Posts by BigSneakyDuck

FreeBSD 15 trims legacy fat and revamps how OS is built

Re: Groff

You're quite right, once all man pages were compatible with mandoc, then groff was removed from base in 2017: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/commit/738919c0391b99947b758d85f6a8636be1886fbb

But the first release this took effect was indeed 12.0R in December 2018. Among other switchers to mandoc, macOS removed groff in 2022 with Ventura, and OpenBSD (where mandoc originated) all the way back in 2011: https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20110314142734

It helps that mandoc is ISC-licensed so more BSD-friendly, and simpler since it only needs to understand man pages rather than trying to do general typesetting.

I can see the reason for the confusion is that Liam's quoting a comment - about an advantage of pkgbase being that you could drop something like groff - which was made in November 2018 just before 12.0-RELEASE came out. Unfortunately reusing this example suggests groff is still in base, so the error is in the article itself. (Deleted my own comment because I can't edit it and don't want it appearing in search snippets or AI regurgitation and misleading people! Funnily enough I was using groff a few weeks ago in an almost fresh VM image and forgot this was one of the few packages I'd actually had to install.)

FreeBSD 14.2 wants to woo Docker fans, but still struggles with Wi-Fi

USB tethering on your smartphone

Anyone who has a smartphone with either WiFi access or a data contact, and has a USB cable that can link their phone to their computer, can create USB ethernet that way. Just plug the phone in and select "USB tethering" on the phone menu. I sometimes used it for a speed boost on Windows on a laptop whose ancient WiFi chip gave me far slower speeds than my phone. But for FreeBSD it's even more useful.

The FreeBSD Handbook claims you need to manually load the appropriate driver into the kernel before you can tether, which suggests you need to be at the command line. This seems to be years out of date however - since FreeBSD 12, devmatch has dynamically loaded drivers when hardware is recognised. So even while in the install stage, I've been able to plug my phone in, select USB tethering, and the USB ethernet just appears as ue0 in the network configuration menu! Worth a try if you're having WiFi woes.

https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1dprdrx/is_freebsd_handbook_section_on_usb_tethering/