Video init problems, and install scenario

[Holland Rhodes]

I'm having a little problem getting my Mac mini to boot with local  
video. I have a "best" configuration Mac mini (that is, with super  
drive, blue tooth and wifi).

I intend for FreeBSD to be the only OS on the machine, so I first  
booted the OS 10.4 CD in single user mode and do:

diskutil disk0 partitionDisk 3 UFS boot 32M UFS freebsd 72G UFS swap 2G

(boot, freebsd and swap are simply volume labels, and are meaningless  
and unavailable in FreeBSD)

I booted from the SNAP-7.0 disc, and installed without incident,  
marking ad0s5 as / and as0s7 as swap.

Upon boot, I edited /boot/defaults/loader.conf adding the line:

hint.pcib.1.skipslot="26"

This skipped probing the internal Bluetooth module so that my USB  
keyboard would work at boot

The "first" partition I created, which I labeled boot, is actually  
partition 3. I rebooted with the Mac OS X install DVD, launched Disk  
Utility and formatted that partition as HFS+. I copied /boot/loader  
from the ISO (using a convoluted method involving a USB thumb drive)  
to that newly HFS+ formatted volume.

I then restarted my machine and landed myself in open firmware.  
Here's the part that you won't want to follow if you haven't followed  
every other step I've laid out. And, even if you did follow my steps,  
you won't want to do this, and here's why:

I do:

set boot-command boot hd:3,\boot\loader hd:5
shut-down

Now, power on the machine, and great news, it boots right in to  
FreeBSD. Bad news is, the local display is unavailable. I can shell  
in to the box, and install, run programs, and do everything that I  
love about FreeBSD. The only problem is that I cannot use it from the  
local display and keyboard.

To be honest, for me, no local display isn't really a problem. If  
something did go so badly with the machine that I had to visit it  
locally, I could simply boot in to open firmware (which initializes  
the display) and do boot 'hd:3,\boot\loader hd:5' to be interactive.

So, my question (or bug report?) is... is there a way to get the  
FreeBSD bootloader to initialize the display?

Beyond this, I've found FreeBSD to run well on PPC (albeit slow).  
I've used FreeBSD for a number of years, and only recently switched  
away from it in hopes of finding commercially supported hardware 
+software running FreeBSD. Mac OS X was the closest I've found. I  
really hope to see FreeBSD as a Tier 1 platform by next summer.