Deth

This morning I was updating my FreeBSD to 13.2 since freebsd-update found it. On my server, it went without a hitch. Here on my desktop, I couldn’t make it start SDDM. Upon some other experimenting, it wouldn’t load services that were installed from ports. That was strange.

My first serious try to get things working was to reinstall all of my ports, which isn’t a bad idea after an update anyway. The best way to do that is by pkg upgrade -f to force the download and reinstallation of all installed ports. That didn’t et things working for me.

That had me thinking something got messed up with the update. It happens most times when the screens to merge changed etc files comes up. Normally, I leave the notes. It’s just the smaller text that makes me miss those sometime.

Today I triple checked that I wasn’t doing that. It turns out that I still made a fat-fingered mistake. I deleted this line from. /etc/defaults/rc.conf

${_localbase:="/usr/local"}

That’s why it wasn’t loading any of the services from ports, since they’re installed under /usr/local/etc/ instead of the base system. In my opinion, this separation between the base operating system and ports is one of the greatest aspects of FreeBSD. It just keeps the cruft down and makes the system easier to maintain.

There are really only two possible ways I can imagine I did this. One possibility is I hit the D key one too many times in vim to delete something above it. The other and more likely possibility is I just hit the d key in vim purely accidentally. Every so often, the muscle memory kicks in on my without me even realizing it. If I wasn’t expecting, if I might not have even thought to look there.

With every config file being text-based and mostly simple config files, it makes it possible to fix almost anything like this that occurs. I still remember in the days of windows all those years ago when you basically had to reinstall with most configuration screw-ups like this.

Once I restored that file things have been working great with this update.