Almost switched to GhostBSD!

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zezollo
Posts: 12
Joined: Sun Feb 12, 2017 12:54 pm

Almost switched to GhostBSD!

Post by zezollo »

Hello!

Thanks for this excellent work! I could install GhostBSD (hence FreeBSD) very easily on my laptop. Almost everything worked very smoothly.

Unfortunately I really love the atom text editor (https://atom.io) and I see that, so far, atom is not easy to build on FreeBSD (more exactly, from what I read from the topics on github, it looks extremely long and difficult). It could be better from FreeBSD 11.0, though, so I'll certainly give a try again once 11 RELEASE is out. Until then, I will stick to Manjaro... But I hope I can join GhostBSD soon!

Cheers!


Nicolas
kraileth
Posts: 312
Joined: Sun Sep 04, 2016 12:30 pm

Re: Almost switched to GhostBSD!

Post by kraileth »

Hi Nicolas and welcome to GhostBSD!

Having an Arch background as well (vanilla Arch, Antergos and Manjaro, too), I totally see your problem. There's a lot of software available on FreeBSD - but simply not everything that you may be used to. I've never used Atom but I heard good things about it. After a quick research on the net I must admit that I cannot really help you with this. Node stuff is quite a bit over my head.

If you enjoy FreeBSD in general you could try your luck with the Linuxulator (FreeBSD can execute Linux binaries by translating its syscalls). To be honest: Not everything works with it. Usually the problem is that the kernel emulated by FreeBSD is too old for a lot of recent software. A good indicator is: Does it run on CentOS 6.x? RedHat ships pretty old (though heavily patched) kernels and if a program is happy with that, chances are that it might well work on FreeBSD, too. I don't have any CentOS boxes around so I cannot really check. But I've read on the net that Atom can be built on CentOS 6.5 but that it is a bit complicated... It really sounds that this is a beast of an editor! :lol:

In the first time on FreeBSD I used to miss the AUR. But eventually I got used to alternatives for programs that I couldn't get to work and even found some pretty interesting ones. Altogether I'd say that FreeBSD is well worth having to do without a few things. But for some people a dual boot setup may also be helpful - now that both FreeBSD and Linux can work with ZFS that's much easier than it used to be in the past!

Either way: I hope that you like 11.0 when it's out and that it will work for you. Perhaps there will even be an Atom port some day. We'll see!
Jes
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Joined: Sun Dec 25, 2016 2:43 pm
Location: Spain
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Re: Almost switched to GhostBSD!

Post by Jes »

Not a critic, only my personal opinion.

I've used atom to write markdown code to take notes and to generate html documentation. In my experience atom runs smoothly until the document start to grow up. Then it comes terribly slow.

But, as kraileth has told, you could try it with linux emulation, running directly the linux atom binary. Or you could try wine and the windows binary.

Honestly, if the lack of a freebsd atom package/port stops you to use ghostbsd, then maybe you should think why you want to try ghostbsd. Only for testing? are you disappointed with windows/linux/mac for some reason? do you think freebsd has something other OS don't have?

I know freebsd/ghostbsd lacks some package linux has, but in the balance the reasons to use ghostbsd are by far just enough, for example: high stability between versions when you upgrade, very good package/port system, the bsd init system (I hate systemd), running desktop system out of the box, and many others. Others could say the same about Linux and windows. It's a matter of taste too :) . You must draw your own conclusions.

My advice: use ghostbsd for a while despite of lack of atom; there are other great editors (imho better than atom) as vim, emacs, jedit, pycharm (commercial but with open community edition), kdevelop, eclipse, netbeans, ninja-ide, eric, etc.

BR
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ericbsd
Developer
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Joined: Mon Nov 19, 2012 7:54 pm

Re: Almost switched to GhostBSD!

Post by ericbsd »

Jes, Sublime Text 2 and 3 can be added to the list.
zezollo
Posts: 12
Joined: Sun Feb 12, 2017 12:54 pm

Re: Almost switched to GhostBSD!

Post by zezollo »

Thanks everyone for your contributions and all these hints! We could add geany and gedit to this list, even if they are, like atom, rather text editors than true IDEs, but have also interesting plugins that make them really good tools.

I tried to answer thoroughly but it made quite a long post, sorry about that...

I knew most of the IDEs you told about, but took time to make a "tour" again, trying them, installing plugins etc. They are all quite excellent, some even have interesting advantages over atom and I discovered some features I didn't know they had. But still, not one of them, in my opinion, fits my needs as good as atom, very clearly, and despite its drawbacks (a bit too heavy and missing a source code browser for python).

Why I want to use FreeBSD is I find its quality simply excellent and I wish I could use it on a desktop computer.

I do not use Windows nor Mac since 12 years now and could never use any proprietary system again, I'm too accustomed now to find the door open when I want to change things the way I want to. On my desktops, I've only used linux distributions all this time. Only made one try with FreeBSD some ten years ago, but had to compile everything, it was really too long (OpenOffice, etc.). The result was interesting, especially quick, but too complicated to maintain for an everyday usage (for me, at least). Apart from that, I use a "vanilla" FreeBSD on a server since several years now, and I appreciate it a lot, especially for its security (jails!), reliability and robustness. I'm not exactly disappointed by Linux; but from the server experience, FreeBSD looks "better", cleaner, more ordered and stable, less "chaotic" to me. (Personnal opinion).

I felt GhostBSD makes the installation and settings of a FreeBSD as easy as a mainstream Linux distribution, and I'm really enthusiast about that :) I feel it's an excellent work that may help people to discover and use FreeBSD.

So, to get back to the "atom question", at the moment I cannot install FreeBSD on my main desktop, because its processor is too new and unsupported yet. But I have a laptop that's a bit older, that I use occasionally, when I work away from home and I wanted to install GhostBSD on it. This could be a start and for that, I could try to use atom with linuxulator (no experience with it) or wine. Or PyCharm might do the trick for this occasional use.

Later, when FreeBSD becomes installable on my main desktop (maybe when the 11.1 is out?), I could consider installing GhostBSD on it too, but I really need a functional atom. There used to be a FreeBSD support and I don't know why it has been dropped. I noticed that there's a bounty there: https://www.bountysource.com/issues/290 ... o-electron so maybe there's a hope to see atom run natively on FreeBSD?

Thanks again to everyone!
Jes
Posts: 42
Joined: Sun Dec 25, 2016 2:43 pm
Location: Spain
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Re: Almost switched to GhostBSD!

Post by Jes »

Very glad to know you are an experienced linux and freebsd user, I didn't know. And very well expressed your position.

Maybe it's a matter of time someone can fix the problems with the freebsb atom port. In the meanwhile you can try with the linux emulation. There could be some issues with that, specially with libs. There are articles in the internet about how to deal with missing libs and linux emulation; the trick here is grabbing the missing libs from the centos distro.

Other solution could be wine and windows atom binary.

The third option is VirtualBox. Not the ideal option to use an editor. I use VirtualBox for example to run "acestream" and watch live streaming. Acestream in a linux inside virtualbox, and vlc in ghostbsd, with virtualbox running in Host Adapter mode. Virtualbox with a 32bit linux distro (debian jessie) runs smoothly in ghostbsd (8Gb RAM minimum); you can put it full screen and virtually didn't notice you are working into a virtualization.

BR
kraileth
Posts: 312
Joined: Sun Sep 04, 2016 12:30 pm

Re: Almost switched to GhostBSD!

Post by kraileth »

Jes wrote:The third option is VirtualBox. Not the ideal option to use an editor. I use VirtualBox for example to run "acestream" and watch live streaming. Acestream in a linux inside virtualbox, and vlc in ghostbsd, with virtualbox running in Host Adapter mode. Virtualbox with a 32bit linux distro (debian jessie) runs smoothly in ghostbsd (8Gb RAM minimum); you can put it full screen and virtually didn't notice you are working into a virtualization.
That's an interesting approach! I've tried to get Linux Firefox running because for some work related training I need to be able to watch DRM protected ( :x ) video streams. Linux's Firefox supports this, the version in FreeBSD doesn't (yet?). I failed to get it working using the Linuxulator. I downloaded 32 RPMs to satisfy all needed libs only to find Firefox segfaulting on startup... :cry:

Right now I'm running a full Arch Linux in VirtualBox, but reading your post I now wonder if I should try to use OpenSSH's X11 forwarding. Ideally I'd then build a minimalistic Linux VM (Alpine?) and use Bhyve for it. If this works, that wouldn't actually be so bad! Luckily there are almost always multiple possibilities.
Jes
Posts: 42
Joined: Sun Dec 25, 2016 2:43 pm
Location: Spain
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Re: Almost switched to GhostBSD!

Post by Jes »

Yes, with virtualbox in Host Only Adapter Mode you have another machine in your lan. I need to do NAT and IP Forwarding to get this virtual machine reach the internet. So, after the right configuration in your firewall (I use PF) to have this virtual machine working as another PC with access to the Internet, the possibilities are infinite. As I said, I use it as a proxy (aceproxy) to run acestream, and watching live streams in ghostbsd.

And for everything you cannot manage to get running in ghostbsd you can use the virtualization, for example firefox or whatever. With a quick machine and memory enough (mine is a thinkpad T420s i5 with 8Gb and a couple of SSDs) you can work very decently.

BR
gbar
Posts: 40
Joined: Wed Apr 05, 2017 12:30 pm

Re: Almost switched to GhostBSD!

Post by gbar »

Hi folks,

For somebody who is used to following YouTube videos to problem solve i'm struggling a bit getting started with GhostBSD. I have had a couple of minor successes trawling through various forums but i could somebody help me with installing the cdt add-on to Eclipse please?

cheers
gbar
kraileth
Posts: 312
Joined: Sun Sep 04, 2016 12:30 pm

Re: Almost switched to GhostBSD!

Post by kraileth »

gbar wrote:For somebody who is used to following YouTube videos to problem solve i'm struggling a bit getting started with GhostBSD. I have had a couple of minor successes trawling through various forums but i could somebody help me with installing the cdt add-on to Eclipse please?
Hi gbar! Sorry for the delay in answering your post; I wanted to answer but got distracted and then lost track of it... I agree with you in that it might be a good idea to be present on YouTube. However somebody would have to dedicate free time to it and the team currently is running short of that resource! ;)

About your Eclipse / CDT question: I know next to nothing about Eclipse, but I've installed it to take a look at it for you. It seems to work (i.e. it can be started and I could create a blank Java project). Then I installed the CDT add-on and started Eclipse again. Now there's this new "C/C++ Development" category that opens a help file when clicked on. So I'd say CDT plugged into Eclipse successfully. I've just installed the addon:

Code: Select all

pkg install eclipse-cdt
that's actually all that I did. I would assume that you did this as well (or built from java/eclipse-cdt). Please describe your problem in a little bit more detail so I can understand what's not working for you.
Attachments
eclipse_cdt.png
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