Installation Instructions?

[Alex Zepeda]

On Wed, Sep 17, 2003 at 09:46:17PM +0100, Andrew McCall wrote:

> I think I have done enough "thinking" of installing FreeBSD recently, 
> and I should actually try and install it :)  I have been looking 
> around, and I can't actually see any installation instructions!  Come 
> to think of it - I can't even find anywhere to download it!

Yup.  AFAIK there have been no binary releases.

> Are there any FreeBSD/PPC install guides anywhere?  Do I have to 
> install it on a x86 machine and cross-compile?

I don't think there are any published guides either.

You do have to cross compile (but you could probably go from any of the other 
targets FreeBSD supports to ppc).

Check out your source tree in a directory (let's use /usr/src)

cd /usr/src
TARGET_ARCH=powerpc make -DNO_WERROR buildworld
TARGET_ARCH=powerpc make buildkernel KERNCONF=GENERIC (or replace GENERIC with 
your desired kernel config file)

Your kernel will end up in /usr/obj/powerpc somewhere, as will your boot loader.

I find on an OldWorld machine, it's easiest to netboot even if you're going to use 
a local root partition.  You can boot from a CD if you want to, but if you've got 
an OW machine make sure to either make an ISO without version numbers, or to 
follow the boot loader path with the appropriate number (e.g. ';1').

However, if you were going to use an NFS root, you could easily just installworld
somewhere other than /, and boot that way.  After that you could tar, pax, or cpio
everything up and unpack it on a local disk if so desired.  NetBSD includes some
very useful disk partitioning tools.

If you do indeed have an OW machine, I'd be very curious to hear if the boot
loader works for you (actually if this is the case you'll have a few other steps
you need to use, as the buildworld builds an ELF loader, but only Apple OF >= 3
supports loading ELF binaries).  My eventual goal is to distil a bootloader that
is up to date except for the memory allocation business (as this is what fails for
me).

Of course, if anyone has some suggestions for how to get this all bootstrapped
under NetBSD, I'd be real thrilled (cause then I could try to build the bootloader
under NetBSD and skip one step of annoyance, no?

- alex