brianwillan
Before installing GhostBSD, back up all of your data. Wipe both the NVMe and SATA drives. Install GhostBSD on the NVMe drive, which appears as nda0. During installation, name the initial user admin.
After the installation completes, reboot the system and add the SATA drive as a separate ZFS pool. In this example, the SATA drive is ada0. Verify the disks first:
geom disk list
Destroy any existing partition table on the SATA drive:
gpart destroy -F ada0
Create a ZFS pool for home data. You can call it zhome or zdata:
zpool create -o ashift=12 zhome ada0
zfs set atime=off zhome
zfs set compression=lz4 zhome
Create a dataset for your user’s home directory. Replace yourusername with your actual login name. It is not a literal directory name.
zfs create zhome/yourusername
zfs set mountpoint=/home/yourusername zhome/yourusername
Create the regular user and assign the home directory to that dataset:
pw useradd yourusername \
-m \
-d /home/yourusername \
-s /bin/tcsh \
-G wheel
Set the password and fix ownership:
passwd yourusername
chown -R yourusername:yourusername /home/yourusername
chmod 700 /home/yourusername
At this point, the operating system lives on the NVMe drive (nda0), and the home directory lives on a separate ZFS pool on the SATA drive (ada0). This allows you to reinstall GhostBSD later without losing any data in your home directory.
For scanning, I set up an FTP service on my GhostBSD system. The scan function on the printer allows scanned documents to be sent directly to a remote FTP destination. As long as the FTP server is configured in the printer’s settings, you should be able to scan and upload files straight to that server without additional software.
For better isolation and security, create a dedicated user and group for scanning, for example scanner. Configure the printer to authenticate using this account. Scanned files will then land in the scanner user’s home directory.
Next, add your regular user account to the scanner group. This allows you to access scanned files without logging in as the scanner user or weakening permissions on your main home directory. This approach keeps the scan workflow contained while still making the files easily accessible for daily use.
Lastly, for voice typing or dictation into text fields, there is no strong native solution on GhostBSD at the moment. In practice, the most reliable approach is to use a web based dictation service. Most modern browsers provide built in speech to text capabilities that work well for form fields, editors, and general text input.
This approach avoids driver issues, desktop integration problems, and model management overhead. It also tends to produce better results than local solutions, especially for general purpose typing rather than command oriented input. For occasional dictation, this has proven to be the simplest and least fragile option.
