Installing on OSX.

[Pwhheee]

Any1 got any experiences? I am currently downloading BSD and im just wondering. Does it run okay?

[brd@]

Do you mean in a VM or on the bare metal?

[Pwhheee]

VM, Bare Metal? I dont really know what any of those things are. :P

I have an mini-mac 10.4 OS X, and im installing it right on the harddrive.

[ninjaslim]

FreeBSD runs well in VMWare Fusion, which is what you should use because they have integration tools for FreeBSD, whereas Parallels and VirtualBox don't. VirtualBox has trouble even installing a BSD.

If you mean installing FreeBSD on a Mac, then there is a wiki page on this. According to a friend of mine, it does run well with most features working.

[Pwhheee]

Whats VMWare Fusion? Do i have to have this to install it?

[Pwhheee]

FreeBSD runs well in VMWare Fusion, which is what you should use because they have integration tools for FreeBSD, whereas Parallels and VirtualBox don't. VirtualBox has trouble even installing a BSD.

If you mean installing FreeBSD on a Mac, then there is a wiki page on this. According to a friend of mine, it does run well with most features working.

Okay, i have now bought VMWare Fusion.

So this should be farly easy. I guess.

[ninjaslim]

You could have used VirtualBox. Why did you buy VMWare Fusion?

[Pwhheee]

[/I]You could have used VirtualBox. Why did you buy VMWare Fusion?
Cuz you said it was bad. And OKAY i didnt "buy" it.

I was being a criminal.

[Djn]

Haha, right. Anyway, ignoring that, I think it might be a good idea to clear up the possibilities:

- You can replace MacOS X with FreeBSD.
- You can install it alongside OS X and chose which one of them you want to boot when you turn on the computer
- You can run an OS X program that emulates a computer (e.g. VMWare) and install FreeBSD inside that.

The first two are the "bare metal"-variants. They're faster, but also more messy if something goes wrong. The last one is easier (since you'll always have OS X running), though in some ways a bit limited.

The "bare metal" name refers to how FreeBSD runs directly on your hardware, as opposed to inside VMWare on top of OS X.

Important detail. Is this a PowerPC mini, or one of the intel ones?

[trasz@]

Two things about running FreeBSD -CURRENT on Parallels 3.0:

1. The disk I/O is _slow_.

2. Timekeeping is completely botched.

[ninjaslim]

I always had bad luck with Parallels.

[trasz@]

Actually, changing the timecounter from TSC to i8254 seems to help somewhat. Just put

kern.timecounter.hardware=i8254

to /etc/sysctl.conf and reboot.