Since I have been stymied in my attempts to get gaming going on FreeBSD for myself, I decided to attempt another tactic. After some effort I was able to get VirtualBox installed and setup to function properly, and it took a number of attempts to get the Gentoo iso to startup within it. I chose Gentoo due to a remembered mention of it being somewhat like FreeBSD, maybe I was remembering something else but I went with Gentoo. My plan was to see if I could get some stuff to work in the virtual environment which had failed me on FreeBSD.
The Gentoo install is involved. We may hear complaints from those who try to install FreeBSD or any other BSD as it not being easy or is complicated, or that updating things later is difficult. I would doubt most of those people have used Gentoo or have gone through all the details necessary to install it. Luckily for me there is a guy in Kentucky who regularly (annually or so) records a step by step install video for Gentoo. He says that things change from time to time and he likes to keep an updated walkthrough for those who would need it.
I followed his video, pausing and rewatching in order to be sure I got the steps correct as I worked to setup Gentoo in virtualbox. He tells of some settings that he might not use himself but that others may, and I chose to use some of those. When it came to setting up the EFI partition and installing the needed files, it did not work. It took me three iterations through the whole process to this point, restarting from a fresh install each time, to discover what I did wrong. There was a path or file or directory name that I mistyped each of those previous times. How I noticed that I made this mistake I am unsure, except that perhaps the emphasis on a third attempt made me look closer. I made it past this and it felt like I would finally finish.
I was able to reach nearly the last steps when grub is setup for the last reboot. This is the moment I had difficulty again. What went wrong I may need to revisit, watching the video again to be sure. I corrected whatever it was, and succeeded to get grub working, I thought. Yes it would reboot and grub did function, but the trouble now was that when I went through the second video to install a GUI, I had made some mistakes with SLiM and FVWM3. How I was trying to execute slim and direct it to start fvwm3 was inaccurate. I solved this mistake but then discovered that due to the entire Gentoo install being rather bare bones, I was again stopped because although fvwm did load up, I had no way that I knew how to continue.
I had to install xterm, and I tried to solve a script issue that uses python. Gentoo has a lot of things compile on your system with the emerge commands. Getting most of what I needed built (and installed) took nearly a day to complete. I still did it, using FreeBSD as the host, virtualbox provided with as much ram (22G) as I could and as many processor cores (5) as I was able. The host was still mostly responsive but Gentoo inside virtualbox worked at a snails pace in comparison.
I hoped that if I could install Lutris, and get that to function, I would learn what I am missing with my unofficial port of it, the same for any other port like the ryzom client, or wine functionality, or steam. Each install took forever which somewhat dampened my expectations, and then when I believed I had done everything for Lutris and the ryzom client to function, there were still unsatisfied dependencies or misconfigured things. My hopeful panacea for Gentoo in virtualbox to help me solve problems became barely different than attempting directly from FreeBSD.
I still have a lot to learn about how to install a linux thing for Gentoo and how to find and discover dependencies, and where to look for documentation, and which documentation might be most accurate. I have not yet abandoned it as both a challenge to learn more about and as a possible route to discovering how to make things function properly on FreeBSD. The amount of non-automated detail that goes into doing things on Gentoo is mostly okay, I do tedious tasks on FreeBSD also, but a little more automation and speed would definitely not hurt, especially speed. Waiting a day to verify success, to try something is a bit depressing.
I recently bought and assembled a new pc, about a month after I had my virtualbox experience above. One massively beefier than my present Phenom IIx6, it is a Ryzen 3 and ram jumps from 32 gigabytes up to 128. When I transfer the virtualbox machine to the new hardware (I have very little intent to go through THAT process again), perhaps the build and install process with emerge will not be so onerous. Maybe at some future date I can write about how my understanding of Gentoo helped me succeed with something like dbeaver or lutris.
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