Raspberry Pi

Hello all,

I have been having varying degrees of success with running FreeBSD on Raspberry Pi. I am running a "B" board and Debian, Rasbmc and openELEC all run flawlessly.

I have followed the following procedure:
  1. Download the FreeBSD RasberryPi image located here: ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/arm/armv6/ISO-IMAGES/10.0/.
  2. Extract the .BZ2 file with 7Zip.
  3. Use Win32 Disk Imager http://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/ to write the image to an SD Card (I tried both 16 GB and 32 GB).
  4. Apply keyboard, video and power.

What happens:
First boot: no video but the lights flash (I can ping the box and SSH is alive if I wait long enough).
Second boot: no video and lights flashing (I can ping the box and SSH is alive if I wait long enough).
Third boot is either: FreeBSD Pi complains of a dirty shutdown and I boot into FreeBSD Pi or I get video, but the FreeBSD bootloader cant find the kernel.
Fourth boot: no video.

I have tried this entire process at least four times with different sized SD cards. Any suggestions as to what I am doing wrong?
 
I would give this a try, but I don't know how to mount an SDHC card. I know, it's probably somewhere on this forum.
 
balanga said:
I would give this a try, but I don't know how to mount an SDHC card....
The same way as a USB stick, using the mount(8) command. An SDHC card works pretty much the same as an external harddisk or memory stick. But you do need an SDHC card reader.
 
I would try a different brand of SDHC card. The Raspberry Pi is quite sensitive and doesn't work properly with some cards. Size shouldn't matter much, I have several working 16 GB cards.

Also keep in mind that ARM is still a Tier 2 architecture so it doesn't get as much attention as i386 or AMD64.
 
SirDice said:
I would try a different brand of SDHC card. The Raspberry Pi is quite sensitive and doesn't work properly with some cards. Size shouldn't matter much, I have several working 16 GB cards.

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried two cards that worked with Rasbian but no dice.

Has anyone gotten the binary distributions to work?
 
ansarm said:
SirDice said:
I would try a different brand of SDHC card. The Raspberry Pi is quite sensitive and doesn't work properly with some cards. Size shouldn't matter much, I have several working 16 GB cards.

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried two cards that worked with Rasbian but no dice.

Has anyone gotten the binary distributions to work?

I tried a few images but managed to have some success with this one: http://www.onemansanthology.com/blog/freebsd-on-raspberry-pi/. I'm using a 64 GB microSD card in an adapter and it seems to boot up OK. I'm just trying a few things mentioned on that web page to find my way around the system.

So far, I am unable to use useradd - Command not found.

I guess I'll try installing ports now...
 
Apply keyboard, video and power.

Hi,

What type of video, HDMI or yellow RCA (SVGA cable I think), or other? Also what type of video - that is TV (HD, analog) or other screen?

I am successfully running FreeBSD 10.0 from, ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/arm/armv6/ISO-IMAGES/10.0/ which is FreeBSD-10.0-RELEASE-arm-armv6-RPI-B-20140131-r260789.img.bz2 on a 4 GB SanDisk SD chip with an adapter. I used A Targus Card Reader/Writer to transfer the img to the chip via USB. I have used portsnap fetch and portsnap extract and installed ports. I have looked around a lot because I have a very frustrating issue with the video (SVGA, also called composite, I think) on a old television, with complementary inputs. The text runs off the screen. I have found quite a few sources of reference. But I say with confidence that I am getting a signal, through the yellow jack, with no modifications to the img or configuration.

Good Luck,

a5'

  • Raspberry Pi B revision 2 (512 MB RAM)
  • USB keyboard
  • Phone charger power supply
  • Ethernet
  • Yellow RCA cable
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Back
Top