Solved FreeBSD Installation CD Alternatives <700MB

T

taiwan740

TL;DR. solution is to use the bootonly.iso and burn that to CD-R This does contain the installer, and autoloads any modules for networking, and downloads everything it needs once connected.

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I've got quite an old laptop that I'm trying to squeeze an operating system on, it may be a lost cause and probably a waste of time, but I'm seeking inspiration.

It's a very old Macbook Pro (AMD64 architecture). It does not support booting from USB, and the CD Drive is unhappy reading from burnt DVDs. CD-Rs are fine, so that limits my installation image to 700MB uncompressed. The 13.2 "disc1" is 1GB and the dvd1 is over 4GB, so that rules them out. The mini-memstick.img is 460MB so I burnt that to a CD-R but the laptop doesn't recognise that disc as bootable (should it?).

I tried the Debian net-installer CD-R as well just to see if I could get anything out of it, it boots GRUB but then hangs upon trying to load the kernel.

Mac OS Snow Leopard runs fine on this machine, so the hardware is fine, it's just an exceptionally fussy booter.

Any ideas how I can get a small installation image of FreeBSD that fits onto a CD-R and has the necessary filesystem attributes to make it a bootable CD?
 
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You want the "boot only" ISO file. My first thought was the link at the bottom of the download page to go back in time to an older release of FreeBSD then I looked at the current 14 Beta and even that has a boot only ISO of well under 700MB.

The 13.2-STABLE boot only ISO is about 380MB. This contains little more than a bare-bones OS to get you booted into the installer and requires networking be set up in the very early stages of the install so as to be able to find, download and install the rest of the OS. I remember it being easy to use the last time I did it that way a decade or so ago :cool:
 
dgmm said:
You want the "boot only" ISO file. My first thought was the link at the bottom of the download page to go back in time to an older release of FreeBSD then I looked at the current 14 Beta and even that has a boot only ISO of well under 700MB.

The 13.2-STABLE boot only ISO is about 380MB. This contains little more than a bare-bones OS to get you booted into the installer and requires networking be set up in the very early stages of the install so as to be able to find, download and install the rest of the OS. I remember it being easy to use the last time I did it that way a decade or so ago :cool:
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Used the img version of that myself just the other day, even recognised my wifi. A annoyance was mis-typing the ssid password which resulted in error messages near totally blanking out the dialogue installation screens. But otherwise ran through fine (second time around).

Yet another option that may be possible is a PXE boot, if the device caters for that and you have another system on the same LAN that can be the PXE server.

CD is perhaps easier however. img is for burning to usb, for CD a .iso is required. https://download.freebsd.org/releas.../13.2/FreeBSD-13.2-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso should have been the file burnt to CD.
 
taiwan740 said:
I've got quite an old laptop that I'm trying to squeeze an operating system on, it may be a lost cause and probably a waste of time, but I'm seeking inspiration.

It's a very old Macbook Pro (AMD64 architecture). It does not support booting from USB, and the CD Drive is unhappy reading from burnt DVDs. CD-Rs are fine, so that limits my installation image to 700MB uncompressed. The 13.2 "disc1" is 1GB and the dvd1 is over 4GB, so that rules them out. The mini-memstick.img is 460MB so I burnt that to a CD-R but the laptop doesn't recognise that disc as bootable (should it?).

I tried the Debian net-installer CD-R as well just to see if I could get anything out of it, it boots GRUB but then hangs upon trying to load the kernel.

Mac OS Snow Leopard runs fine on this machine, so the hardware is fine, it's just an exceptionally fussy booter.

Any ideas how I can get a small installation image of FreeBSD that fits onto a CD-R and has the necessary filesystem attributes to make it a bootable CD?
Click to expand...
Personally, I'd copy https://mfsbsd.vx.sk/files/iso/13/amd64/mfsbsd-se-13.2-RELEASE-amd64.iso to a CD and try that.

It's only 333MB.
 
Thanks for the suggestions. It"s an A1212 Macbook Pro - the EFI on it is horrendous.

I've tried the bootonly.iso for 12.4 and 13.2 and it's refusing to boot either of them.

Shame as it effectively makes it bound for the e-waste bin. I wanted to use it as an SSH client for my Raspberry Pi devices, as it's got a lovely screen and keyboard. Maybe I'll try i386 if that's all I'm using it for.

There's another hack I can try on the iso using isomacprogs which I might try, but that might have to wait for another time.
 
taiwan740 said:
Thanks for the suggestions. It"s an A1212 Macbook Pro - the EFI on it is horrendous.

I've tried the bootonly.iso for 12.4 and 13.2 and it's refusing to boot either of them.

Shame as it effectively makes it bound for the e-waste bin. I wanted to use it as an SSH client for my Raspberry Pi devices, as it's got a lovely screen and keyboard. Maybe I'll try i386 if that's all I'm using it for.

There's another hack I can try on the iso using isomacprogs which I might try, but that might have to wait for another time.
Click to expand...
Did you try mfsBSD ?
 
taiwan740 said:
I did not yet, I researched it and it had a lot of words associated that I didn't understand.

FreeBSD 13.2/i386 boots fine. Lightdm won't start up successfully, I think the graphics card might be too old. My enthusiasm is waning.
Click to expand...
So, you have managed to install FreeBSD, but the problem you are having is installing a GUI?...
 
taiwan740 said:
Shame as it effectively makes it bound for the e-waste bin. I wanted to use it as an SSH client for my Raspberry Pi devices, as it's got a lovely screen and keyboard. Maybe I'll try i386 if that's all I'm using it for.
Click to expand...
If FreeBSD doesn't work out, put DosBox, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Haiku or Minix on it.

taiwan740 said:
I've tried the bootonly.iso for 12.4 and 13.2 and it's refusing to boot either of them.
Click to expand...
The boot CD was the only option for FreeBSD on an old computer.
taiwan740 said:
FreeBSD 13.2/i386 boots fine. Lightdm won't start up successfully, I think the graphics card might be too old. My enthusiasm is waning.
Click to expand...
So, you got it to install, so that part isn't the problem anymore. The problem is configuration, right now for your display/login manager. You'll need x11/xdm and a light Window Manager, like x11-wm/mcwm. It takes getting used to. If it's an Intel or AMD card, you'll have to install the kernel modules. Graphics for cards without video acceleration only becomes a problem when video is played up to full screen.
 
astyle said:
An Intel based Mac from 2007, and 2GB RAM... yeah, even with i915.ko graphics, there's not much room to run a DE... unless you go for something lightweight like XFCE or IceWM.
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XFCE all the way, even on my "good" kit.

I've installed the drm-kmod firmware and all that, I think it's running an ATi "discrete" card, as such. Xorg does work, I tested using the 32-bit Graphical Installer on a Debian install cd.

Indeed, I have a working operating system installed, just the enthusiasm waning part is that I can't really be bothered with it at the moment.

My main PC (this one I'm writing on) is a 2006 Mac Pro running FreeBSD 15. It was also a bear to install an operating system on, I wrote a How-To in this forum to get FreeBSD installed on this particular specimen, but that was a bit easier as it supports DVDs!

I'm marking this thread as solved as you kind folks pointed out to me about the bootonly.iso, which admittedly, I was a bit prejudice against, if I had even noticed it. I think in the past, some Linux distro had a "bootonly" but it was literally just the bootloader and then a BusyBox terminal with about five commands, one of them being "poweroff". I digress...
 
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