NomadBSD 1.4
 

Whilst I normally run a lightweight Linux distro, this O/S has caught my eye. :)

If you are at all interested in the BSDs, this one is worth a look.

It will run 'live' from a pendrive, but runs better once installed to the pendrive - or install to hard drive.

One specific feature that I found most useful is that it mounts ext4 partitions 'out of the box'.

It uses the OpenBox WM, but has an interactive toolbar in addition to a menu bar as standard, with lots of useful programs included, a real mobile BSD O/S on a pendrive. :hattip:

https://nomadbsd.org/index.html

Hi fatmac,

Thanks for posting - that looks a really interesting project. Reminds me of using FreeSBIE booting off CD many years ago on other people's computers! :)

Have you tried installing to hard drive?

Cheers,
Steve

I used to use FreeSBIE too...2007 version, as well as NetBSD Live from 2007 & 2012 - still have the discs. ;)

Yes, I installed it to several machines, works a treat, just that I found USB transfer speeds to be a bit slow for me to keep using it as my main O/S.

I've got my old FreeBSIE, BackTrack, OpenSolaris, PC-BSD beta disks v.0.7.3 on up from when I was a beta tester and a tonne of old Live CD's in my desk drawer. :)

That's a blast from the past! I ran PC-BSD a while ago. Thanks for the heads-up, fatmac. That project does look interesting. :)

I have a Thinkpad T61 that died a few years ago when I pulled the USB mouse from the dock while it was compiling ports. After sitting in a drawer all that time it resurrected itself when I was checking for possible fan donors to preform surgery on my X61. I've had Kali on it but have been planning on switching it over to FreeBSD.

Before doing that I thought I'd try installing my old PC-BSD beta disks to the 64bit machine. The disks were i386 dated June 2005 up and I only have one i386, the IBM T43, and I didn't want to mess up my FreeeBSD build.

PC-BSD beta disk v.0.7.8 and v.0.8.0 stalled at a making slices screen and never made it past that. PC-BSD v.1.5.1 was made in 2008 and my machine was made in 2997 so I tried that. It got to the very end and had some issue that prevented the build from finishing so I gave up on it.

I've got Minix, DesktopBSD, Watt, Frenzy, AntiX, Fugita, a lot of Slax and Puppy disks. But with a 100GB HDD I decided to devote that box to the Dark Mother, Kali, and am installing the latest version now.

I'm looking to move from Slackware to a BSD. I was thinking of moving to OpenBSD, but this NomadBSD is very interesting. I've installed OpenBSD and NomadBSD in VirtualBox 5.1 and both are running, although slower than if native.

With NomadBSD, I like the desktop ready applications: a browser, a audio player, an IRC, an office suite, a password program, a note editor, the Octopkg add program, printer config, three file managers. The only thing I'd add is EMACS, because that is where I do task management and diary. Really it is ready to go. On the other hand OpenBSD needs nearly all of that added, plus the gtk, qt5, and other programs to support the applications. So I really am impressed with NomadBSD. My only hesitation is will NomadBSD become a PC-BSD interest, which will wane in a few years? Then I'll wish I had taken the OpenBSD to desktop road, because of learning howto build my own desktop. In other words, is there and easy way to build a desktop with the application suite found in NomadBSD, or is there a OpenBSD desktop script which builds applications? Cheers, BrianA_MN

NomadBSD is just a compilation of programs running on top of FreeBSD, so the base system will still be around.

It isn't the base system that I'm concerned about, because I know it is FreeBSD. My question is really about the application compilation and how it is applied on-top of FreeBSD. Is there a way to duplicate the script or process in OpenBSD or even on NetBSD?

As a newbie to BSD, I'm still learning if the package add process does a dependency check and adds all the necessary dependency's in all the BSD's or only in FreeBSD? My experience with adding Firefox-esr to OpenBSD was the necessary dependencies were added, but the application ran very slowly.

NomadBSD also has what appear to be custom applications, ex OctoPkg. It also seems to have been tuned for the desktop. Those are steps I'd love to understand. I hope to learn some of those steps before moving to one of the BSD's only on my older CPU platforms.

Is NetBSD the only BSD that still runs on 68040 platform?

OpenBSD's mac68k port is long since discontinued.

http://www.openbsd.org/mac68k.html

NetBSD has quite a few which may be relevant:

http://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/

Regarding ports and packages - it's best to read the documentation provided for each OS, as all have diverged significantly in that respect.

I have a Beginners Tutorial on How To Build A FreeBSD Desktop From Scratch with a target audience of someone who has never used the command line that takes you from installation of the FreeBSD Base System to a fully functional Fluxbox Window Manager FreeBSD desktop using ports to compile third party programs.

I take you step-by-step through installation of the Base System and show you how to use the portmaster program to compile 3rd party programs like Firefox from ports. It pulls in a list of all dependencies it thinks needs to be installed and you can choose options for each one. Something that you cannot do if you use the pkg system.

If you don't want to install everything it suggests you can choose no and use the -i flag to choose which to install and which not to install. Like this:

You can skip the Windows hand-holding parts, use pkg instead of ports if you like and still follow the outline. It covers a pf firewall ruleset, and one if you use CUPS, and shows you what System and Security files need editing before you go online.

There is a separate tutorial on How to Spoof your Ethernet MAC Without Dropping the Interface using FreeBSD and some free wallpapers I made.

@trihexagonal Thank you for the reply and the excellent tutorial. I read the tutuorial and picked up some really good insights to building a more secure desktop system with the notes about pf. Do I properly undertand your comments about portsmaster vs pkg and they can't both be used on the same system? I might have missed it in the tutorial, but the extra note about -i usage in the above reply was helpful. I would think a cron job could be setup to check on updates? Thanks again. Cheers, BrianA_MN

I mix ports and pkg but I have the experience to work through problems that mixing them might bring with it.

Experience people new to FreeBSD do not yet have, and running into problems they can't yet solve increases the chance of them becoming needlessly frustrated, giving up and moving away from FreeBSD.

You don't need to run a cron job to update. Once or twice a day I run:
# portsnap fetch update
# pkg audit -F
# freebsd-update fetch

If freebsd-update fetch downloads updates then you run:
# freebsd-update install

And reboot afterwards with:
shutdown -r now