Newly Minted BSD User With Two Questions

L

lxkraken

I'm a recent transplant from Linux and I'm very happy that I finally took the plunge and installed FreeBSD. I've been using my newly adopted OS for less than a week and I already know that I'll enjoy this system. The pw command was quite an eye-opener as to how efficient BSD's approach to things command-line and by extension the entire OS can be. I do however have two questions:

Firstly, I installed FreeBSD on a completely new hard drive. My old Linux install sits in my desktop tower, its SATA cables unplugged from my motherboard. What I'd like to do is have the FreeBSD drive act as the first hard drive with a boot manager that will allow me to access my old and decrepit Linux installation. Is there something native to FreeBSD that I can use or should I install something like grub or lilo?

Secondly, although my wireless connection works fine and it doesn't seem like my connection is taking a performance hit, I consistently get this error even before having logged in:

ath0: bad series0 hwrate 0xa, tries 3 ts_status 0x0

The message is intermittent. Sometimes it doesn't occur, other times my screen slowly fills itself with this message at console before starting X. What could be causing this?
 
It's best to start a single thread for each question. Using a good title helps attract readers who will know about the subject.

That said: FreeBSD has a multiboot loader for MBR disk partitioning, boot0. Depending on which version you installed, you may have MBR or GPT partitioning. gpart show will tell.

But there's an easier way: just use the BIOS boot menu to pick which drive to boot.

I don't know what can be done about the Atheros message. Use Alt-F2 to switch to the second console and avoid the messages.
 
Going back to the first question, after some abortive experiences with boot0cfg, experiences which some very cursory googling indicates aren't that rare, I think that if you want a boot manager, you'd probably be best off using one from the Linux system. Both legacy grub and grub2 can boot FreeBSD, and it's easy enough to set that as the default.
 
It's also possible to install GRUB2 into a dedicated partition. boot0 should be able to chainload it. Not tested.
Off-topic curiosity : Posters of last three posts were registered on the same date ~ 5.5 years ago.
 
Heh, that is interesting. That was probably right around the time the forums started, wasn't it? There was a privately run FreeBSD forum, but the owner became ill, and didn't keep it up. Afterwards, it become overrun with spam. At that point, @Carpetsmoker and some others began daemonforums.org, and I remember FreeBSD.org (freebsd.org?) giving it a link.

Then, within a few months of that. (I think that happened in April of 2008, and around June of 2008 I left my FreeBSD-centric job for a Linux-centric one around August, I think, and didn't keep up that closely with what was going on in FreeBSD after that), FreeBSD.org began their own forums. Daemonforums still happily exists, though @Carpetsmoker is no longer in charge, I think, but it's fairly small and seems to be more OpenBSD oriented, though all BSD topics are welcome. If I joined in November, that was after I'd taken the Linux job and gotten busy, so it probably wasn't the first day the forums opened, but it was probably fairly close to the beginning.
 
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