FreeBSD on my old rusty PowerBook 12"

[Ross Gohlke]

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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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?
>
> Sorry if I'm asking silly questions, but this is the first time I
> installed FreeBSD on something different than {i386,amd64,sparc64}.
> Thanks!
>   
Do you have an old Mac OS X Installer disc? If so, it contains Disk 
Utility, which will allow you to partition the drive, creating a small 
HFS partition and as many UFS(2) partitions as you want. You will need 
to know the identities of each partition when you get to sysinstall. You 
can do this in Disk Utility by selecting each new partition and clicking 
Info.

Older versions (10.1, 10.2) of OS X might use UFS, I'm pretty sure newer 
versions use UFS2. Regardless, Disk Utility simply calls it UNIX File 
System.

This is the first I've heard of ADB support, and I don't own a USB 
keyboard; I used Disk Utility in Tiger (10.4) to create a dual-boot 
drive, so the HFS partition wasn't a problem. I was able to successfully 
boot into FreeBSD before I lost access to a keyboard, not much else.

Happy FreeBSDing!

-- 
Ross Gohlke > http://www.GRINZ.com
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