers are terrible”: Sweetroll crashes after a few requests to the HTTP proxy… on my laptop with FreeBSD 11-CURRENT… when compiled as a static binary. I don’t think the same static binary ever crashed on my server with 10-RELEASE though. Anyway, removed the -static flag.

Year of FreeBSD on the laptop, part N: the EFI loader now supports booting from ZFS. And displaying the menu. Even the boot environment menu. This is great! (But now I have a useless 1GB UFS partition…)

htop 2.0 is cross-platform and improved and just really cool! I’ve added FreeBSD support for the battery life meter. It was really simple compared to what they have for Linux – two ways of reading battery info, both involve the file system, which means messing around with I/O and strings.

Moved FreeBSD on my laptop from UFS root to ZFS root! (+ UFS /boot)

Had to actually reinstall a fresh system and restore the tar backup inside of the running system, because after just unpacking it onto a fresh ZFS volume, it couldn’t boot. In the weirdest way possible: the boot process was hanging on mountroot waiting for USB o_0

Trying to run FreeBSD directly on hardware. Some people say that free operating systems work better on older computers… well, nope.

On my old MacBook Air, it crashes when you try to do any significant disk I/O (like, you know, installation, or just unpacking an archive to a RAM disk) or when starting X. On 10.2-STABLE, it’s general protection fault while in kernel mode or page fault while in kernel mode, on 11-CURRENT it’s vm_page_alloc: page 0x... has unexpected queue N.

On a more recent iMac, it works great. bge(4) Ethernet, nVidia graphics, a USB sound card, USB 3.0 hard drives. 4K videos on YouTube play smoothly. Changing display brightness doesn’t work, but darkening the screen with xbrightness or xrandr is okay on a desktop.

But I wanted to use it on the laptop :-(

xhyve supports FreeBSD now! Converted my VirtualBox machine to a raw disk image using VBoxManage clonehd, started it in xhyve. (Had to Esc to the prompt, unload and disable-module vesa to prevent the “module vesa not found” error.)

Works great! Rebuilt the whole system (clean buildworld installworld buildkernel installkernel) in 32.783 minutes. VNC is a bit slower than VirtualBox’s display emulation, but that’s fine.

So you don’t need Avahi (with its dependency on dbus, glib and other stuff) to use Bonjour on FreeBSD: Apple’s mDNSResponder is available as a port!