Appendix: Implicit Skills

March 16, 2025 - 4 minutes read - 758 words

You’re going to be navigating around (cd), editing files (vi), etc. You need to be able to list files, view files’ content, move directories, copy and moves files about, etc. You should be able to page output with less or more.

“Home directory” should be a familiar term.

Reading `man` Pages

As I mentioned, FreeBSD has an excellent documentation culture and that comes in the form of manual or man pages. FreeBSD is descended from the original Unix developed at AT&&T who gave out their implementations on physical tape. Given that they were shipping around the globe in the early 1970s, providing documentation “on-line” was a practical necessity. Thus man was born. It’s a program. You can even man man which has always been amusing. The man library is divided into sections:

     1.	  FreeBSD General Commands Manual
     2.	  FreeBSD System Calls Manual
     3.	  FreeBSD Library Functions Manual
     4.	  FreeBSD Kernel Interfaces Manual
     5.	  FreeBSD File Formats Manual
     6.	  FreeBSD Games	Manual
     7.	  FreeBSD Miscellaneous	Information Manual
     8.	  FreeBSD System Manager's Manual
     9.	  FreeBSD Kernel Developer's Manual

FreeBSD people are forever saying printf(1) with that (1) after the interesting term or function. This might seem obnoxious, but sometimes the same token has multiple sections. The printf program appears in both sections 1 and 3. To leave off that identifier leaves the destination as ambiguous.

Install a Package With `pkg`

Foreshadowing Linux’s apt and apt-get, pkg install <packagename>.

Search with pkg search <package-string>

See the man page for more.

Privileged and Unprivileged Users

root versus all the others. Why do they exist? Which should you log in as (not root). Why? This is covered elsewhere, but the installer will have you create a privileged and non-privileged account and you should have some model for why.

FreeBSD does not come with sudo as is common in Linux (sudo is a GNU program). For the sake of this guide, and for my philosophical purity of keeping things BSD as much as possible, my solution was simply to log in as root. This has risks but I started using virtual terminal 9 (Alt + F9) for user stuff and leaving terminal 0 for root login.

You can install sudo. My finger memory definitely reached for it, often. But once I got the system setup, it wasn’t something I needed often. Also, during installation, we added our unprivileged user to the wheel group. Doing so on a BSD system gives that user the ability, through their group membership, to edit most system file – so one theoretically needs sudo less.

File ownership; permissions

Many resources explain this.

`sysctl`

sysctl is a way for changing kernel behavior without (re-)building the kernel. So it’s very low-level configuration that can be changed from the terminal i.e. no reboot required to see effect.

Here’s the man page:

The sysctl utility retrieves kernel state and allows processes with ap- propriate privilege to set kernel state. The state to be retrieved or set is described using a “Management Information Base” (“MIB”) style name, described as a dotted set of components.

As suggested, these values can also be read. Dump them all with sysctl -a.

sysctl changes are volatile. That is, they don’t stick unless you put them in disk.

Other Helpful Tools

Since we’re focusing on a focus mode laptop a lot of desktop niceties that we don’t want to install for fear of avoiding bloat or distraction won’t be around. Make sure that you can do some searching (grep) and some output mangling for use as input (|).

| (“Pipe”)
grep

Commands for…

Power Management

acpciconf -s3: Put the system in “S3” (industry specification) suspension. This will help you simulate “shutting the lid” without wearing out your computer’s hinge

System Information

Boot log can be read via dmesg or interacting with /var/log/messages

Mounting a USB Drive

If you need help with a large bug, you may need to get data to another machine for submitting to forum, etc.

# camcontrol devlist # this is for the CAM subsystem: it manages hardware # mount -t msdosfs /dev/da0s1 /mnt # do a basic mount ^ – to determine the filesystem type first, use file -s /dev/da0s1

Keep in mind, that in the case of a USB drive (typical), you have to mount a given slice, in specific, the first slice: that’s the s1 at the end. If you do lsblk (“list block (storage) devices”)), you’ll see /dev/da0.

It’s typical in BSD related things to refer to the physical partitions on a storage medium with s[1-n]