701, Why do you hate me?

S

sidiasus

Alrighty, I'm banging my head against this one.
The last time I used FreeBSD was the 5.2 release. So, it's been a little while and I figured that getting FreeBSD on my EEE PC 701 would be fun.

I can't get the darned thing to install. I started with the 8.0BETA4 release memstick image dd'ed according to directions, but the installer couldn't find the packages on the usb stick. I tried to drop to a shell to fire up the wireless and grab the media from good ol' ftp, but the installer couldn't launch a shell either.

Figuring that mayhaps there were kinks with my machine and a release candidate, I decided to go for a more stable release and checked out 7.2. Unfortunately, there are no usb images available for that release, and all the instructions on how to build your own usb stick assume that you are running FreeBSD. The only set of instructions that I could find to create a USB boot stick image used unetbootin, which seems to make unusable images.

I don't have hardwire access to a router/switch/hub, otherwise I'd do the obnoxious route and install a tftp server on another machine and netboot it.

So, here I am. Short of A) Buying an external cd-rom drive, or B) going through the effort to install FreeBSD on _another_ machine just to get it working on my optical-less lappy.

There has to be another way to get an image made. I just can't seem to find any clues.
 
Unfortunately the USB images still have some kinks in them that are being ironed out. Unless you feel like a lot of effort working around it I suggest waiting until the first 8.0-RC build.

Easiest workaround might be to setup an FTP server and use your wired LAN connection. No need to drop to a shell for that.
 
Have you tried putting the all the bits to install on a SD Disk and installing the way that people did prior to CDROMs? I know the handbook covers installing from a dos partition, it might be worth a try.
 
Have you tried the slackware method of rebooting and using a disk image?
There is also unetbootin.
How much available free space do you have?
Try this: unetbootin and use a knoppix image 5.x that has the tools.
Do the qtparted resizing and moving of partitions. There are ntfs tools and e2fs programs on the disk to check for integrity. Be sure to use these and to make a primary partition.
Commit.
Reboot and download the image that you want. If you have the space, get the dvdimage. Best to download the image, extract it to a usb device, remove the gz file, and move the dvd.iso to the main system.
Start unetbootin and remove the old knoppix file.
Redo the process and choose the option of install from and get the image as the one you want.

Follow the directions and reboot.
 
Just install 8.0-RC1 usb image on your 701, it works like a charm. I did the same on a 701 and 900A and FreeBSD 8.0 Beta 4 without any problems. Furthermore it's more convenient to use stable packages than those on the medium. Install just the minimum and then add the things you actually need.
 
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