Help needed please - Thinkpad A31p & FreeBSD 4.8 Installation (LONG)

[kitsune]

On Fri, 4 Jul 2003 19:23:56 +1000
"Pisut Tempatarachoke" <pxt at ph.adfa.edu.au> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I've just got my TP A31p and now look forward to installing FreeBSD
> 4.8 (4-CDROM set) on it.  I'm very new to FreeBSD and really hope
> someone could give me some advices.  Thanks a lot in advance.
> 
> The laptop has no floppy drive and came with a 60 GB hard drive which
> consisted of two FAT32 partitions (slices):
> - 55 GB Windows XP Pro and
> - 5 GB IBM recovery partition.
> I used BootIT NG to shrink the XP partition down to 23 GB.  This left
> me with a free space of 32 GB.  Then, I created a 9 GB FAT32 partition
> within the free space hoping to use it as a data partition which can
> be read and written from both XP and FreeBSD.  So, now I have
> - 23 GB Windows XP Pro
> - 9 GB FAT32 for sharing data between OS's
> - 21 GB free space (unformatted) for FreeBSD (I havn't installed it
> yet) and
> - 5 GB IBM recovery partition
> 
> ???My first questions - Is this a sound method of slicing my disk?
> Does the 9 GB FAT32 partition really need to be there?  Am I wrong in
> thinking that FAT32 is accessible from both XP and FreeBSD?

Yes, FreeBSD can make use of FAT32 partitions. IIRC it is possible of also
installing XP on a FAT32.
 
> I've read posts somewhere that I MUST NOT install FreeBSD boot manager
> during the installation because it will overwrite the master boot
> record (MBR), and as a result XP will be unbootable.  I then must
> leave the MBR untouched until I finish with the FreeBSD installation
> and copy /boot/boo1 to another computer on a network (A31p doesn't
> have a floppy drive).  Then, I have to boot from a FreeBSD CD to enter
> FDisk and make sure the XP partition is set bootable.  Reboot it and
> once I'm in XP, I can copy /boot/boot1 from the networked computer to
> C:\BOOTSECT.BSD and include a line
> 
> C:\BOOTSECT.BSD="FreeBSD"
> 
> in my BOOT.INI file.  This will give me a boot-from-FreeBSD-slice
> option the next time I boot my laptop.
> 
> ???My second questions - Is this approach workable?  How do I copy
> /boot/boot1 to another computer on a network?  Can I copy it onto my 9
> GB FAT32 slice instead, as I'm not sure if I will be smart enough to
> set up the LAN connection correctly?  Could I write it onto a blank
> CD?  What are the commands involved?
> 
> ???My third questions - Could someone please suggest how I should
> partition my FreeBSD slice?  As I have 768 MB RAM, here is what I have
> in mind:-
> /  512 MB
> swap  2048 MB
> /var  512 MB
> /tmp  1024 MB
> /usr  Rest of disk
> I have no idea how much disk space I should allocate to /, /var, and
> /tmp.  Can I change them at a later stage?  What are UFS and UFS+S and
> how are they different?

I would just allocate 512Mb to swap should be fine. I have just slightly more
than 512Mb and  512Mb of ram and I have never had a problem.

 UFS is the file system FreeBSD uses. The +S means with soft updates. This
provides something that does basically the same thing as journalling, but with
out speeding up the booting proccess when it is powered down with out being
unmounted.

 
> ???Forth question - Is it a good idea to just install everything
> during the first installation?  Any recommendations on what I should
> or should not install please?

I personally would install most everything I want to begin with then take the
time later to edit make.conf and use the portstree to compile and reinstall
optimized binaries of various ports.

> ???Last questions - During the monitor configuration stage, I have to
> supply the infomation on a) the horizontal sync range, b) the vertical
> sync range, and c) the LCD make.  How do I find out this information?
> Does anyone with an A31p know please?

I don't know, but it may be worth checking to see what windows is using. If that
does not work, there is all ways messing with it till you find one that works
nicely.

> Thank you all very very much & any other tips are also welcome.


BTW I would not suggest using KDE, despite being a well known wm/desktop
enviroment, it is eats a lot of resources and is slow. I would suggest using
Fluxbox or another Blackbox clone.