Setting up FreeBSD 12 in Virtualbox 6, 2019

VirtualBox has come a long way since I started using it 11 years ago!

In that time, FreeBSD has put in a lot of spit and elbow grease and make the process of using it as a guest operating system pretty smooth for a BSD.

FreeBSD has also switched package systems in that time too -going from the aging pkg_* tools to using the newly written pkgng system.

I don't write often because I have settled into a pretty dull routine; WSL, or Mint, and the occasional NetBSD vm, with some retrocomputing mixed in from time to time. Nothing worth writing about, honestly.

Frustrated with trying to compile an update for NetBSD, I decided to take FreeBSD out for a spin. While I do play with FreeBSD from time to time (not as much as Net) I hadn't really taken a very close look at how well it works with VMs these days.

For the most part I've worked with connecting to my VMs with ssh, and hacking together decent resolutions either with Mate's tools or custom xorg.confs. Not wanting to take excessive amounts of time waiting for compiles and being curious, I just dove right in to pkgng, Virtualbox, and Mate.

I created a FreeBSD 12/amd64 virtual machine and ran through the installation from iso -nothing major there.

After that was set up, I got pkgng to work. That simply meant running pkg and then "pkg update"

From there I installed the xorg, virtualbox-ose-additions, mate and slim packages. Later I found I needed to add fuse, though I'm not sure what for at this point -mounting, maybe?

So ...pretty simple so far; after that some configuration needs to take place.

For slim, you need something in ~/.xinitrc. Since I'm running Mate I only have one line in mine:
exec mate-session

For virtualbox I've added the following to /boot/loader.conf:

fuse_load="YES"

And I made the following changes to /etc/rc.conf to get everything working:

dbus_enable="YES"
hald_enable="YES"
slim_enable="YES"
vboxguest_enable="YES"
vboxservice_enable="YES"

I've also set up codeblocks, firefox and vlc as well.

I used Mate's hardware tool (graphics) to set up a decent resolution and saved it as a local user. I wasn't able to save it globbally, which is annoying but I can cope with. I don't have sound working, but I'm confident I'll get it if I ever need it.

My middle mouse button works, though -so FreeBSD already has one over on Mint.

I wasn't able to get shared folders to mount, but I found a nice post on the FreeBSD forums that gave me the following line:

sudo mount -t vboxvfs -o rw,gid=1001,uid=1001 vmshare $HOME/windowsDir

Change the share ("vmshare") name and the destination and it works just fine, albeit a little "ghetto" for 2019.

I had a NetBSD VM set up for my retrocomputing (simh) environment -still have it, actually -but I think I'll set this up too, and maybe even try recompiling a system from scratch sometime in the future.

One thing I'll make a note of -I tried the same set-up with vmware player but couldn't set the resolution above 1280. Installed their tools, did some things I found on the google -none of it worked so I went back to my VB VM ...which did.