FreeBSD and OpenBSD in Hyper-V - First Attempts


So I wanted to try out the  new FreeBSD 13.1. Rather than installing it onto a physical computer, I decided to try creating a virtual machine in Hyper-V. 

Hyper-V is a Microsoft product, and it was all I am able to use in the work environment that I am in. In a previous experiment I was able to create a Linux Mint virtual machine in Hyper-V with no problems. 

However, I did encounter problems setting up FreeBSD 13.1 in Hyper-V. I eventually gave-up on getting FreeBSD 13.1 to work in Hyper-V. I tried a few different ideas, but I was never able to get X-Windows to recognize the keyboard. The keyboard worked fine to type in startx, but once X started, the keyboard wouldn't work. 

It was a little disappointing not being able to get FreeBSD working in Hyper-V, but alas, some times such things happen.


To stay within the BSD family, I decided to try out OpenBSD. I had very little knowledge of OpenBSD, but I decided to get it a try in Hyper-V.

Unlike FreeBSD 13.1, X Windows inside OpenBSD 7.1 was able to recognize both mouse and keyboard. This article is actually being created on OpenBSD 7.1 in X using the Gnome window manager and default web browser. 

I did encounter a problem in OpenBSD, however. When creating the virtual disk, I used a 20GB non-expanding, static drive. I figured 20GB would be enough, but I discovered that it filled up when trying to install the gnome window manager files. So I deleted the 20GB and created a 30GB drive, but I ran into the same issue. At least with a 30GB drive most of the Gnome software installed and X was functional. Installing FireFox failed as the pkg installer ran out of disk space. 

During the installation process, I had the OpenBSD installer automatically allocate the disk drive, so on my next attempt, I may do a manual allocation with most of the drive being allocated to root and a small amount to a swap file. 

A special thanks to Life, Home and my Linux Journeys on Youtube and his video OpenBSD 7.0 With The Gnome 40-4 Desktop New Release New Results Dec. 2021. It helped me out with setting up Gnome in OpenBSD.

More to come.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

AmigaOS Aros clone on Icaros Desktop version 2.2.5

Recent AmigaOS 3.1 Word Processor Experiments