If you are, like me, still feeling your way along with regard to FreeBSD, I can’t recommend the handbook strongly enough. I haven’t had the time to try to move my install forward for the past few days, but I’ve been reading the handbook when I have the time. Not that I expect to remember everything I read, but I figure it can’t hurt to lay eyes on everything in there at least once.

It’s already filled in gaps for me, or tied things together in ways that have enhanced my general *nix knowledge as well as helping me to get more comfortable with FreeBSD.

I strongly recommend reading through it at your own pace. It’s actually not as dry as I expected, and is really enjoyable to read.

Next: Wireless

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.

FWIW, I’m writing most of this post AS I try these different things to fix my xorg.conf. The only thing I’ve really done at this point is try to get some input from the folks at the DesktopBSD forum.

After getting some help from the folks at the DesktopBSD forums, I’m still not really clear on what to do, but it sounds like my immediate roadblock IS just Xorg.

Xorg.conf is nearly empty. Looking at xorg.conf as created (and successfully used) by PCLOS, I don’t know whether to think I could just grab the relevant bits and pop them into the xorg.conf for my DesktopBSD install or not.

I also don’t know whether I need to implement these options regarding use of the Nvidia driver.

And finally, I’m not sure whether this 2004 procedure on configuring X still applies, or is required in any way. Is xorg.conf barren looking because since I haven’t implemented the hints above, or because it hasn’t been configured yet? Or should it have gotten the info it needed at install time, meaning that something went wrong, but I should paste in the info from the PCLOS verison of xorg.conf?

First I tried single user mode to see if I could configure Xorg as per the manual. It didn’t seem to want to run. Given my previous problems trying to do much of anything from system mode on a not-quite-finished install, I didn’t spend much time trying to figure out whether there was some other way I could run it.

My next thought was to implement the “hint” and etc. linked above and/or using info from my PCLOS xorg.conf. Well, problem 1 is that ad0s2a, the partition with xorg.conf and devices.hints on it, can’t seem to be mounted rw using the remout rw tool in Frenzy. Both the other ufs partitions were remounted rw with no problem, as was my thumbdrive, but I can’t get it done with that partition, of course the one the one I really need access to.

I don’t know whether there’s some obvious security reason why this should not be writable (it would arguably make sense), or whether this is yet another symptom of whatever the DesktopBSD installer didn’t like about my system.

Either way, I’m at a halt again.

I’m still catching up my postings to events. This was mostly written as it happened, on Saturday the 12th, but not finished and posted until today.

Previous: The beginnings of my installation attempt here.
Next: FreeBSD 6.2 Install

I’d done a bit of playing around prior to thinking of starting a blog, so this post will serve to tie in “stuff I didn’t journal” to “stuff I remembered to journal”. The hand off from this post to the other posts I’ve started to write will probably be a bit awkward, but once I all the drafts cleaned up and posted things should be a bit more consistent from this point forward.

Over the past 5 or 6 days I’ve been attempting to install DesktopBSD 1.6 onto my computer. The important details of my system are:

A64 “Newcastle” 3200+
2GB PC3200 RAM
Epox 8KDA3I motherboard
Nvidia 6600GT
Atheros 5212 based wireless card (I’ll add the brand and model when I can dig it up.)

Windows and PCLOS already each had their own drives, and bootloaders on those drives, before I began this process. As of now, I just pick which operating system to boot by picking the appropriate drive from a bios-provided menu every time I restart my computer.

For starters, the installer for DesktopBSD is fairly straightforward. However, if you are in my realm of ignorance regarding *BSD in general, I’d suggest you either bring up the DesktopBSD Installation Guide on another computer to follow through the process, or print it beforehand.

The only part of the install process that really required much thought was the partitioning section. I chose to install it into 20GB of free unformatted space which I created at the beginning of my primary IDE master drive. Neither Windows nor PCLOS boot from that drive, making it a good, safe choice for one so rife with ignorance and paranoia. For those coming from the windows or linux worlds, it may come as a surprise to see that the installer has you choose a “slice” of your drive for DesktopBSD, and appears graphically to create only a single partition, yet there are actually multiple partitions being created in the background. This is documented nicely, and in depth, in the FreeBSD Handbook.

A quick glimpse into the future — I eventually wind up giving FreeBSD a try. As a veteran of numerous Linux installs, and someone who has resized and otherwise messed with partitions on numerous “I’d hate to mess this up” installs of Windows both at home and at work, with reckless abandon, (and general success) I can tell you that partitioning under FreeBSD requires thought and knowledge of what the heck you are doing. I can tell you that for someone unfamiliar with the FreeBSD way of doing things the graphical, simplified partitioning interface used by DesktopBSD is a huge benefit.

For the most part, the installation went smoothly, the questions were easy to answer, and everything seemed hunky dory.

I’ve actually done this process several times now, so here are just a couple of tiny things I noticed — it seemed as if my monitor would go to standby if I walked away from the computer for too long during the install, and that it would sometimes not want to come back with a mouse wiggle or keyboard tap. This resulted in a couple of aborted installations. It may also be true that I was just not being patient enough, or expecting a responsiveness that the installer just couldn’t provide at whatever point it was in its activities.

On the three occasions where the installer seemed to complete successfully, it prompted me for a reboot at the end.

This is where the fun began.

Upon initial boot, the next step is apparently to configure different system options, including a root (system) password, setting up users, etc.

On my system, after selecting DesktopBSD from the bootloader, I would eventually get a blue DesktopBSD splash screen, then nothing. The system would fully hang, with my monitor displaying “No Signal”. No keyboard or mouse input would do anything, and I’d have to hard reboot.

Booting in “safe mode” or with ACPI disabled didn’t help. However when booting in safe mode I did note that the last line I saw before the hang related to xorg.

So, I thought maybe it was an xorg problem, and as I write this catchup post I still don’t know for sure.

Helpful folks at the DesktopBSD Forum and Section 5.4.3.2 of the FreeBSD Handbook both pointed me to logs located at /var/log/Xorg.0.log

My problem — how to get there on a nonfunctioning system, formatted with a filesystem that I didn’t know how to read from Linux or Windows.

The first suggestion was to try from single user (system) mode. No luck, which I now think is due to the fact that I had no way of actually logging on and/or due to the fact that setup wasn’t actually complete.

The next suggestion was to use Frenzy. Frenzy is a FreeBSD LiveCD with a large assortment of admin and security tools. I’d have to think that for an experienced FreeBSD user it would be a nearly indispensable tool to have around.
Frenzy is pretty nifty. After booting from the CD, a noobie-friendly environment was only a “startx” away, bringing me to a very functional XFCE desktop. XNC was a perfect graphical file manager for my purposes, Leafpad is essentially a notepad clone, and with these two tools I was ready to go digging.

Unfortunately, my logfiles did not exist.

However, after using another handy graphical tool to mount my USB thumbdrive as RW, I was able to copy off the (nearly empty) xorg.conf file, and to also grab var/log/messages.

My intent was to edit xorg.conf directly to try and fix the seeming problem. After googling these lines from var/log/messages :

NVRM: detected agp.ko, aborting NVIDIA AGP setup!

NVRM: RmInitAdapter failed! (0x25:0xffffffff:1009)

NVRM: rm_init_adapter() failed!

I found this discussion thread and many similar references, leading me to believe that I might need to edit devices.hints as well.

My plan, going into this past Saturday, was to attempt to create my own xorg.conf using my PCLOS as a reference (I wasn’t sure how well that would work out, but I thought it would be worth a try) and/or to experiment with devices.hints as noted in the discussion thread.

Next: Problems with X

A few nights ago, I somehow found myself staring at this article, by Matt Fuller. He’s a FreeBSD user, but makes an honest pass at a fair comparison between FreeBSD and Linux.

Now, understand, I’ve been happily using PCLinuxOS since May of 2007, a period of time which, while short, is far, far longer than I’ve continued to push forward with any of the 10 or so distributions I’ve tried in the past. In 8ish years of on-and-off flirting with Linux, no distro has held my attention or satisfied my needs as well as PCLOS.

However, that doesn’t mean I’m ready to stop trying new things, and Matt’s description of the philosophical and design differences between BSD and Linux convinced me that I had to give BSD a chance. He’s very careful to write in such a way as to avoid portraying BSD and Linux as competitors, and since everyone in the world seems hung up on telling everyone else why only their own choices are the right ones, I’ve got a lot of respect for that viewpoint. Choice is one of the fundamental elements of OSS, is it not?

So as far as Linux goes, I think PCLOS is my stopping point for as far into the future as I can see. But BSD has caught my eye, and by the time I finished Matt’s article I knew I had to give it a try.

The article convinced me that FreeBSD was, for me, the way to go. A bit of googling led me to DesktopBSD – lucky for me, since it’s FreeBSD + some addons for new folks like myself. In comparison to other noobie-friendly BSD distributions that I researched, my biggest reason for choosing DesktopBSD was that it doesn’t deviate from vanilla BSD except for adding tools to improve the noobie experience.

I’ve benefitted from more than one “noobie blog” during my forays into Linuxland, and I hope my recorded experiences here will do the same for someone else who is taking a look at DesktopBSD or FreeBSD.

Here is my upfront admission of the facts:

I am a novice in the Linux world. I can get around, I can fix minor problems with a bit of googling, I can handle day to day activities under Linux. There are still things that I boot to windows for simply because I don’t know how to do them under Linux, or have not yet taken the time to explore the related software under Linux.

I’m a 100%, green as you can be, absolute noobie when it comes to BSD.

When looking at these two facts, I can promise this: I’m going to do stupid things, miss obvious things, do things wrong, do things in the hardest possible way, and generally screw things up over the course of these postings. You’ll follow my steps at your own risk, and I strongly encourage anyone who pulls these posts up in a google search to look for supporting documentation for anything that I state or imply as fact.

In short, as of of this writing you should assume everything I write is wrong.

So what the heck am I doing here?

Here is a short list of things I lack with regard to my ability to contribute to the Open Source community:

• Time — I’m the father of a 3 year old, and as any parent can attest, this pretty much removes the time factor)

• Money — We pay our bills. We save a *tad*, tbut here’s not enough there to donate to any of the people I’d like to donate to until I can justify it to my SO based on the utility that OSS has provided for me/us)

• Skill — I work in IT. I’m a computer enthusiast. My skills, however, are mostly either Windows-centric, or very niche-oriented. I have dabbled in programming, but I’m not a developer. I don’t know enough about *nix to work as a packager. I lack the ability to code or troubleshoot code in any meaningful way.

You see my point. And yet, here I am, embarking on a relationship with FreeBSD / DesktopBSD which, at my point on the learning curve, is at least as significant as my decision to give Linux a serious look. What I could have done, but have failed to do with Linux, is to document my earliest experiences as a noob.

I’m 1 day into my relationship with FreeBSD, and have a partly Windows-centric, partly Linux-noob point of view on what I’m seeing. I’m sharing it, here, in the hopes that someone else benefits from this blog the way I have benefitted from others. This is my attempt at a teeny-tiny speck of contribution to the DesktopBSD and FreeBSD worlds.

How the heck did I wind up looking at BSD? It’s not all that interesting, but the story is here.