On 15 Jan 2002, at 8:23, BOF boldly uttered: > The biggest problem I have had with installs is with network cards. > While FreeBSD supports many, many brands, most of them are not available > during installation, including Tulip-chipped ones (I use Netgear 310's > almost exclusively). This is easily corrected with a kernel recompile, > which I think is even simpler than with Linux, but a nuisance to have to > do right off the bat! (There may be a way around this using modules, but > I just do the kernel recompile since I end up doing one eventually anyway).
I do not recall ever having to do this with FreeBSD. I have a FreeBSD box here that was installed with v4.2 and updated via sources to 4.3-Stable and the Netgear NIC was recognized off the bat using the "dc" driver. The line "device dc" appears in the GENERIC kernel configuration file. (/usr/src/sys/i386/conf/GENERIC) One thing that you may have to do when installing is disable a bunch of the other drivers (ie for NICS) that are part of the GENERIC kernel, some of which may conflict resource-wise with your installed card. This is done via a "graphical" utility (ie curses-based) during the install process. No re-compiling is necessary. It just disables these devices at boot time using the kernel configuration file /boot/kernel.conf. > The most difficult thing with installation is the disk partitioning. > Luckily, FreeBSD will do a good job by default, and I suggest this for a > newbie, as long as there is not going to be a lot of customization to > the system. Actually these days I think sysinstall makes partitioning the disk quite easy, assuming you know how much space you want to allocate to things, where you want the mount points to be, and assuming you understand the differences between FreeBSD disk nomenclature and ie Linux. (FreeBSD calls what some of us think of a partition a "slice", and then the filesystems are assigned within that slice by something called the label editor. This is run for you by the install process.) > In fact, if one gets brave enough, the entire system can be > uprgarding from version to version by using the porting concept. (I > tried it once: it took about six hours, four of which was recompile time). It's not the "porting concept", the FreeBSD base system is based on a collection of source code maintained via CVS mirrors around the world. Source code for the release comes on the install CD, if you want to "stay current", you install the cvsup utility, decide on a version to track (bleeding-edge, stable, or just security fixes), use cvsup to update all your sources, and do the following: (as user) cd /usr/src make buildworld make buildkernel (as root after rebooting single-user mode) make installworld make installkernel mergemaster Mergemaster is a cool script that checks cvs versions of all the configuration files (most located in /etc) and allows you to either allow the newest default conf file to overwrite your current one (say for things like hardware drivers), merge your existing conf file with the new one, or keep your existing conf file. It goes through all the standard system configuration files this way, and at the end prompts to do other necessary tasks like rebuilding the email aliases and device files. THE biggest feature IMHO that FreeBSD has over typical Linux distros is that there is a single, unified "FreeBSD". You don't have to spend your life trying to keep up with all the minutiae and idiosyncracies of every distro and which kernel variation it has, what utilities are present, what security patches are installed, bla bla bla. You simply update your sources, "make world", and you're up to date. Everything in /bin, /usr/bin, /sbin, /usr/sbin are updated to current. Sendmail is updated, BIND is updated, NTP is updated, etc. (I have found that oftentimes updating Linux distros to a newer version ends up being futile, most people just tell you to re-install the whole stupid thing. I do NOT consider this a reasonable option, considering all the work that goes into getting a machine customized the way you like it.) If you want something not included in the base system, there are thousands of ports that automatically install simply by changing to their directory and typing "make" "make install". All dependencies are retrieved and installed in the process, and the port is added to the package database. (in order to keep track of what is installed and to cleanly uninstall) BTW, the reason BASH does not come with the default system is that it is GPL. FreeBSD uses the BSD license, which is less restrictive than the GPL about returning modified work back to the public. Therefore BASH can never actually be included with the base system because AFAIK its license conflicts with the BSD license. Phil -- Philip J. Koenig [EMAIL PROTECTED] Electric Kahuna Systems -- Computers & Communications for the New Millenium _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list Archives, Digests, etc at http://linux.nf/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
