Hi, I'm trying to install FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE on an older IBM thinkpad 770 laptop. This is a Pentium-233 MHz vintage model, with 256MB RAM. I chose 5.1 because I have a Cardbus 3com 575 Ethernet apaptor and it looks like there's no support for Cardbus at all in -stable.
So I boot the laptop from the 5.1-RELEASE mini CD-ROM, and a buch of messages scroll by. Before I can read them I'm in the blue sysinstall screen, so I have no way of really reading what the kernel said. I was able to catch more than a few "unable to map IRQ" lines or something like that. Anyway, my Ethernet card is not activated, so I can't use it to install. If I choose to install from the CDROM all goes fine and it says it's copying the base files into /. But somewhere in the middle of this process the CDROM will just "hang." The activity LED goes on solid and the installer program just times out trying to read any more from the disk. After a while it pops up an error about "Unable to read, do I want to retry?" But it really doesn't matter what I do at this point, it seems the CDROM interface is totally borked until I reset the system. So, it's apparent to me that there's probably some kernel settings that I need to mess with. Either I need to get the Ethernet card recognised, or I need to figure out why this CDROM just hangs all of a sudden. I have tried re-burning the CD-R at a slower speed, this had no effect. I'm pretty sure that the CDROM is fine, as I've installed other operating systems without any problem. I've read the FreeBSD handbook, but it talks about this whole kernel config process that I never see. There's one line in there about how this is deprecated in -current in favor of the "device.hints" method. However, the documentation on how to use this method is non-existant. What exactly am I supposed to set? I've looked at the manpage of the xl driver that this card uses, and it says nothing about hints. I managed to get into the loader command line interface, but I have no idea what commands I need to use or options I need to set. And I can't read the boot messages because they scroll off the screen. In linux I would just use ctrl-alt-Fn and switch to a different virtual terminal and then use shift-pageup to read the messages, but I haven't found a way to do this in FreeBSD. Any ideas? Brian _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
