Need assitance installin FreeBSD

[Kevin D. Kinsey, DaleCo, S.P.]

Felt a need to clarify this; flame me
where I'm wrong....

Jerry McAllister wrote:

>Actually, I think the intention of the MINI-ISO is to boot and
>run the installation with everything loaded from one of the ftp
>sites.   
>
>  
>

This doesn't sound correct at all.  What you've described is
what the _floppies_ do.  They boot and run sysinstall and get
you to the 'Net for FTP setup.  The mini ISO gives you the
"minimal" install.  That is, the root stuff (/, etc, bin, sbin, stand,
and /usr/sbin, /usr/bin, the gnu and otherwise contributed base,
and /var (cron files and so on)....

After running sysinstall from the mini ISO, you
should be able to have a working system without
accessing the 'Net.  However, that simply means
that you can use the CLI to go further, and most
everyone will want to.

There is no ports skeleton installed, no ports tarballs,
no documentation, no packages, no compat, no X,
just good old ls, cat, grep, tar, etc.  and a few
editors (vi, ed, ee) ... As close as you'll get to
a GUI with the mini ISO and no net connection
is the sysinstall program itself.

>You just burn the MINI-ISO directly to CD and boot from it - no other
>manipulation of the file such as trying to uncompress it or make a
>bootable file system.  It is all already there as is..
>  
>

Yes...IIRC, there can be some issues if the burn tool
you're using doesn't speak the correct lingo.  If that's
the case, you'll likely not boot from it OR do any further
installation.

>You burn the CD, boot it, do the preliminary stuff and then when selecting
>install media, choose ftp and then pick a site that is convenient from
>the list and it handles all the rest.   If you have a good high speed
>net connection - at a university or something, it takes less than
>an hour.
>
>  
>
As I said, not necessary until you get around to something
not listed above.  See my earlier post on my strategy for this.

As for the speed, that's probably true.  But the full ISO #1
was 5-6 hours over T1 last I checked (and trusting the telco's
word that it was really a T1 --- I was skeptical after seeing
that estimate....)

Kevin Kinsey
DaleCo, S.P.