FreeBSD 6.2 Install

I’ve decided to try a vanilla FreeBSD 6.2 install.

This is not an indication that I’m giving up on DesktopBSD. My understanding is that FreeBSD can be transformed into DesktopBSD merely by installation of certain additional tools. If this install is more successful than DesktopBSD was for me, I’ll figure out how to make that transformation. If I can’t get things up and running, I’ll try DesktopBSD again — maybe the benefit of this little bit of experience will inspire me to try something different with the DesktopBSD install.

However, at least one poster at the DesktopBSD forum seemed to think that crashing before getting to create users might be unrecoverable. I’d still have liked to try messing with xorg.conf and devices.hints, — it seemed like it would have been interesting to try, and reinstalling costs me nothing but time.

However, since I could never get Frenzy to mount the requisite partition with rw priveleges, it felt like it was time to try a new tactic.

Installing FreeBSD really makes you appreciate the handholding present in the DesktopBSD installer. It’s not exactly hard to install, things are pretty straightforward, and cookbooking the FreeBSD installation guide from the handbook right along with the install helped quite a bit. However, it is rife with things that are probably glaringly obvious to someone who has done this a few times, but which made me happy to consult the handbook on many occasions, even if only to clarify meanings.

I’ll admit that I skimmed right over Pre-Installation Tasks and went straight to Starting the Installation. This could have been foolhardy, but I already knew I would be using the full primary master IDE drive (I moved the rest of the data off after my failed attempt with DesktopBSD), that I was going to trust its autodetection of my drive geometry (the first time, at least), and that I know my networking information. (Which doesn’t matter anyway, since I’m going to have to figure out WPA-PSK under BSD before any of that comes into play.)

I’d suggest at least giving the early sections a look-see, to be sure that you either know, don’t care about, or are willing to gamble regarding the things it’s having you check before installing.

Having said that, I was very happy to be using the entire drive, since the partitioning tool shown during the FreeBSD install wasn’t nearly as intuitive as the one used by DesktopBSD. Yes, it’s covered in detail here. Yes, it would be good for me to understand. All true. In any case, I’d have had no choice but to read up if I only wanted to use part of the drive. However, eager to see how the final result will compare to installing DesktopBSD, I just committed the whole thing, and let the installer work out the partitioning. I have no doubt that as I start really trying to configure and use *BSD I’ll find myself with multiple opportunities to look at that screen again and again.

Apart from not caring much for the partitioning tool, I just followed right on through the rest of the procedure. I got a bit ahead of myself, and accidentally skipped right over the part where the installer gives you the opportunity to install packages, and I “finished” the install, including the creation of users and setting the system password, putting me at least a step ahead of my DesktopBSD attempts.

This was probably the point where I should have been most cautious, but it seems I was caught up in the moment. Not having explicitly installed or configured any desktop environment or window manager, I nonetheless found myself typing “startx” just to see what would happen.

Well, no lockup this time, though I’d have been hard pressed to do anything useful on the desktop that loaded. Still, progress.

It was then that I remembered that I had skipped over installing packages. I went back and grabbed, among other things, KDE 3.5.4. from the CD. This was easy to do, thanks to Sysinstall. I think that Sysinstall would have let me do the whole thing over again if I’d wanted to, but also made it easy to go straight to installing packages.

What’s next? Well, as I post this my journal is finally current with my actual progress, so I’m not sure. There are resources around regarding configuring KDE, but I didn’t do anything that (to me) resembles configuration of Xorg, either. I’ll have to read up and see whether there’s a major configuration that needs to be done, or whether I probably just need to tweak the xorg.conf that seems to have been created at install time.

Interestingly, I did locate this article, which not only is a nice compliment to the FreeBSD handbook section on installing X, but also contains this tidbit:

“You may copy the xorg.conf file from the Linux system that you run on the same computer”

THANKS, Forrest Sheng Bao, you may have just saved me some trouble.

I think I’ll give a stab at doing it as in the FreeBSD handbook, but I’m not too proud to drop in the file from PCLinuxOS, which also boots on this box, if I have trouble doing it the “right” way.

Previous: DesktopBSD Installation Woes
Next: Xorg and/or KDE setup. I’m not sure which.

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