FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE Installation success

Brandon Gooch jamesbrandongooch at gmail.com
Tue Oct 26 01:11:03 UTC 2010


On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 7:50 PM, Henry Olyer <henry.olyer at gmail.com> wrote:
> The problem here is that it shouldn't take so much effort to get this
> going.  But I know it does.  And I don't blame the FreeBSD team.
>
> I do blame the organizational infra-structure that exists.  ie., we should
> have scripts that describe every aspect of a computer, so that such scripts
> can be mechanically read and a configuration built.
>
> We do ./configure for software we install.  Same thing, but for all aspects
> of the hardware.  The present "configure" logic covers the OS and the
> installed software, we need to do this for hardware.
>
> I notice that freeBSD download's and installs trails Linux.  That's okay.
> FreeBSD is so much better, and in so many ways, too.
>
> Nothing I've seen in Linux lands comes close to the "sysinstall" command or
> the plainly superior organization of FreeBSD.  What I'm trying to encourage
> is that we, as a group, work on our infra-structures, like strengthing the
> already high level of organization we have in sysinstall.
>
> How about a query program that examines a machine.  Is this practical?
> Something like the automated X-install process that makes it unnecessary to
> set the horizontal and vertical frequencies ourselves (which we used to have
> to do.)  But not for X, for the sound card, for as much as possible.
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 8:25 PM, Michael D. Norwick <mnorwick at centurytel.net
>> wrote:
>
>> Good Day;
>>
>> It is with some pleasure that I have finally succeeded in building an
>> operative workstation with a custom kernel and world,  Xorg 1.7.5,
>> KDE4-4.5.2 from ports, most common network applications as well as Firefox3,
>> and Thunderbird 3.1.5.  The machine is an older Dell GX270 P4 2.4 GHz PC
>> with 3G of ram and an ATI Radeon video adapter.
>> This install has not been without it's trials.
>> 4 weeks ago I backed up all my data and reformatted from Debian 'lenny' to
>> GPT/ZFS/8.1-RELEASE.  The next two weeks did not go so well.  While I tried
>> hard to get ZFS formatted drives to work reliably, intermittent unexplained
>> core dumps with reboots gave me cause for concern.  I finally reinstalled
>> msdos boot records and formatted the drives UFS.  That install has lasted 2
>> more weeks.  I liked ZFS v14 and would like to try it again when I get more
>> current hardware with more ram and SATA drives.
>> My next challenge was building KDE4, Firefox, and Thunderbird from ports.
>>  KDE4 and friends (QT4) took days on this machine to build, install and
>> setup.  I initially installed the ports tree using portsnap but was having
>> so much trouble building the mozilla stuff from ports I moved to cvsup and
>> portupgrade.  This is also what I used to install the kernel and base source
>> tree.  Several iterations of make - clean and deinstall/reinstall along with
>> cvsup'ing ports a couple of times finally got me to a working browser and
>> mail client.
>> I have had a time getting Flash working with Firefox.  I have not yet got
>> the plugin working in Firefox but Opera, using linux-f10 allows my kids view
>> their on-line home school lessons.  Audio was somewhat of a challenge to get
>> sound from an AC97 on-board audio chipset.  snd_hda was the module that
>> eventually provided the needed audio driver for this chipset.  I think I
>> forgot what configuring this stuff was like during my 'hamm', 'bo', and
>> 'slink', debian days.
>>
>> My thanks to the entire FreeBSD/KDE development team on allowing me to
>> experience the fruit of their efforts.  I still like turning the knobs
>> myself.  I'll keep reading the manuals.  :)
>>
>> Michael

Have either of you had a look at PC-BSD?

http://www.pcbsd.org/

It's getting better with each release...oh, and it's based on FreeBSD too :)

-Brandon


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