So I finally have a fairly stable install of FreeBSD on my Mac Mini, the only noticable problem I have had so far is a weird problem with running X forwarding on it, since it somehow causes reboots, though no real kernel panics, since db doesn’t come up, and I have no real core dumps to look at. So it pretty much works out normally, install minimal with docs, manpages, and other stuff, use ports and such, to install X, and it mostly works. The only thing I really had to change was drivers for the network card, the Mac Mini uses a Marvell YukonII NIC, and well Marvell/SysKonnect released the driver code under a FreeBSD license, and it is available here. Unfortunately this does not work as such, and you have to patch if_yk.c because one of the system calls changed. Applying the patch


1569,1570c1569,1570
< }
< #else
---
> }
> #elif __FreeBSD_version < 700006
1577a1578,1588
> SK_ADDR_LOGICAL_ADDRESS);
> }
> #else
>
> if (bcmp(IF_LLADDR(pAC->pIfnet),
> pAC->Addr.Net<sup><a href="#fn0">0</a></sup>.CurrentMacAddress.a,6)) {
>
> SkAddrOverride(pAC,
> pAC,
> 0,
> (SK_MAC_ADDR*)IF_LLADDR(pAC->pIfnet),


should do the trick.

Ze Panda

I own an Intel Mac Mini, it is one of those things which sort of just happened, and now I happen to own one of them. One of the points of owning this was running an alternate OS, so that when I needed something that wasn’t mach and well I wanted to experiment with this.

As of a few days ago, I have been booting FreeBSD, it took me a little bit to get a hang of the ports collection, mostly because of not reading the FreeBSD Handbook and being bad at finding stuff in general. So far problems I have encountered include an inability to get FreeBSD to recognize my network interface card (I am guessing something built into the Intel chipset) but I am hoping I can solve this problem once I get more stuff running, and can more closely probe what I am running.

The other fun fact that I have come across is an inability on sysinstall’s part to install any of the distributions I choose, because sthe port/INDEX file is named port/INDEX-7. The obvious sollution would be to create a symlink, saddly I can’t do this on an ISO, and once it boots up, the “holographic” shell does not support most commands, so bah for that.

I will put up more detailed instructions soon enough, but mostly they include installing the minimal system (no man pages :(), and then going through and porting or pkg_adding (I used both depending on how many times the ports collection failed) everything I needed. Fortunately the minimal install is pretty well built in terms of tools, so don’t have to worry about such things as compilers and such. The one big benifit is that I can get wireless working with wpa without too much trouble, which is sort of cool seeing as how much trouble people are having with WPA on other things (I didn’t use wireless to do a netinstall because my router needs WPA suppliant running, and the open Brown wireless needs me to go to a page and log into Brown, and even then provides extremely limited connection), that being said, FreeBSD is cool.

Ze Panda

Hmm, I am wondering why 7.0-CURRENT branches don’t come with the port index despite downloading two discs worth of isos and comparing MD5 hashes, like is there something I am missing when it refuses to install X.org and fails because of a lack of PORT indices.

Panda