[Thinbsd] Re: ThinBSD with other videodriver

[Francois Tigeot]

On Tue, Jun 15, 2004 at 04:47:20PM +0200, Martin Nilsson wrote:
> David DELAVENNAT wrote:
> >|> I installed thinbsd on to a flash card yesterday only to find
> >|> that I had a trident Cyberblade video in my tiny diskless client.
> >|>
> >what flash card did you use?
> >on the todo list we have the flashboot faq :)
> 
> The machine I used have a motherboard similar to this one: 
> http://web.lex.com.tw:7777/cv860a.htm
> The flash I used was just an 256MB CF card that were available.
> 
> How to install ThinBSD on flash.
> 1. Boot the FreeBSD cdrom on the machine with installed CF card.
> 2. In sysinstall goto Configure->label & fdisk. Crete one partition on 
> the flash, set it bootable, newfs and write the changes (you have to 
> also make a small swap partition, make it 1MB we won't use it)
> 
> 3. exit & reboot.
> 
> 4. put the flash in a box with a real running FreeBSD.
> If you using a CF card an USB card reader is useful.
> mount it under /mnt and cd there.
> untar boot-xxx.tar.gz move the kernel from /mnt/boot/kernel/kernel to 
> /mnt and also put mfsroot.gz in /mnt (not in boot as for PXE install)
> 
> 5. unmount and put flash in your thin computer and see it fly.

This seems surprisingly easy.

When we started the project, we thought about flash-based devices, but had
not yet time to test them.
It is good news to hear that they work almost out-of the box !

> The sysinstall part could probably be made a lot easier by calling fdisk 
> & disklabel directly from a script but the above was the way I knew 
> would work.
> 
> >as it is done with pexes project maybe we could write a config script
> >that put in the ramdisk only the drivers needed
> >for a specific configuration. better than see the ramdisk grow to
> >support every thinclient hardware in the world.
> >something like the openbsd installer that config the keyboard,
> >drivers, etc...
> 
> Having a smorgasbord of compiled binaries for different programs, 
> drivers etc to choose from when creating the mfsroot would probably be 
> smart. A small script could then ask which ones to include on the ramdisk.

Yes, this would be good.
For the moment a good part of the work has to be done by hand.

In the interim, I just put a new ramdisk image on the web site with
support for the 'trident' driver. You will still have to edit xorg.conf to
reflect your configuration, though.

-- 
Francois Tigeot