Ubuntu stole my FreeBSD...

[Josh Paetzel]

John Murphy wrote:
> 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.

I don't suppose you ever tried sysutils/e2fsprogs?  I've been able to
create ext2 filesystems with it in the past on FBSD.

-- 
Thanks,

Josh Paetzel