powerpc can't get no love?

[stleric]

Just had an experience trying to get FreeBSD 9 installed on a G4 Mini. It was interesting. The main problem I had was with not being able to boot off the hard drive once the installation was finished. I made some earlier attempts at installing 8.2 with no luck but then I found Sossego's magic post and that made it a fairly routine process (thanks man!). It doesn't seem to work for 9.0 however, at least not as is. I tried various things and I'm not quite sure which thing or combination of things did the trick. If I'm installing FreeBSD 9 to Mini either to bare metal disk or to a disk that's in some undefined initial state, what's the best way to format the disk? Guided or manual? Should the apple-boot partition be located in a specific place or be of a specific size? Do I have to do the

dd if=/boot/boot1.hfs of=/dev/ada0s2

thing? (Thanks again, Sossego!). Any other useful tips will probably be helpful as I'm still throwing other distros at the mini but I suspect I'll be coming back to FreeBSD 9 at some point.

My other beef is with the package system for the powerpc. Version 9 is not that old but when you do

pkg_add -r <something something>

pkg_add can't find it because it's being directed to a non-existent directory on the package server, it seems. I had to do the

setenv PACKAGESITE <someplace someplace>

thing. It's probably not the worst bug in this distro but come on! I guess the powerpc crowd is a ports crowd. BTW, 8.2 had the same problem but I just figured since it was old...

Anyway, I guess it's nice to have an "alternative" to OS X for these older machines. A smarter installer (or good instructions conspicuously located) would be nice for the next version. And the package URLs should all point in the same direction.

TIA,
eric

 

[sossego]

The dd thing is necessary or it won't boot.

The package site bit: http://forums.freebsd.org/showpost.php?p=169904&postcount=52

If it's more advanced, join the mailing list. We're all working on a variety of projects using FreeBSD on the PowerPC/POWER platform.

Here is our progress:
There is a tutorial with OtherOS++ and FreeBSD.
Porting Java is actively being worked on.
Llvm and clang are being worked on for FreeBSD PowerPC.
Accessibility using FreeBSD on PowerPC is being worked on.

 

[stleric]

The dd thing is necessary or it won't boot.

Just to be clear, 9.0 still requires me to manually copy the bootloader to ad0s2? Is it correct that the boot1.hfs file has to go in ad0s2 and that ad0s2 has to be configured as an 'apple-boot' partition? When using gpart, is the apple-boot partition automatically assigned to ad0s2 or is the assignment made in the fashion of first partition -> ad0s2, second partition -> ad0s3, and so on?

The package site bit: http://forums.freebsd.org/showpost.php?p=169904&postcount=52

Something like that, I think I used 'Latest'. Can you explain why it is that TPTB can't (or won't) either make the client's hard-wired URL point to the right directory or rename the directory on the server side to whatever the client uses for its default?

Thanks again,
eric

 

[sossego]

Yeah, man, you have to do it that way. Originally, I did the installation of it using an Ubuntu live CD. Tingox had influenced the second way of installing. Once the Apple partition map is created, it becomes ad0s1. FreeBSD uses hfs for bootloading in keeping up with the Open Firmware. The other partitions can be added or edited with gpart. Yeah, the same way.

I had trouble myself with the shell variable for a bit. Others on the mailing list may have the same shell environment as you do, ask on there; if it wasn't for the mailing list, there would be no tutorial.

"Abstract thinking with conceptual understanding" is a good description of my perception and thoughts.

Be patient with the mailing list replies, okay? One of us will answer as soon as possible.

Apologies if everything isn't covered in this answer.