FreeBSD on my old rusty PowerBook 12"

[Ed Schouten]

Hello Nathan,

* Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn at freebsd.org> wrote:
> Ed Schouten wrote:
>> Hello all,
>>
>> A couple of days ago I saw a commit flash by, which added ADB support to
>> FreeBSD. This means I can finally use FreeBSD on my old PowerBook 12",
>> which is doing nothing right now.
>>   
> Welcome to PPC! The introduction of the MPsafe TTY layer was what fixed  
> the last locking bugs in akbd that I hadn't managed to track down, so  
> thanks :)

That's very great to hear! The TTY layer was I guess one of the last
remaining core components of the kernel that exclusively used Giant, so
getting the graphics/input layers fixed up should become a lot more easy
now.

>> I tried to install FreeBSD on the system and it somewhat works, but I
>> think I need to do something differently to get it working properly.
>>
>> I downloaded the 200810 snapshot, which does not support ADB, so I'm
>> using an USB keyboard right now. Good enough. When I get into the
>> installer, it seems there is some kind of hard-coded disk layout. I only
>> have ad0s2 and ad0s3, where ad0s2 is 128 MB and ad0s3 is the rest of the
>> disk. I can't create any more partitions. So right now I've put / on
>> ad0s2 and /usr on ad0s3, which is pretty awful.
>>   
> Sysinstall doesn't (currently) have the ability to modify APM layouts.  
> gpart does. This should be fixed. The result is that sysinstall just  
> uses whatever partitions happen to be on your disk already.
>> About boot loaders: I just booted from the harddisk by running in the
>> ofw console:
>>
>> 	boot cd:\boot\loader hd:2
>>
>> But I want to have a boot loader on the harddisk itself. I read
>> something about putting a HFS partition on the disk and storing a file
>> in it? Is that what ad0s2 is for?
>>   
> I have a hack in head to solve this. If you rebuild world, you will get  
> a /boot/boot1.hfs. This is a little (800 K) HFS partition with a port of  
> the sparc64 boot1 in it, which you can dd to an 800 K partition to get  
> OFW to boot your machine. However, sysinstall doesn't know about this  
> yet either. You can make this and your regular FreeBSD partitions with  
> gpart, then use dd and boot1.hfs to get a bootable system with sane  
> partitioning.

That sounds great. Unfortunately I can't find a CD image which has a
fixit shell on it (there are no fixit disks?) so I think I can't
properly partition my harddisk with gpart right now. You happen to know
where I can find a FreeBSD PPC disc which allows me to do this? Thanks!

-- 
 Ed Schouten <ed at 80386.nl>
 WWW: http://80386.nl/
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