ThePanda

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

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 3rd, 2006 at 11:42 am and is filed under article. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.