FreeBSD Installation Horror

Rob spamrefuse at yahoo.com
Wed May 4 18:16:46 PDT 2005


Sebastian Reichelt wrote:
> 
> As a programmer and computer science student, I
> wanted to try out FreeBSD on my old computer
> (Pentium 166). Mainly I just want to get to know
> the differences between FreeBSD and Linux, and see
> whether it really has a better design (which many
> people I know claim).

Sebastian,

About 5 years ago, I made the transition form Linux
to FreeBSD. That also gave me some headaches, and the
first few times nothing seemed to work.
Slowly I learnt that FreeBSD (Installation & OS) does
things quite different. Ever since I got the hang of
how these things worked, I never used anything else
than FreeBSD. Anyway, I hope this helps you a bit
deal with your current frustration.

I also run FreeBSD 5.3 on an old Pentium-1:
 Pentium/P54C (149.69-MHz 586-class CPU)
 real memory  = 33554432 (32 MB)

Note: you need at least 24 MB during installation.
On a running system, you can do with less.

Boot from the floppies. Then:

1) FDISK Partition editor
I recommend to ignore any geometry issues here.
Delete all existing slices, and say 'A', to use the
entire disk. If I remember well, the geometry issues
are irrelevant when you dedicate the entire disk to
FreeBSD.

2) Install Boot Manager
I always choose "BootMgr" here.

3) FreeBSD Disklabel Editor
Initially you should have no entries here (if you
have, remove them); then choose 'A' autodefaults.
These autodefaults will be fine for a first time
installation rehearsal :).
Leave the finetuning for subsequent installations,
when you are more familiar with it.

4) Choose Distributions
Choose here "The smallest configuration possible".
This will give you a running FreeBSD system in a
minimal amount of installation time.

5) Media
Since you have CDs, choose here
"Install from a FreeBSD CD/DVD".

---------

Does this help you overcome the issues you
encountered earlier?

Rob.

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