laptop install problem

gentoobob

gentoobob

I just was handed a Dell Latitude LS laptop, old little laptop with 400Mhz, 256MB of memory, 40GB hard drive. I'd like to throw FreeBSD on it. Here is the problem. No serial port, no cdrom drive, and only one usb port that is not bootable at post.

How can I get FreeBSD on it?

I do have a laptop IDE converter so I can slap the hard drive into a desktop and install FreeBSD on it, but will that cause problems when I put it back into the laptop and there are new devices/missing devices? I have read that with FreeBSD's generic kernel, you can install FreeBSD on one system and move the hard drive to another and it will work. Is this true?

Thanks,
 
Thanks SirDice! I didnt get that documentation looking it up on google last night. I did get some really outdated stuff, didnt trust it.

Thanks.
 
If you use the IDE converter, you can save at least some headache by using glabels in your fstab instead of device numbers. (I use the auto-created ufsid labels, though they're kinda hard to read:
Code: 
# Device                Mountpoint      FStype  Options         Dump    Pass#
/dev/label/swap0        none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/ufsid/49897af369f08098 /           ufs     rw,noatime      1       1
/dev/ufsid/49897af35d21ed0b /home       ufs     rw,noatime      2       3
/dev/ufsid/49897afadac659ce /tmp        ufs     rw,noatime      2       2
/dev/ufsid/49897afadf0276b3 /usr        ufs     rw,noatime      2       2
/dev/ufsid/49897afbdc034aff /var        ufs     rw,noatime      2       2
/dev/acd0               /cdrom          cd9660  ro,noauto       0       0
 
the ufsid is hashed from something, I don't know what, automatically, similar to the use of uuid in linux.

A much better bet is to install your OS and then manually label with human readable labels like # tunefs -L rootfs /dev/ad0s1a & so on, and then edit your fstab to match the labels. Alternately use newfs(8) -L to set a label at creation time (you might be able to do it as a custom flag to newfs in sysinstall).

http://ivoras.sharanet.org/blog/tree/2009-05-20.geom_label-ufsid.html
glabel(8)
tunefs(8)
Edit: also
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/geom-glabel.html
 
Thanks for all the advice guys. to be honest, I did it without all that jazz and it worked great. Now I'm on to install GNOME.

Thanks again.
 
Re:

fronclynne said:
the ufsid is hashed from something, I don't know what, automatically, similar to the use of uuid in linux.
Click to expand...

FYI: it's a two parter: time of creation of the ufsid and a random seed.

Code: 
sblock.fs_id[0] = (u_int32_t)time(NULL);
sblock.fs_id[1] = random();
printf("/dev/ufsid/%08x%08x", sblock.fs_id[0], sblock.fs_id[1]);

Just in case anybody wants to find out.
 
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