This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3,777 for Tuesday, the 24th of January 2023.
Today's show is entitled, running Hiku on Bive, the BSD Hypervisor.
It is hosted by Claudio Miranda and is about nine minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Claudio talks about installing and running Hiku are one beta 4 on Bive.
Hey everyone, this is Claudio Miranda, also known as Claudio M on the Fediverse and pretty
much everywhere else.
I want to record an episode for Hacker Public Radio because as per Ken Fallen,
HPR is extremely low on shows, so this is my contribution and I hope to record a few
more to fill that gap and if you can't please do so because this podcast, this Hacker Public
Radio only exists as long as you decide to contribute to it.
So my contribution for today is my experience with running Hiku, the open source
implementation of the B operating system, aka BOS, on free BSD via B hive, B hive if you're
not familiar with it is the BSD Hypervisor.
So it's like virtual box or KVM and Linux or VMware, it's a system to allow you to run virtual
machines and run operating systems on those virtual machines.
So this is available in free BSD, if you look in the packages for repository for free BSD,
you do a search for B hive, it should be in there, it's also available in the Lumos and I'm
not sure if it's available on any other operating systems, but I will be putting links to
these applications to B hive and whatnot in the show notes, so keep an eye off of that.
So what I use, you could use B hive straight out, there's commands and everything if you do
a man B hive, it should give you all the information you need on creating a VM and running
that VM and configuring it, you can also find a lot of tutorials online, but there is a tool,
management tool that I use called VM B hive and you'll also find that in the free BSD repositories.
It's VM Hive and B hive, but the command itself is just VM, so there's a few commands that
are listed, the link that I'm providing also gives a quick tutorial on how to set up a virtual
machine with B hive using VM B hive, so the nice thing about is that it builds up configuration
files for you, has some presets and stuff, so if you want to do a Windows virtual machine,
you can actually do that, I actually did that here at work and it works pretty well,
I was able to image the virtual machine with our district image here and set it up as a
virtual system for testing server of sorts. But anyway, I'm not going to talk about that, I'm
going to talk about Hiku, since I had actually gotten this running and was playing around with B hive,
I've tried to get Hiku running on a B hive virtual machine, so I went ahead and I went through
the installation and the installation seems to go through pretty well, the way I set it up is that
I had it booting as a UEFI system, so I did, if I'm not mistaken, initially I did use the X8664 version
and the installation actually booted up fine, I was able to perform the install, but I did notice that
once the installation was done, it wouldn't boot, so I would started searching on the internet and I
did find a page that from the Hiku website that shows you how to boot or how to perform installation
for UEFI and what you basically have to do is copy over the EFI boot folders and I think the
keys folders, there's a folder with keys in there, but I'm jumping ahead of myself here a little bit,
that folder actually is available on the latest release of Hiku, when I attempted this the
first time I was using one of the nightlies that were available after the R1 Beta3 came out,
and every time I tried the nightlies, it just did not work, but I figured since the R1 Beta4
was released just recently, I'd give it a try again, so I went ahead and performed the same
installation process as if I'm installing onto a regular machine or a hard drive and I partitioned
everything as I needed to move over those UEFI files to the boot system and the way I did that
actually was, after everything was done installed, I went ahead and booted again off of the installation
image and mounted the virtual drive that I installed Hiku on, or actually not that, when I mounted
the EFI partition that was created on that virtual drive, and I copied those EFI boot folders,
the EFI folder, and the keys folder over from the installer image to the virtual drive,
the partition on the virtual drive, and once I did that I was very happy to see that it would
actually boot, so I don't know if something changed within R1 Beta4 that allowed for this to happen,
but I know there's been some, it seems like there's been some work in that, but yeah I was able
to get a system booted, a Hiku system booted, and I was able to install everything and
run some applications, as a matter of fact the little bit that I ran was kind of impressive
considering web positive, which is the BOS, the Hiku web browser, the native web browser,
based on net positive, which was available on BOS, that one used to be very crashing,
sometimes had issues with certain sites, but this time around it loaded sites with minimal issues.
I think the only thing I noticed was when I loaded a mastered on,
was an issue that was that happened to me before, where the widgets for the buttons on the page
were just these blank boxes. Now if you hovered over them, you would see a tool tip
that would describe what it is, and it would still function, but it wasn't just visible,
it wasn't the actual widget that would show, and that was still persisting on web positive,
that was on R1 beta 4. Otherwise I did load a couple of things, I figured let me load my work,
my trouble ticket page for work and everything, and our districts web page, and loaded that
just fine, did have any problems. YouTube seemed to work fine, but since I don't not using any
audio on that, I couldn't really test too much, but otherwise everything seemed to load fine.
I do plan on playing a little more with R1 beta 4 on some actual hardware. I had been thinking
installing this version on my EPC901, which is currently running OpenBSD, but I have to
see, because I kind of don't want to delete OpenBSD installation, so I may see about getting another
SSD and putting that on there, and then just kind of swapping out as I feel like it.
But yeah, it was kind of cool. If you are interested in running FreeBSD and want to play around with
Beehive, go ahead and find yourself, heck, you might even run FreeBSD in virtual box,
and then play around with Beehive that way, and then kind of go all inception with your virtual
machines and installations. So yeah, I'll be putting the links in the show notes for all of this.
If you have any questions, please reach out to me, you can find me on Macedon,
as ClaudioM at bst.network. You can also hit me up via email at ClaudioMatstf.org,
and we're just right in the comments. Be sure to put a comment for this episode. Thanks,
and have a good one.
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