Mac mini

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 12:27 AM +0200 4/24/05, Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
>Does anybody know if the mini
>
>  - will run FreeBSD without too much trouble?
>
>  - can netboot FreeBSD?

If you check this mailing list back in late January, there's a
few threads related to the Mac Mini.  One of them has the subject
of "Mac mini and FreeBSD - some initial details", which details
how I got FreeBSD/ppc up-and-running on my mac-mini.  (I bought
a Mac-mini on the first Saturday they were available).

Upgrading can be a bit tricky, if something goes wrong due to the
new kernel.  You have to resort to tricks to boot up the previous
kernel.  But for the most part, upgrading freebsd/ppc has gone okay
for me.  The port has definitely improved over the past few months.

Note that if you are going to do your own buildworlds, then there
are still a few updates to gcc that you will have to apply before
trying to compile freebsd/ppc.  Those haven't made it into the
base system yet, even though many other ppc-related updates have
been committed.  Need updates to:
      contrib/gcc/config/rs6000/rs6000.c
      contrib/gcc/config/rs6000/sysv4.h

All of this is only available on 6.x-current.  You cannot run
5.x-stable on FreeBSD/ppc.  You also can't run cvsup on PPC, so
I run cvsup on a source directory on one of my other FreeBSD
machines, and then nfs-mount that on my FreeBSD/PPC machine.

There have been a number of messages to this mailing list which
have little bits of useful information.  As Mauro noted, *some*
of that info is collected in the FreeBSD developers' wiki at:
     http://wikitest.freebsd.org/moin.cgi/powerpc
but not all of it.  Of course, freebsd/ppc is very much a
moving target, so some tricks that were important in January might
not be as important now.

I have no experience with netbooting my Mac-mini, so I can't say
anything useful wrt that.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu