Recent content on JRG Systems
I made a video about how to hack on FreeBSD from an Apple Silicon MacBook. This is a companion video for my blog post with the same title. Please excuse all the “ummms” and “ahhhs”. I’m new to being on camera. :) FreeBSD QEMU VM guide referenced in video: Guide: Run FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE for ARM64 in QEMU on Apple Silicon Mac (MacBook Pro M1, etc) with HVF acceleration…
UPDATE: 10-4-2023 - I accidentally put the wrong IP address in the /etc/exports file for macOS. It has been corrected below. I really like coding on MacBooks for reasons spelled out in a previous post . I also really enjoy hacking on FreeBSD. So how do I bring these two seemingly disparate operating environments together in a developer’s paradise? By running an ARM based FreeBSD VM on the…
Recently, I acquired a new 14" M2 MacBook Pro for my business. I haven’t used a MacBook as a daily driver since I left Apple a couple years ago. Instead, I’ve used various Thinkpad’s running BSD ’s or Linux as daily drivers. I forgot how easy it is to be productive on a MacBook. Apple has made incredible strides in taking away the friction of working within a computing…
This year I attended the BSDCan 2023 conference in Ottawa, Canada. This was the first time I’ve attended a BSD conference and I had a wonderful time. Ottawa is a charming city with a rich heritage. It isn’t overly challenging to navigate, given that it serves as the capital of Canada. Embarking on an early morning stroll along Wellington Street, flanked by government buildings and…
Something goes wrong… Our house lost power the other day while the family and I were on the way out the door to eat at a restaurant we hadn’t been to before. Power outages are generally not a problem for my basement home lab since most of the systems I consider important are on a UPS and will shut themselves down gently if power suddenly goes missing. For reasons, my primary router…
I recently wrote a blog post complaining about Oracle Cloud being too Oracle-ish (which, duh…) Oracle Cloud provides two free ARM64 virtual machines which can run Linux or FreeBSD. I mean free is free, right? (the answer to that is emphatically no ) so I jumped on board to give it a whirl. I migrated this website to a FreeBSD ARM64 instance and everything went swimmingly. Ok, so far so…
TL;DR Obsidian on FreeBSD Installer I use the application Obsidian to write notes on everything from a daily journal to details on my various systems and projects at work and home. It’s my go to information store for everything life throws at me. Obsidian is a great tool for this kind of knowledge database for several reasons. First, it stores all your data as text files in Markdown format.…
After a bit of “soul searching” and annoyances from Oracle Cloud that began to pile up (the traffic management layer is very Oracle-ish), I migrated away from the free tier of Oracle Cloud’s offering to a small VM from Vultr. This time I installed OpenBSD. Running a small webserver with OpenBSD is a breeze! I always knew this in an abstract sense but never deployed one myself.…
I first started using DigitalOcean years ago and found their cloud management tools simple and intuitive to use. Deployment and management of cloud computing images was a snap and I was very impressed with their software offerings. Not to mention they had actual FreeBSD support comprising of blog posts and custom OS images. Overall, I’ve been very happy with DigitalOcean’s services for…
Introduction Following up on my post about how I pair my bluetooth headphones on FreeBSD, I decided to test drive the new blued project by Andreas Kempe on my Lenovo T480 laptop running FreeBSD 13.1. I first saw mention of blued configuration daemon on the FreeBSD Quarterly Report and decided to take a look. The blued build is straightforward. The ng_hci kernel driver needs to be patched,…
Introduction Bluetooth on FreeBSD is a topic that’s fraught with some difficulty to say the least. Many modern system bluetooth chipsets are not supported ‘out of the box’ by FreeBSD drivers and the pairing / connectivity software leaves a bit to be desired. With all that said, it is possible to get Bluetooth working with an audio headset. I have not tried to connect any other…
So, I was going to write a post about how finding printer drivers that work with FreeBSD is a pain and how I was eventually able to get my printer working by using a Linux printer driver with FreeBSD’s Linux syscall emulation and CUPS. Then, I ran into conflicts with the printer driver I downloaded and the Linux compat libraries I was using on my desktop. Essentially, it boiled down to me…
This question popped into my mind recently on a rainy bike ride into my favorite co-working space. For the past ten years or so, I’ve spent nearly all of my computing time in MacOS. I did that because it was required by work. Now that I no longer have said requirement in my life and am free to run anything I like on my systems, why do I keep coming back to BSD? In a similar vein to Ruben…
Introduction wifibox is a great project that brings Linux wifi drivers to FreeBSD. I only recently learned about the project from a reddit post on r/freebsd . Wifibox creates a bhyve virtual machine running Alpine Linux with your system’s wifi device passed through to the Linux system. The question then is: “Why would I want to do this?” If your wifi works great under FreeBSD,…
I’ve been using FreeBSD on and off for many years now. I really like the project’s focus on quality engineering and documentation. Recently, I’ve begun to look for ways to increase my skill as a software engineer while also contributing to open source software once again. Happily, joining the FreeBSD community as a developer meets both of these goals. With this in mind, I decided…
Hi! I’m John Grafton. I live in Ohio and enjoy writing software the UNIX way. The BSDs are my operating systems of choice and I enjoy installing FreeBSD on just about any hardware I get my hands on.