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FreeBSD: why so lame?

Created by Zink. Last edited by Zink Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:56:59 PDT. Viewed 355 times. atom feed
Here's a simple task: you have no FreeBSD systems in your world. You want one. You have a new box, but it's weird enough no off-the-shelf pre-compiled BSD seems adequate.

What you naturally want to do seems simple: make a directory. Unpack a bunch of FreeBSD stuff into that directory. Configure, configure, configure and make. Install the newly made OS onto a CD-Rom or a SanDisk or some other place. Boot and go. (actually, I want it on my PXE server).

What you actually get after a great amount of digging is a source tree with Makefiles designed for "FreeBSD make" which does many weird things, the most important of which is NOT BE PRESENT on your existing O.S.. And the Makefiles just don't work with other "make"s.

It's like the comfort zone for the FreeBSD people is "overlooked".

frankm : Thu, 17 Apr 2008 06:54:26 PDT permalink
Well, the usual method _is_ to install a binary distribution that only mostly supports the hardware, then bootstrap it up to the fully-configured state, in much the same way one would when installing Linux for the first time.
Zink : Thu, 17 Apr 2008 09:33:05 PDT permalink
If I have a 686 freebsd box and a tiny MIPS box on which I want to install Linux, I download a Linux source distribution, edit the configuration file to say MIPS, etc., and then type "make". Which maybe doesn't work, maybe I have to download and make a recent gnu-make, then gcc's MIPS support, a couple other utilities, and then it's certainly good to go.

So it's much lamer than it ought to be.

My MIPS machine has no disk. To put linux on it I make a directory hierarchy on my build machine, with a /bin into which I copy MIPS executables, tell the config about the directory, and presto, when I boot the MIPS box it has a RAM disk initialized with a complete system I can run.

To boot the box I copy the result of the kernel make to /srv/tftp and the box's PXE code grabs it. The PXEboot program uses TFTP to get the kernel so I don't have to set up an NFS server.

There's no reason there couldn't be a collection of packages I could download to my linux box to make a free-bsd installation. Hopefully there is and I don't see it.

Obviously FreeBSD isn't going on my MIPS box, but I have a tiny X86 box (Soekris) of the same description. PXE-ethernet, serial consle, no disk, no video, no USB, no CD-Rom. And I don't have a FreeBSD box to build it on. I can already put linux on it like a dream.

frankm : Fri, 18 Apr 2008 10:04:43 PDT permalink
A Soekris box? That's not weird at all! Try http://m0n0.ch/wall/, or search for nanobsd. You could also boot off a live CD image like FreeSBIE or http://livecd.sourceforge.net/ and build the image yourself.

Or you could grab http://www.exit.com/Archives/FreeBSD/nanobsd-fulldisk.img and dd it to CF and boot it. :-)

Zink : Fri, 18 Apr 2008 19:59:42 PDT permalink
I'd have to get a CF first, of course. Or a CD. But yeah, I'll probably end up doing that. I've seen nothing which suggests there's a way of doing it that doesn't require some other freebsd system to do config on.

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