Easy fresh hobo HDD

It was a suprisingly simple fresh install on an attached HDD using some cables to power and then access by USB.  I put together a seperate hard drive to use on a machine I do not own.  I had the 14.0 installer on a usb, the only question was which attached drive via the bios boot menu would be the one among many.  The bios menu does show 'transcend' for the usb3.0 reader which is good but the real HDD attached via usb looked to blend into all the others.  I figured it out (maybe a semi-random guess) and got FreeBSD installed clean.

I chose ports and source, chose various needed options, and it installed as a ZFS stripe to the one drive.  The 14.0 installer is quite nice actually, even though it is not vastly different than most in the past.  I cannot make a custom kernel or reduced install since this will be used with hardware I cannot know right now, it may have nVidia and intel.  My next task was to get as much setup as possible so that when I finally use this drive I will be able to get right back to playing minetest or doing anything else I might usually do.

I began with trying to install fvwm3 which gave me the temporary error that pkg was not yet setup.  Once pkg was functional, I installed fvwm3, then xorg-server and xorg-drivers, I tried to startx but it was not yet present, a very simple solitary line "exec fvwm3" was in my .xinitrc file.  Installing xinit and then xauth solved the startx issue.  I could get fvwm3 up but quickly realized xterm was not yet present.  I looked at the fvwm menu option for "XDG Menu" which needed py-pyxdg, and after that I fleshed out most of my usual desktop items.  I installed firefox, gkrellm2, flameshot, and feh.

I chose to create a unique wallpaper for this portable 'hobo' drive, and then I tried to add it to the fvwm options for wallpaper but it wasn't displaying how I wished.  It took a bit of time before I figured out that what I needed was feh --no-fehbg --bg-max hobo_wall.png & in my .xinitrc above the exec fvwm3 line.  Everything was now about as workable as I could want, the rest I needed was to copy a bunch of things from my primary box, like my .cshrc and 'Ported_Software' and Blog directories.  I forgot to add bluefish but that is just one thing, if I end up writing another blog post via the drive running on another's pc.

This makes me wonder about my struggles to restore a desktop or graphics on my primary box when something disturbs what was installed and configured.  Certainly installing everything by pkg from the FreeBSD repo means it should all just work which is good, and I guess proves how much I need to learn or how fragile things can be when you customize.  I could have used desktop-installer but I did not, and succeeded anyway.  It definitely helps to have an idea of which components are necessary to get a desktop GUI up, though fvwm is much simpler than KDE or any other all-encompassing Desktop Environment.