In this guide, we’ll use the xine video player to set up basic video playback on a fresh FreeBSD install. The xine multimedia player relies on the XWindow system and the XVideo extension to provide a graphical video playback interface.

Xorg supports a wide variety of video cards, but not all are supported or offer good video playback performance.

It is a good idea to have a short MPEG test file for evaluating various players and options. Since some DVD applications look for DVD media in /dev/dvd by default, or have this device name hardcoded in them, it might be useful to make a symbolic link to the proper device:

Due to the nature of devfs(5), manually created links will not persist after a system reboot. In order to recreate the symbolic link automatically when the system boots, add the following line to /etc/devfs.conf:

There are several possible ways to display video under Xorg and what works is largely hardware dependent. This guide will focus on the Xvideo extension which allows video to be directly displayed, even on low-end machines.

Start by installing the X Window System:

Once the package has been fully installed, the X Window System can be started with:

To check whether the Xvideo extension is running, use xvinfo:

If XVideo is supported, the result will look similar to the example below and may include screen and video card information.

XVideo is likely unsupported by the video card if the result instead look like:

The display may be unable to meet the demands of rendering video playback if XVideo is unsupported (though this is not always the case).

xine is a free multimedia player. It plays back CDs, DVDs, BluRays and VCDs. It also decodes multimedia files like AVI, MOV, WMV, and MP3 from local disk drives, and displays multimedia streamed over the Internet. Get started by installing the package:

In practice, xine requires either a fast CPU or support for the XVideo extension. The xine video player performs best on XVideo interfaces. If in the previous step, the Xvideo extension was unsupported, issues may occur.

The xine player starts a graphical user interface (GUI) and the menus can be used to navigate to multimedia files.

Alternatively, xine may be directly invoked from the command line by specifying the name of the file to play:

You now have a simple way to play a variety of multimedia files on your FreeBSD system! To find out more about the xine player, refer to the SourceForge page.

We are actively iterating on adding NVDIMM support to FreeBSD. To test the program without actual NVDIMM hardware, we use the newest version of QEMU which has support of virtual NVDIMM and is not yet available in ports.

 – Contributed by Guangyuan (Charlie) Yang

Whether for music, communication, or notifications, audio is an important feature of many personal computer systems. In a new FreeBSD system, an audio card will need to be configured to process audio files and send them to the connected speakers.

Fortunately, setting up audio on FreeBSD is simple and straightforward. This guide will walk through setting up and configuring audio, connecting a pair of headphones (including pairing Bluetooth models), and testing the system’s sound, all in under 10 minutes!

FreeBSD supports a wide variety of sound cards, these are listed in the Hardware Compatability List for each FreeBSD release. The Hardware Notes will list supported audio devices and which FreeBSD driver it uses. Start by identifying which driver will be needed for your specific audio device.

The device driver will need to be loaded to use the sound card, this can be easily done with kldload(8). To load the intel-specific driver, for example:

The driver can be automatically loaded on boot by configuring /boot/loader.conf. Available sound modules are listed in the sound(1) manual page, these can be viewed by using:

Once the sound module has been checked, add a line to /boot/loader.conf to automatically load the driver. The line for the previous Intel driver would be:

To simplify identifying and loading a driver, the snd_driver module, a meta driver that loads all of the common sound drivers, can also be loaded:

If the audio output require a Bluetooth connection, further configurations will have to be made to ensure Bluetooth support is loaded and configured. This section can be skipped if Bluetooth is not needed.

Before attaching a Bluetooth device, determine which Bluetooth driver it uses. A broad variety of Bluetooth USB dongles are supported by ng_ubt(4). Broadcom BCM2033 based Bluetooth devices are supported by the ubtbcmfw(4) and ng_ubt(4) drivers. Serial and UART based Bluetooth devices are supported by ng_h4(4) and hcseriald(8). For example, if the device uses the ng_ubt(4) driver:

If the Bluetooth device will be attached to the system during system startup, the system can be configured to load the module at boot by adding the driver to /boot/loader.conf:

Once the driver is loaded, connect the Bluetooth device. If the driver load was successful, output similar to the following should appear on the console and in /var/log/messages:

To start and stop Bluetooth, use the driver’s startup script:

FreeBSD uses hccontrol(8) to find and identify Bluetooth devices within RF proximity.

One of the most common tasks is discovery of Bluetooth devices within RF proximity. This operation is called inquiry. Inquiry and other HCI related operations are done using hccontrol(8). To display a list of devices that are in range use:

Note: only devices that are set to discoverable mode will be listed.

The BD_ADDR is the unique address of a Bluetooth device, similar to the MAC address of a network card. This address is needed for further communication with a device. To to obtain the human readable name that was assigned to the remote device:

The Bluetooth system provides a point-to-point connection between two Bluetooth units, or a point-to-multipoint connection which is shared among several Bluetooth devices. The following example shows how to create a connection to a remote device:

create_connection accepts BT_ADDR as well as host aliases in /etc/bluetooth/hosts.

The following example shows how to obtain the list of active baseband connections for the local device:

Modern graphics cards often come with their own sound driver, which may be used as the default device. To confirm, run dmesg and look for the pcm entries:

In this example, the graphics card (NVidia) has been enumerated before the sound card (Realtek). This can be changed to use the sound card as the default device with:

where n is the number of the sound device to prioritize. In this example, it should be 4. Make this change permanent by adding the following line to /etc/sysctl.conf:

Some systems may struggle with switching between audio outputs, fortunately FreeBSD allows for these to be specified in device.hints, which can be configured for automatic switchover. To start, identify how your system is enumerating the outputs with:

Add the following line to /boot/device.hints using the highlighted values from your own system. These will likely be different than the example. In this example, colored text has been used to identify where in the original string the values originated.

To confirm that the sound card has been detected and properly configured, run dmesg | grep pcm. This example is from a system with a built-in Conexant chipset:

The status of the sound card may also be checked using this command:

The output depends on which sound card has been detected, so the result may look different. However, if no pcm devices are listed, check if the correct driver was loaded in the first step.

Another quick way to test the card is to send data to /dev/dsp:

Any file can be used for this and will produce noise through the connected audio device.

Printers capable of printing plain ASCII text can be quickly set up on FreeBSD.

Before starting, identify the type of connection your printer is using:

FreeBSD uses lpd(8) (Line Printer Daemon) to print in the background so the user can continue to use other programs. Start by creating a directory to store files while they are being printed:

As root, create /etc/printcap with these contents:

**This line is for a printer connected to a USB port.

For a printer connected to a parallel or “printer” port, use:

For a printer connected directly to a network, use:

Replace network-printer-name with the DNS host name of the network printer.

To check for errors, run:

Enable LPD by editing /etc/rc.conf, adding this line:

Start the service:

Print a test:

For occasional printing, files can be sent directly to a printer device without any setup. For example, a file called sample.txt can be sent to a USB printer:

Direct printing to network printers depends on the abilities of the printer, but most accept print jobs on port 9100, and nc(1) can be used with them. To print the same file to a printer with the DNS hostname of netlaser:

The examples shown so far have sent the contents of a text file directly to the printer. As long as the printer understands the content of those files, output will be printed correctly.

Some printers are not capable of printing plain text, and the input file might not even be plain text.

Filters are specified in /etc/printcap with the if= identifier. To use /usr/local/libexec/lf2crlf as a filter, modify /etc/printcap like this:

Typical FreeBSD text files contain only a single line feed character at the end of each line. These lines will “stairstep” on a standard printer:

A filter can convert the newline characters into carriage returns and newlines. The carriage returns make the printer return to the left after each line. Create /usr/local/libexec/lf2crlf with these contents:

Set the permissions and make it executable:

Modify /etc/printcap to use the new filter:

Test the filter by printing the same plain text file. The carriage returns will cause each line to start at the left side of the page.

Several other printing systems are available in addition to the built-in lpd(8). These systems offer support for other protocols or additional features.

CUPS is a popular printing system available on many operating systems. Using CUPS on FreeBSD is documented in a separate article: CUPS

Hewlett Packard provides a printing system that supports many of their inkjet and laser printers. The port is print/hplip. The main web page is at https://developers.hp.com/hp-linux-imaging-and-printing. The port handles all the installation details on FreeBSD. Configuration information is shown at https://developers.hp.com/hp-linux-imaging-and-printing/install.

LPRng was developed as an enhanced alternative to lpd(8). The port is sysutils/LPRng. For details and documentation, see http://www.lprng.com/.