Re: [Edbrowse-dev] FreeBSD port

[Chris Brannon <chris@the-brannons.com>]

Cleverson Casarin Uliana <clcaul@gmail.com> writes:

> and installing/using an entire OS through SSH is not
> practical.

First, congratulations to David on getting edbrowse into the ports tree!

Well, if you just want to try FreeBSD, there are always virtual machines.
Have a look at qemu.  It has a curses display driver, which you can
select by passing -curses on the command line.  Any text-mode OS should
work.  You may have trouble if the OS insists on displaying one of those
silly splash screens.  This puts the display into graphic mode and
breaks qemu's curses driver.  With Linux, this can usually be gotten
around by passing an appropriate parameter to the kernel at boot.
I've never had any trouble with this when running *BSD under qemu, so I
assume they don't do the splash screen thing?
Serial consoles are also an option.  With qemu, you can redirect the
serial port to a TCP listener, so that you can access the serial console
via telnet.  Use a Unix-domain socket and socat for greater security.
If your hardware supports hardware virtualization, you can
use qemu with kvm.  This is much more performant than plain qemu.  It
isn't noticeably slower than running on bare metal.
I've used qemu extensively for many things, including trying out
various flavors of BSD.  So if you want to take FreeBSD for a spin
without installing it on actual hardware, this is a great option.

-- Chris