Just had an experience trying to get FreeBSD 9 installed on a G4 Mini. It was interesting. The main problem I had was with not being able to boot off the hard drive once the installation was finished. I made some earlier attempts at installing 8.2 with no luck but then I found Sossego's magic post and that made it a fairly routine process (thanks man!). It doesn't seem to work for 9.0 however, at least not as is. I tried various things and I'm not quite sure which thing or combination of things did the trick. If I'm installing FreeBSD 9 to Mini either to bare metal disk or to a disk that's in some undefined initial state, what's the best way to format the disk? Guided or manual? Should the apple-boot partition be located in a specific place or be of a specific size? Do I have to do the
thing? (Thanks again, Sossego!). Any other useful tips will probably be helpful as I'm still throwing other distros at the mini but I suspect I'll be coming back to FreeBSD 9 at some point.
My other beef is with the package system for the powerpc. Version 9 is not that old but when you do
pkg_add can't find it because it's being directed to a non-existent directory on the package server, it seems. I had to do the
thing. It's probably not the worst bug in this distro but come on! I guess the powerpc crowd is a ports crowd. BTW, 8.2 had the same problem but I just figured since it was old...
Anyway, I guess it's nice to have an "alternative" to OS X for these older machines. A smarter installer (or good instructions conspicuously located) would be nice for the next version. And the package URLs should all point in the same direction.
TIA,
eric
Code:
dd if=/boot/boot1.hfs of=/dev/ada0s2
My other beef is with the package system for the powerpc. Version 9 is not that old but when you do
Code:
pkg_add -r <something something>
Code:
setenv PACKAGESITE <someplace someplace>
Anyway, I guess it's nice to have an "alternative" to OS X for these older machines. A smarter installer (or good instructions conspicuously located) would be nice for the next version. And the package URLs should all point in the same direction.
TIA,
eric