Some needed information about new installation of FreeBSD 7.1.

[Colin Dick]

Hi Luca,
  I have recently installed FreeBSD on a macmini.  I already had some FreeBSD background, however, also noted and have
been informed that there are very limited pre-compiled packages available.  So far though, I have had no problems
building from ports.

  The initial install itself was a bit tricky.  Seems to require that the partitions get created in the MacOS partition
manager from an OSX build CD (or other partition manager... though don't seem to build well from the FreeBSD install
itself).
  For each partition/slice you create, you will find 2 partitions created in the FreeBSD fdisk, your created partition
and an additional 8Meg partition.  Ignore the 8Meg partitions and create your SWAP and filesystem mountpoints as
required on the partitions made in the MacOS partition manager.

  Once you have the system built, there is still the trick to get it to boot.  You have to break into OFW and issue a
particular command.  If you have a Mac partition, you can put your loader on it and your command will point to that
loader location.  If you don't have a Mac partition, you will have to leave your build CD in the drive and point at it.
 It all seems complicated but makes sense once you get it all sorted.  It took me numerous attempts and another one of
the posters a few attempts to get it all to work.
  Check out the last couple of months of FreeBSD-ppc archives for some good posts and tips to get it all going.  I also
found that this mailling list has many intelligent folks who seem willing to help.  Once you get your system installed
and booting, you should be able to issue:

portsnap fetch
portsnap extract

  That will build your ports tree for you.  When you need a specific package, something like:

cd /usr/ports
make search name=<pkgname>

  Should provide you a listing of different packages.  Then, it is usually as simple as:

cd /usr/ports/<pkgtype>/<pgkname>
make
make install clean

  To get any particular package installed.  The ports system does its own checksums of the packages it downloads to
ensure they are secure before building.  Hope that is enough to get you started.  Good luck.  It is sure nice when you
find you get the system up and running.

--
Colin

On Tue, 10 Feb 2009 23:47:57 +0000, Luca Renaud wrote
> Used to the Linux world for more than 8 years,Debian,OpenSuSE,deb,rpm etc. I
> want to experiment with FreeBSD and
> install the new 7.1 on my iMac rev.A Bondi Blue.,however I have some
> questions:
> 
> 1)Pre-compiled packages of the ports collection I see only for
> i386,ia64,amd64 on the ftp://ftp.freebsd.org site,when I put
> the cursor over the link Package in the ports package list,the link is for
> the i386 compiled package.So,where can I find
> pre-compiled packages for the ppc architecture?
> 
> 2) Used to the security features of the packaging systems in Linux,automated
> signature verification of packages previous
> to the installation etc.,openpgp keys for package maintainers,for the
> distribution itself etc. the best I could see in freebsd
> is the hash sums in the distinfo files,for source code files,what about the
> pre-compiled files?,signed individually and
> to verify with pkg_check?
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-ppc at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ppc
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-ppc-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"