Installation on older hardware

A

ageekinsw

Hi,

I am new to FreeBsd FreeBSD, but am not a noob (30+ years computer experience, 15 years on Linux). I have tried many times to get this installed on a variety of systems that are running other OSs seamlessly, to little avail. I have succeeded once on a desktop with version 7.2. Have tried 8.4 and 9.1 on laptops that run Centos 6+ very well, and failed miserably (including total boot failure on install attempt with 9.1).

I want to run this because it is REAL Unix, and because it is supposedly very stable. I have as yet not found this to be true, however, I am using dumpy hardware admittedly. The most common problem is using the ports collection. The most common problem is using the standard make install clean, that the installation fails on dependencies a good way into the installation.

One possible problem is the order of installation. When installing normal add in ports (X, Tex, etc), is there any specific order? X seems to be quite problematic by this route, and on some attempts it seems as if nothing will build by this method.

In the next day or two, I will try again, an post specific failures. I realize that I am not in the midst of an actual installation, and have not been specific in my questions, but I would like to get to a stable build with this. Any constructive comments would be appreciated.

Thanks.
Ageekinsw
 
A Pentium I or II with enough memory, say at least 64M, should be fine. Something from within the last decade would be better, and that's usually not hard to find.

As far as ports, it depends on the specific problem. After an install, the first thing that should be done is to update the ports tree. Beyond that, using ports-mgmt/portmaster is highly recommended. See Upgrading FreeBSD Ports for some specifics.
 
At least in my experience, the recent csup >> subversion, and other changes, make ordinary installs and upgrades in older hardware less easy than used to be the case. (Disk space, especially, available memory, to a lesser extent.) [No problem recently doing upgrades on a pentium 3, but the browser of choice will not load for some reason... maybe not enough startup memory]. OTOH a pentium 4 should be no problem in most configurations, and they are used everywhere very inexpensively. It would all vary per instance though, so no real reason to dissuade in the least.
 
OK, after the first post tried 9.1 again. Fresh download and burn of install CD (the unit has a DVD ROM, but will not (at this point) boot a DVD from any OS, however, the last CD installation of an OS was last week). The unit is a Compaq M700 PIII 1 GHz with 512 MB RAM, and a 30 GB HD. The install CD boots to the point of detecting the internal USB hub, after talking to the HD (ATA0), and hangs. On some tries, it goes to try and talk to "ATA1", which there should not be any (it's a laptop). As I stated in the OP, boot failure, tried as many options as I could find.

Ageekinsw
 
Hi,

I am now enduring specific intermittant hardware failure - DVD /CDROM drive. Is there any[]way to install straight from FTP (I am currently booted to Knoppix 4.02)? Any reply would be helpful
 
Thought of that. Current HD is PATA, all other machines are SATA. no dice. I believe that I should be able to install from a partition, if I format correctly, using Knoppix to download the needed files. To date, I have only attempted an ISO install. I will look at documentation on how to install from a file system.

Thanks.
 
If the laptop can boot from USB, you may have luck with the ghostbsd.org smaller installs that can fit on a thumbdrive without too much trouble. (Though on one machine the laptop's add-in cards (PCMCIA?) had to be removed to fully boot.)
 
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