I need help for installing FreeBSD

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Playerdude666

Hello, a while ago I tried to install FreeBSD on my 2006 computer (which model is an HP Compaq 6720s) although I have a problem, and that is that when the installation starts, when I click "boot multi-user" or "boot single -user" then after those numbers appeared below the ASCII art, the screen went black and stayed that way, I waited 3 or 4 hours but it did not load and it stayed in black screen,i used an USB (i tried boot memstick and mini memstick images and even non-memstick images) and i burned the image with Rufus,Etchdroid,Balena Etcher and even using the "dd" command in Linux and still showing black screen,also this happens in other FreeBSD-based distros,someone has the solution to this problem? I don't want to use OpenBSD or NetBSD
Thanks for your attention.
 
Boot into live CD e.g. Linux and see what graphics card there is in the machine.

Search for that card and FreeBSD and see if any help online.

But a 17 year old computer probably going to struggle.
 
An older machine will work in text mode but will probably not with X. Not in FreeBSD and not in any Linux distro. It was about 2012 or there about, maybe later, that the big switch was made from user mode setting (UMS) to kernel mode setting (KMS). X required KMS and KMS was only supported with newer video cards at the time. Older video cards were no longer supported.

You could use X in VESA mode but VESA mode looks horrible because it only supports 800x600 and 1024x768 modes. If you have a laptop with a different aspect ratio, VESA will display but the aspect ratio will be way off. Don't view any photos on it. They'll look weird. Even text consoles like xterm will look, just not quite right.

If your older machine has an i915, like all my ancient laptop does, you're probably ok. But it will still need a bit of fiddling around. I tried copying my HD3000 (i915) config to my old laptop. It needed a bit of work. Doable but certainly not worth the effort I put into it.
 
cy@ said:
An older machine will work in text mode but will probably not with X. Not in FreeBSD and not in any Linux distro. It was about 2012 or there about, maybe later, that the big switch was made from user mode setting (UMS) to kernel mode setting (KMS). X required KMS and KMS was only supported with newer video cards at the time. Older video cards were no longer supported.

You could use X in VESA mode but VESA mode looks horrible because it only supports 800x600 and 1024x768 modes. If you have a laptop with a different aspect ratio, VESA will display but the aspect ratio will be way off. Don't view any photos on it. They'll look weird. Even text consoles like xterm will look, just not quite right.

If your older machine has an i915, like all my ancient laptop does, you're probably ok. But it will still need a bit of fiddling around. I tried copying my HD3000 (i915) config to my old laptop. It needed a bit of work. Doable but certainly not worth the effort I put into it.
Click to expand...
But is there any FreeBSD-based distro that can run on old graphic cards?
 
It is very likely a 32 bit cpu architecture. This is tier 2 support nowadays I think. It also has a different download (i386, not amd64?), right?
 
Playerdude666 said:
But is there any FreeBSD-based distro that can run on old graphic cards?
Click to expand...
Distro is the wrong term. FreeBSD is not Linux. If you're talking about derivatives, no. Older cards need an old version of Xorg (x.org) that still supported UMS. Remember, this was not a FreeBSD or Linux decision per se but an x.org decision.

The reason for this was that UMS required the app run with root privilege in order for it to talk directly to the hardware. With KMS only the kernel will talk to the hardware, as it is with all other devices. At the time the switch was made, x.org decided not to expend the effort to rewrite old drivers to support KMS.

A person would need to run a FreeBSD earlier than 9.1 with an older display card.

NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Linux followed suit. There are no modern operating systems that still support UMS and older video adapters. But you can still use VESA. VESA will look natural on a 4:3 aspect ratio monitor in 1024x768 mode.

You can still use older video cards in text mode for server systems. If you have a beefy MB that still supports PCI you can cheap out with an older video card if the machine's purpose is a server or firewall appliance in your basement.
 
Try to install FreeBSD 11.2? It's the only version successfully can be installed via usb on my 2013 hp laptop. I can update the whole system after the installation.
 
cy@ said:
A person would need to run a FreeBSD earlier than 9.1 with an older display card.
Click to expand...
My PentiumII machine with Matrox G200 was running up to 11.0-Release.
The xorg server no longer supports XAA(XFree86 Acceleration Architecture) after 1.14.
Performance dropped, but it was working in 1920x1080.
Xvideo also functional.
Is x11-drivers/xf86-video-mga still in ports but not working anymore?

The latest firefox pkg at the time also worked.
The PentiumII does not have SSE, so I had to disable it with jpeg-turbo.
 
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