FreeBSD jails are often talked about from a security or system administration perspective. Although it’s a perfectly valid point of view, jails can also be used for other purposes. In fact, just recently I benefited from a jail in such a situation. It once again convinced me that jails were really awesome and made me write up this short article. Assumptions The host is a graphical desktop workstation running FreeBSD 12.

I’ve been using FreeBSD as my primary server OS for quite a long time. But, for unknown reasons, I have never seriously used it on client workstations. Maybe it’s partly because I’m a CUI-oriented person who loves doing things on text terminals as much as possible. Actually, I have been pretty happy with any client OS as long as I could use a decent terminal on it, so that I could SSH into FreeBSD servers where I spent a lot of time doing jobs which didn’t require graphical interface.