New approach to working around that frustrating touchpad issue with trying to run FreeBSD and derivatives in KVM/QEMU: just giving a USB drive over to NomadBSD!
NomadBSD is a persistent live system for USB flash drives, based on FreeBSD. Together with automatic hardware detection and setup...
Had to get a little amused during the installation.
Yeah, you should indeed maybe skip the encryption for now if you have no clue wtf you are doing. I did not want to encrypt anyway, but also have never worked with geli.
And everything so far seems to be functioning after booting back into the new install, besides the Wifi card. Support is kinda spotty on the BSD side, which is one reason I was just trying to run shit in a VM.
But, some kind soul on the forum has us covered!
In place of wlan0 you can use usb tethering… its works on nomadbsd. usb tethering is done via RNDIS protocol which by default is supported
Vaguely impressed again at how friendly and helpful a lot of BSD communities do seem to be. Maybe especially in comparison to some gaggles of Linux enthusiasts. (And yes, I say this as someone with plenty of experience there. 😩 Approachability is not always great, maybe especially for new users.)
So yeah, I do now have working network through tethering to this phone. Which I tried to do with something else a while back (don't actually remember what tbh), but I was glad for the little walkthrough. Especially since I am a huge n00b when it comes to BSD. A lot of stuff is just different enough to trip you up pretty fast until you get used to it.
I did a little more configuration, and ran an update on the little that came installed by default. It's late enough that I don't even want to get into a browser sufficiently to even post to Tumblr from over there tonight, but hey. Certainly planning to jump back in tomorrow.
This is looking pretty fun for now, at least. Which is at least half the point.
