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From: none on 6 Apr 2010 13:07
Hi, all,

(Feel free to skip the chatty intro paragraph if it's not of
interest...)

After using FreeBSD on desktop and server for several years, I switched
my desktop to ubuntu because of the greater ease of getting applications
to work properly. I enjoyed ubuntu from about 2006 to 2009, but recently
I've been plagued by more and more problems due to what I perceive as
a lack of quality control. For that reason, I'm sticking a toe in the
water to see if I want to switch back to BSD. I tried and failed to get
a fresh install of vanilla FreeBSD working on my desktop system (mouse
and keyboard didn't work). Reinstalled ubuntu on that one, and am now
more cautiously trying to see if I can get FreeBSD working on a spare
machine. The PC-BSD installer gave me a working xorg, mouse, and
keyboard -- yay! Now I have some other issues I'm trying to work
through.

Can anyone tell me how to populate the ports tree on a freshly installed
PC-BSD system? (There are apps I want that are not available as PC-BSD
PBI packages.) There's this FAQ entry:
http://faqs.pcbsd.org/index.php?action=artikel&cat=9&id=13&artlang=en
It tells me to edit /root/ports-supfile , but I don't have any such
file. This is BC-BSD 8.0, from an ISO freshly downloaded yesterday.

Am I correct in thinking that even if I just want to install my
apps from binary packages (rather than compiling ports), I still
need to populate the ports tree first?

Can anyone refer me to some clear, nontechnical, up-to-date instructions
on how to set up a dual-boot linux/freebsd system? I spent quite a bit
of time googling, but this seems to be a topic where there is a tendency
for all the online info to be written for extreme propeller-heads. It's
also confusing trying to sort through all the possible options, which
bootloader to use, etc. A lot of this stuff seems to be rapidly
changing, and it gets hard to figure out which options are currently
the best to use. If doing a fresh install of both OSes decreases the
technical complexity of the task, then I'd rather do that than try to
resize partitions and preserve my existing ubuntu setup. Reinstalling
ubuntu would take a little bit of time, but it's something I'm confident
I have the skills to do.

One of my main reasons for considering the switch back from linux to BSD
is to eliminate the disaster that is pulseaudio -- sound has been almost
completely broken for me in the two most recent versions of ubuntu.
Therefore I was concerned to see the recent thread saying that firefox
3.5 requires pulseaudio. How would I tell whether my system is
infected with pulseaudio? If it is, can I nuke it from orbit without
breaking firefox? (I told the PC-BSD installer to install firefox from
the DVD.)

Thanks in advance!

-Ben
From: Warren Block on 6 Apr 2010 14:13
none <""> wrote:
>

Before responding, it's usually more effective to post multiple
unrelated questions separately.

> I tried and failed to get a fresh install of vanilla FreeBSD working
> on my desktop system (mouse and keyboard didn't work).

Likely missing hal/dbus or not configured so they aren't needed. The
Handbook has an up-to-date section on X configuration.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x-config.html

> Can anyone tell me how to populate the ports tree on a freshly installed
> PC-BSD system? (There are apps I want that are not available as PC-BSD
> PBI packages.) There's this FAQ entry:
> http://faqs.pcbsd.org/index.php?action=artikel&cat=9&id=13&artlang=en
> It tells me to edit /root/ports-supfile , but I don't have any such
> file. This is BC-BSD 8.0, from an ISO freshly downloaded yesterday.

With the warning that I don't use PCBSD but understand that it is
supposed to be fully compatible with FreeBSD... copy the sample file
/usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile to /root/ports-supfile, then
edit it.

> Am I correct in thinking that even if I just want to install my
> apps from binary packages (rather than compiling ports), I still
> need to populate the ports tree first?

No, packages don't need the ports tree.

> Can anyone refer me to some clear, nontechnical, up-to-date
> instructions on how to set up a dual-boot linux/freebsd system?

Not me, but I can tell you that it depends which way you look at it. If
you're more familiar with Linux, use Grub, which can boot FreeBSD.
Otherwise, the FreeBSD bootloader is bare-bones but functional.

> One of my main reasons for considering the switch back from linux to BSD
> is to eliminate the disaster that is pulseaudio -- sound has been almost
> completely broken for me in the two most recent versions of ubuntu.
> Therefore I was concerned to see the recent thread saying that firefox
> 3.5 requires pulseaudio. How would I tell whether my system is
> infected with pulseaudio?

'pkg_info | grep pulseaudio' If pulseaudio is on the system but works,
are you still going to remove it?

> If it is, can I nuke it from orbit without breaking firefox?

If Firefox needs it, no, probably not. However, pulseaudio has never
been installed on this FreeBSD 8 system and yet Firefox plays sound. As
of this morning, that's Firefox 3.63,1.

--
Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota * USA
From: Robert Kopp on 6 Apr 2010 14:20
On Tue, 06 Apr 2010 10:07:07 -0700, none wrote:

> Hi, all,
>
> (Feel free to skip the chatty intro paragraph if it's not of
> interest...)
>
> After using FreeBSD on desktop and server for several years, I switched
> my desktop to ubuntu because of the greater ease of getting applications
> to work properly. I enjoyed ubuntu from about 2006 to 2009, but recently
> I've been plagued by more and more problems due to what I perceive as a
> lack of quality control. For that reason, I'm sticking a toe in the
> water to see if I want to switch back to BSD. I tried and failed to get
> a fresh install of vanilla FreeBSD working on my desktop system (mouse
> and keyboard didn't work). Reinstalled ubuntu on that one, and am now
> more cautiously trying to see if I can get FreeBSD working on a spare
> machine. The PC-BSD installer gave me a working xorg, mouse, and
> keyboard -- yay! Now I have some other issues I'm trying to work
> through.
>
> Can anyone tell me how to populate the ports tree on a freshly installed
> PC-BSD system? (There are apps I want that are not available as PC-BSD
> PBI packages.) There's this FAQ entry:
> http://faqs.pcbsd.org/index.php?action=artikel&cat=9&id=13&artlang=en
> It tells me to edit /root/ports-supfile , but I don't have any such
> file. This is BC-BSD 8.0, from an ISO freshly downloaded yesterday.
>
> Am I correct in thinking that even if I just want to install my apps
> from binary packages (rather than compiling ports), I still need to
> populate the ports tree first?
>
> Can anyone refer me to some clear, nontechnical, up-to-date instructions
> on how to set up a dual-boot linux/freebsd system? I spent quite a bit
> of time googling, but this seems to be a topic where there is a tendency
> for all the online info to be written for extreme propeller-heads. It's
> also confusing trying to sort through all the possible options, which
> bootloader to use, etc. A lot of this stuff seems to be rapidly
> changing, and it gets hard to figure out which options are currently the
> best to use. If doing a fresh install of both OSes decreases the
> technical complexity of the task, then I'd rather do that than try to
> resize partitions and preserve my existing ubuntu setup. Reinstalling
> ubuntu would take a little bit of time, but it's something I'm confident
> I have the skills to do.
>
> One of my main reasons for considering the switch back from linux to BSD
> is to eliminate the disaster that is pulseaudio -- sound has been almost
> completely broken for me in the two most recent versions of ubuntu.
> Therefore I was concerned to see the recent thread saying that firefox
> 3.5 requires pulseaudio. How would I tell whether my system is infected
> with pulseaudio? If it is, can I nuke it from orbit without breaking
> firefox? (I told the PC-BSD installer to install firefox from the DVD.)
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
> -Ben

The open-source boot loader GAG boots Windows and FreeBSD with no issues.
I'm not sure about Linux: I think Linux' GRUB has to be installed in the
root partition for this to work, and it might have to be a primary
partition.
From: Michel Talon on 6 Apr 2010 14:34
none <""bcrowell\"@(none)"> wrote:
>
> Can anyone tell me how to populate the ports tree on a freshly installed
> PC-BSD system? (There are apps I want that are not available as PC-BSD
> PBI packages.)

I am not experienced with PC-BSD, but you can download a tarball of
ports from a recent freebsd release. This has the advantage that you
will easily find prebuilt packages, corresponding to the release (to be
added with pkg_add -r).

For example
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/8.0-RELEASE/ports/ports.tgz

> Can anyone refer me to some clear, nontechnical, up-to-date instructions
> on how to set up a dual-boot linux/freebsd system? I spent quite a bit

I have a triple boot on this laptop. I got it with windows, i added
Ubuntu which installed a dual boot with Windows without any problem, and
i then added FreeBSD which i boot using grub.

So the only magic is to first partition the disk into the good number of
slices (i used partition magic to resize Windows), and use the Ubuntu
installer appropriately. For example in Linux i see the disk this way:
root(a)rose:/home/michel# fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disque /dev/sda: 100.0 Go, 100030242816 octets
255 t�tes, 63 secteurs/piste, 12161 cylindres
Unit�s = cylindres de 16065 * 512 = 8225280 octets

P�riph�rique Amorce D�but Fin Blocs Id Syst�me
/dev/sda1 1 1034 8305573+ 12 Compaq diagnostics
/dev/sda2 * 1035 6133 40957717+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 6134 9200 24635677+ f W95 Etendu (LBA)
/dev/sda4 9201 12161 23784232+ a5 FreeBSD
/dev/sda5 6134 6395 2104483+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 6396 7611 9767488+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 7612 9200 12763611 83 Linux

There is a recovery partition and the Windows partition which take two
slices, then an extended partition in which Linux is installed and the
last partition is for FreeBSD.

To gain some room i use the same partition (logical sda5) for Linux swap
and for FreeBSD swap. When installing FreeBSD i asked the installer to
not use any swap partition. Then i edited /etc/fstab to use the logical
partition (which FreeBSD sees no problem). In Linux i need to run
mkswap in the init.d boot scripts before running swapon -a.


Finally the grub menu.lst is edited as follows:
title FreeBSD
root (hd0,3)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

Of course when installing FreeBSD one asks the installer to not mess
with the MBR.

That's all!


--

Michel TALON

From: mechanic on 6 Apr 2010 16:50
On 06 Apr 2010 18:20:17 GMT, Robert Kopp wrote:

> The open-source boot loader GAG boots Windows and FreeBSD with no issues.
> I'm not sure about Linux: I think Linux' GRUB has to be installed in the
> root partition for this to work, and it might have to be a primary
> partition.

No you can use a standard Grub2 install on any Linux partition with
the loader written to the MBR in the usual way (eg during the
install of Debian/Mandriva/whatever), and afterwards write a simple
chainloader 'stanza' as they call it to add the BSD partition to the
Grub menu. These stanzas are written by files in /etc/grub.d/ on
the Linux partition, too much detail to report here.

--
mechanic
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