New install in VirtualBox in a non english setup

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jphd
Posts: 2
Joined: Sat Oct 15, 2016 7:41 am

New install in VirtualBox in a non english setup

Post by jphd »

PC with Windows 7 SP1 x64, 24GB, Intel i5-4690, Virtualbox 5.1.6, French Azerty keyboard.
Try to install GhostBSD10.3-RELEASE-20160827-173859-xfce-i386.iso on a 32GB virtual disk.

(N.B. experience with Unix started in 1982 on a Unix V7 PDP-11-34 @UCSD, then many old version of FreeBSD
with CLI configuration and compiling of kernel, ... recently installed and used Xubuntu 14.04 in HDD or virtual disk,
many years as C programmer in Windows)

I do appreciate FReeBSD style, much more than GNU*, for many reasons.

Now today's experience:

1st - boot in VB: VERY short time to chose between the 4 choices, only one will work,
after finding proper parameters in VB. Must ### off quite a number of people.
It is not really obvious that it is a live session only, and that to do the install
you have to double click on a desktop icon.

2nd - *NO* Choice of keyboard configuration at boot & install time, no indication that it is a QWERTY only process,
UNACCEPTABLE. (Neither Windows nor Xubuntu would even try that!)

3rd - Having recognized that common US ethnocentric behavior, I get the thing working, and updated, but...
The keyboard is now AZERTY when the system is running - OK, but still QWERTY
at the boot / initial login. I haven't been able to find any way to change that.
Absurd. Any username / password with QAZW or number in it will fail, jeez!

Is there any European in the dev team? (UK is not in Europe, it is somewhere else)

Willing to go on, but this is not easy... We are in 2016.

jphd
ASX
Posts: 988
Joined: Wed May 06, 2015 12:46 pm

Re: New install in VirtualBox in a non english setup

Post by ASX »

Hello and greeting from Italy, from one EU contributor to the project.
The project founder, ericbsd, live in Canada and his primary language is French as far as I know.
No matter where are the devs from, keyboard selection must work (or get fixed).

1- Thanks, unfortunately virtualbox doesn't officially support FreeBSD, so yes, some manual settings is required, I'm taking now a note to be put on the next relase notes / release announce.

2 - True, there is no choice of keyboard at boot time, but there is at install time, as soon as you start the installer language and keyboard are selected and keyboard is set immediately. It it hasn't worked for you, please provide further details, obviously we are unable to test every keyboard layout out there, but we are certainly willing to fix broken things.

3 - keyboard, simplest workaround is to put the folllowing line into ~/.xinitrc:

Code: Select all

setxkbmap fr
Unfortunately we changed login manager for just this release, and of course we missed something along the way.

Please, feel free to post more questions as needed.

ASX
jphd
Posts: 2
Joined: Sat Oct 15, 2016 7:41 am

Re: New install in VirtualBox in a non english setup

Post by jphd »

Thank you for the answer.

OK, put as 1st line. .xinitrc is now:

setxkbmap fr
exec $1

Fail.
Does not change the behavior for the initial login.
And I think that if I wanted to login to a CLI shell rather than Xfce desktop it would not work either. Right?
The useful setting should be set before X starts. (I used to know how to do it, but that's too long time ago.)

OK, I can't install and use the: Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-5.1.6-110634.vbox-extpack
but the system is working OK, Network OK, mouse OK, keyboard OK (after manual setting), access to
local network computers OK.
(except one XP with PrivateFirewall running, that I can't access as long as the firewall
is in use, other Windows computers have not this problem, strange...)

I did not try yet: printing, audio, video.
I will try to test Wine, one day.

I gave the VM 4096MB memory & 128MB video memory. The disk is SATA, the network is bridged.
USB is set to 1.1, unused anyway.

Firefox works, Internet access is OK,
*But* Update Station burn some CPU, then exit without a word. Is that OK?

OctoPkg tells me that everything is green, but I do not see Wine in the list ???
Where is it?

And I worry about the continuous 12-20% CPU used with the guest is idle, as seen from the host,
when I gave only 1 core to BSD out of 4 in the i5-4690. ??? (Equivalent to 40-80% of 1 core CPU time)
The BSD task manager tells me that it is using only 1% CPU!
What is the cause of that?

Best regards,
jphd
ASX
Posts: 988
Joined: Wed May 06, 2015 12:46 pm

Re: New install in VirtualBox in a non english setup

Post by ASX »

jphd wrote:Thank you for the answer.

OK, put as 1st line. .xinitrc is now:

setxkbmap fr
exec $1

Fail.
Does not change the behavior for the initial login.
And I think that if I wanted to login to a CLI shell rather than Xfce desktop it would not work either. Right?
The useful setting should be set before X starts. (I used to know how to do it, but that's too long time ago.)
Yes, text console keyboard layout is set in /etc/rc.conf, with something like "keymap=fr.iso",
or using the tools "kbdmap"

X keyboard setup should be set automatically, clearly is not, we are looking into, but we have other priorities.
OK, I can't install and use the: Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-5.1.6-110634.vbox-extpack
but the system is working OK, Network OK, mouse OK, keyboard OK (after manual setting), access to
local network computers OK.
(except one XP with PrivateFirewall running, that I can't access as long as the firewall
is in use, other Windows computers have not this problem, strange...)

I did not try yet: printing, audio, video.
I will try to test Wine, one day.

I gave the VM 4096MB memory & 128MB video memory. The disk is SATA, the network is bridged.
USB is set to 1.1, unused anyway.

Firefox works, Internet access is OK,
*But* Update Station burn some CPU, then exit without a word. Is that OK?
It is not clear, we rely at 99% on FreeBSD repos, Virtualbox has that problem upstream, we are not going to fix it, simply we don't have the resources to do that.
OctoPkg tells me that everything is green, but I do not see Wine in the list ???
Where is it?
wine is available as pkg and a port, and is visible from octopkg, please look again.
And I worry about the continuous 12-20% CPU used with the guest is idle, as seen from the host,
when I gave only 1 core to BSD out of 4 in the i5-4690. ??? (Equivalent to 40-80% of 1 core CPU time)
The BSD task manager tells me that it is using only 1% CPU!
What is the cause of that?
Most likely some background process, like update-station, and/or some "tracker" process:
it appear that gksu was built with a dependency to "nautilus" which in turn pull in 5 "tracker" utilities, meant to speed up desktop searches.
When we will find a reasonable alternative to gksu, things should improve.
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