Conclusion

- 3 minutes read - 627 words

Thanks for making it this far. I hope you have a FreeBSD laptop that will help you Just Focus for years to come!

I want to say thanks to the awesome FreeBSD community members who helped me get this laptop into such a fine shape. I hope that identifying points of snag even for a fairly-sophisticated Unix user will help these folks continue to make FreeBSD a viable open source opportunity for years to come. At best I’m a user who can type a lot, you’re the ones that make the magic happen until I can Just Focus enough to fully apply my efforts to improving the kernel and userland.

Mastering the vt

As I mentioned, I would really like to have the ability to change the boot_mute image and/or make it last longer to cover up rc script output. This has lead me to finally get familiar with the BSD source code.

Doing so taught me to see how educationally impactful it is to have applications use the same libraries as the kernel. When you see an interesting call in the kernel, you can see if that function is used in an application. If you want to extend an application, look to see how its functions are used in the kernel.

On top of that, a lot of student-targeted C code is horribly contrived or academic. FreeBSD’s is a great C codebase to learn from. While some of the engineering approaches are moot (and that’s a valuable lesson in itself), I find that the code is written to be read, even where, upon reading it, I go: “Hm, well, yes. No idea.”

Other Install Stories

I hope that these documents show that it’s not entirely easy install FreeBSD. I would really love to see things get easier. I think the FreeBSD Foundation’s efforts around making 2025 the year of the laptop will go a long way to giving the community a few well-supported choices. I think everyone should be able to learn programming and computing for less than $200.00

For me, building on sub-$200.00 hardware is a constraint to drive creativity. But for many this would be a lot of hours of work. But that’s what’s great about building a “Just Focus-like” computer on FreeBSD: you an have an OS, for about the price of a Chromebook or a low-end Windows machine, that isn’t riddled with ads and that doesn’t take your privacy in exchange for a lower price point. We can reclaim some shred of our self-determination with FreeBSD (and GNU/Linux).

There are some “all in one FreeBSD + Desktop” installations. I’m most interested in helloSystem (which tries to look like OSX of its golden “Aqua” era (2002-2006). These are exciting and inspiring resurrections of good ideas we might have moved on from a too hastily.

But my laptop was not an overnight build. It was definitely harder in places than it had to be. And in several places my literal decades of experience with Unix helped me fight to a solution or, at the very least, a better question. That’s a hell of a capability that is not evenly distributed through the population.

So I feel like it’d be dishonest were I to not acknowledge that others have had a rougher time of it. I want to let those people know that, in my book, they’re awesome. Out of respect for them, here are two FreeBSD attempts that are, honestly, kinda rough and should inspire the cognoscenti to aim higher. We can do it.

Conclusion

In the end, I’ve found FreeBSD to be a wonderfully clean, minimalist, thoughtful, and elegant operating system—exactly what I needed for my “just focus” laptop project.

Now it’s time to stop working on this and Just Focus.