BSD Cafe Billboard

So I was testing to see if the MidnightBSD install image would blow up on my Framework 13A and I am happy to report that it did not. I did not start the installer but switched to the LiveCD and as all of the system messages popped up successfully the last message before the login was the start of the aged service. Very sad considering that this project was the first to resist age attestation by prohibiting its license in states/countries where age attestation laws exist.

Sorry, couldn't resist.

@TomAoki
"Anything I don't understand is therefore easy to do."
-- Pointy Haired Boss from Dilbert

It's a midterm election year. Politicians want to show themselves as being proactive and forward thinking (or get voted out). California is on a quest to plumb the depths of human stupidity. Sadly, they set the standard for other blue states.

Another example is the law they are about to pass that makes all 3D printers, CNC milling machines, and other automated manufacturing tools illegal (and their owners criminals) unless they can detect if a firearm or firearm part is being printed/manufactured and block it at the device. All these devices (if you are not familiar with them) share one thing in common: they process files called gcode which is a series of X & Y coordinates and commands add or subtract material (depending on the device). The device cannot tell the difference between a firing pin, toilet seat cover, or a slinky dragon. The law wants all files to be sent to an AI for permission to print. On a device you own. It's political overreach at its finest since it is being pitched to eliminate "ghost guns" (unserialized weapons) and "protect the children". For the record, ghost guns are not undetectable or invisible to metal detectors. That is utter BS. Sure, you can print a fully plastic gun with all of the moving parts, but if you put a bullet in there and the plastic firing pin manages to activate the round, you will be lucky if the shrapnel kills you. "Ghost" guns have no serial number on the lower (the part with the grip) and cannot be traced back to the owner. Manufacturing guns for personal use is not illegal in the US. Selling or giving them away is. You can't even will them to your children. Any gun you make during your lifetime has to be destroyed when you pass. You can't even have them buried with you as someone might dig them out.

Selling ghost guns is already illegal nationwide. Out of every 100 ghost guns confiscated, 1 might have a 3d printed part. What this is actually doing plays into the surveillance state setup that age attestation started. To make matters worse, they slipped the ghost gun thing into a budget bill and refused to approved the budget unless the ghost gun bit went with it. When a law affects as many people as this does, the people should have to vote on it. This stuff is being pushed by Left Wing Super PACs as they were the one's making joyous press releases when the law passed somewhere.

I will stop now.

Install worked but I was trapped with the lack of wireless support for the AX210. I don't have another OpenBSD box to install the firmware from and my Framework doesn't have Ethernet. Graphical login worked but the trackpad was not detected/enabled. I have an i3 NUC laying about and I may use that to test OpenBSD or maybe another BSD as OpenBSD doesn't have bluetooth support and I kind of need that for the external mouse I prefer.

A super PAC is a type of political action committee that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections, but it is prohibited from directly contributing to candidates or coordinating with their campaigns. This structure allows super PACs to operate independently while still supporting political candidates through advertising and other means.

Many scholarly works on modern politics (real ones, not the ones focusing on the trends being artificially promoted by one side or the other) draw the political spectrum as a line graph with moderates in the middle and the left/right heading off in their respective directions. My personal observation is that this graph should not be a line but a circle. Starting with moderates and branching off as before, but both sides ending up at absolute totalitarianism regardless of which side you take.

@tomaoki your model is correct and on my graph the ideals would be located at the 90 degree and 270 degree positions with anarchy at the 135 and 225 positions.

OK, i was able to install OpenBSD 7.9 on the i3 NUC. Firmware has been installed via USB drive and my laptop (running CachyOS again) with the manual on screen. Wifi is up and operational. I may take this opportunity to modify my boot image to include the firmware as per the instructions.

I tried installing 7.8 but once I get the installer started it blows up. I should have taken some screenshots but I needed my laptop operational again so i reloaded CachyOS (don't hate me, it works out of the box).

Here are the specs:

• Framework 13
• AMD Ryzen 7 7840
• 64GB RAM
• AMD 780M Integrated Graphics
• 2TB nvme drive
• Intel AX210 wifi/bt card.

I've gotten FreeBSD installed but can't get a graphical login to save my life.
GhostBSD hangs at Stage 2 of the boot process (when the terminal first clears to report a bunch of stuff before switching to graphics).

i truly want to give a BSD a real go as a laptop daily driver, but I am flummoxed at every turn.

TBH some were quite usable. I converted one to use as an icon for OpenBSD on my personal startpage.

There is an alternative to niri called scroll (https://github.com/dawsers/scroll) which is a fork of sway. Sway is in the OpenBSD repos so it stands to reason that scroll should work on OpenBSD. How do I request that this package be added? I am not familiar with the packaging procedures of any of the BSD's.

I am on, profiled, and connected and see nothing.

Since it is schedule for a June 16 release (more or less), I am going to wait till then to give it a whirl with my test NUC before going on to my Framework 13A. Omfreebdy looks like it will set up most of the stuff I wanted, so let's see what happens.

The docs seem to expect physical presence first or sending QR codes which is dicey.

Consider it yours.

In this case, the repo maintainer was kind enough to tell you what AI was used in each file. Look at the file names. Most of them are DallE.

<SOAPBOX>
"AI" is a marketing term. It is catchier and more futuristic than Large Language Models.

While true, self-aware and conscious artificial intelligence is a goal, we are not there yet.
https://castle.princeton.edu/the-7-levels-of-ai/

If you are gung-ho about it, try dog-fooding it for a while on real work. I did. I used "AI" to help me sift through an Internet's worth of Linux and BSD documentation to come up with a simple, cohesive set of installation instructions. Goals were stated, targets set, hardware identified, and all it was able to produce was either a half-assed system that kind of worked or failed utterly. The latter more than the former. It got confused a lot on the details (either hallucinating up stuff or reading from old docs) and had to be reminded to double-check everything versus the latest documentation. It also had a habit of over-complicating things. At one point it wanted me to install nix (the package manager) on Void Linux as part of it's plan to allow me to install Brave browser.

The graphics stuff is cute and getting better, but is killing off any art form really worth it? Sure, some tools (like "AI" masking) are very useful. But generating photographic quality images as opposed to hiring a photographer is not very cricket. Plus, legally, all fully "AI" generated images or videos cannot be copyrighted and are automatically in the public domain. The same with code.

I am done now
</SOAPBOX>

All I was saying is that it is a tool that is not readily understood, that marketing types are the actual driving force behind the proliferation and early adoption is fraught with all of the usual gotcha's. Punting it onto the unwashed masses before being thoroughly debugged is always a recipe for angst and social outrage.

@grahamperrin That was poorly written. Better said that a whole lot of money is being dumped into marketing these product before they are fully baked.

@grahamperrin How? This is clear as mud.