Ubuntu stole my FreeBSD...

[John Murphy]

But thanks to the FAQ entry on booting FreeBSD and Linux using GRUB
at http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/disks.html#GRUB-LOADER
I was able to get it back again (except the file which I edited was
/boot/grub/menu.lst).

I had resisted the temptation to install any Linux flavour for many
years, but all the talk about Ubuntu had me intrigued. So I decided
to install Xubuntu on my old Packard Bell Easynote. It can only do
800x600 so the first surprise was that the buttons to proceed from
Ubiquity's location chooser dialogue were hidden behind the lower
task bar. The window could not be re-sized or scrolled and it took
me a while to work out how to move the task bar to the side. The
problem would be much worse for anyone restricted to 640x480 and I
was surprised to find the bug was first reported over a year ago!

The laptop previously triple booted Windows 2000, FreeBSD and NetBSD
and the fourth primary partition was reserved for data. The NetBSD
slice was to be overwritten with the new installation. Had to create
an 'extended' partition in place of the NetBSD one and then make a
swap and ext2 file system within it. It was going to create mount
points for my FAT slices, which I didn't particularly want, so I
deleted those and found I had to return to the gpart screen and do
it all again because it insisted on mounting those slices.

I would have been quite happy to leave the boot manager as it was
and add an entry for the new OS, but there was no option to do so
and, even though the Windows installation was recognised and an
entry in the boot manager was created, the FreeBSD one was not.

The installation was successful, but it seems odd to not have a root
user. To make the changes to grub required a command like:

'sudo editor /boot/grub/menu.lst' and then the unprivileged user pw.

I must admit it looks nice, but the only thing it'll get used for is
creating ext2 file systems on Compact Flash cards destined for my
Psion 5mx. Couldn't find a way to do that from Free.

-- 
Thanks, John.