Installing on OSX.

Pwhheee · Nov 20, 2008

Any1 got any experiences? I am currently downloading BSD and im just wondering. Does it run okay?

brd@ · Nov 20, 2008

Do you mean in a VM or on the bare metal?

Pwhheee · Nov 20, 2008

VM, Bare Metal? I dont really know what any of those things are.

I have an mini-mac 10.4 OS X, and im installing it right on the harddrive.

ninjaslim · Nov 20, 2008

FreeBSD runs well in VMWare Fusion, which is what you should use because they have integration tools for FreeBSD, whereas Parallels and VirtualBox don't. VirtualBox has trouble even installing a BSD.

If you mean installing FreeBSD on a Mac, then there is a wiki page on this. According to a friend of mine, it does run well with most features working.

Pwhheee · Nov 20, 2008

Whats VMWare Fusion? Do i have to have this to install it?

Pwhheee · Nov 21, 2008

ninjaslim said:
FreeBSD runs well in VMWare Fusion, which is what you should use because they have integration tools for FreeBSD, whereas Parallels and VirtualBox don't. VirtualBox has trouble even installing a BSD.

If you mean installing FreeBSD on a Mac, then there is a wiki page on this. According to a friend of mine, it does run well with most features working.

Okay, i have now bought VMWare Fusion.

So this should be farly easy. I guess.

ninjaslim · Nov 21, 2008

You could have used VirtualBox. Why did you buy VMWare Fusion?

Pwhheee · Nov 21, 2008

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ninjaslim said:
You could have used VirtualBox. Why did you buy VMWare Fusion?

Cuz you said it was bad. And OKAY i didnt "buy" it.

I was being a criminal.

Djn · Nov 22, 2008

Haha, right. Anyway, ignoring that, I think it might be a good idea to clear up the possibilities:

- You can replace MacOS X with FreeBSD.
- You can install it alongside OS X and chose which one of them you want to boot when you turn on the computer
- You can run an OS X program that emulates a computer (e.g. VMWare) and install FreeBSD inside that.

The first two are the "bare metal"-variants. They're faster, but also more messy if something goes wrong. The last one is easier (since you'll always have OS X running), though in some ways a bit limited.

The "bare metal" name refers to how FreeBSD runs directly on your hardware, as opposed to inside VMWare on top of OS X.

Important detail. Is this a PowerPC mini, or one of the intel ones?

trasz@ · Nov 25, 2008

Two things about running FreeBSD -CURRENT on Parallels 3.0:

1. The disk I/O is _slow_.

2. Timekeeping is completely botched.

ninjaslim · Nov 26, 2008

I always had bad luck with Parallels.

trasz@ · Nov 27, 2008

Actually, changing the timecounter from TSC to i8254 seems to help somewhat. Just put

kern.timecounter.hardware=i8254

to /etc/sysctl.conf and reboot.

Installing on OSX.

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