i hate freebsd
first of all, i reserve the right to take back anything i say here. you never know, maybe one day i'll get passed all the problems i'm having with it right now and think that *somehow* freebsd doesn't suck. ...but that day is not today.
i've spent the last 3 days trying to figure out how to make an install cd that we can use to automate the installation of a system, as simple as:
- put disc in
- turn computer on
- watch it install and configure itself asking only for the network configuration
you'd be surprised at how very difficult this is.
it's not the fault of the o/s so much as the community around it. mounds and mounds of documentation and not a shred of something useful. the release engineering manual has one of my favourite phrases:
To successfully build a release, you must first populate /usr/obj by running make world or simply make buildworld.
but it doesn't explain where make world should be run! i mean, 'cmon. not all of us are old-skool unix geeks. we need actually useful documentation, like the stuff you find with the gentoo project.
3days. that's how much time (and company money) has been poured into this. i got 3 responses from the freebsd-questions mailinglist, all of which appeared helpful at first, but lead to equally useful dead-ends. one guy pointed me to a bunch of not-so-helpful howtos, another had me download 500mb of a knoppix-like freebsd setup that was documented in portugese (very useful).
sigh. the stupid part of all of this is that i could have gotten this up and running under gentoo in no time. but bsd is special. it's different, and as far as i can tell, about as elitist as it is stable.
Comments
smyli
7 Jan 2005, 12:17 a.m. |
wa hahahha. 500 mbs of portugese! i feel for u, but it's pretty damned funny.
daniel
7 Jan 2005, 12:19 a.m. |
i just knew that if i posted on here, i'd find someone who could appreciate my plight ;-)
Ted
7 Jan 2005, 10:21 a.m. |
Try running "make world" in /usr/God/Genesis/. Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.
Sorry, I'm on the back shift and I'm bloody tired - couldn't resist... :-)
Cheers,
Ted
tallo
9 Jan 2005, 6:31 p.m. |
Now, while that's all talking about PXE boot stuff, there's a neat little section numbered "3 Bootstrap Setup" that seems to describe exactly what we discussed you were looking for.
Now, to be honeset, I found this with a Google search for "freebsd sysinstall script", so one can't necessarily say that it was "obvious". It's probably not, since PXE stuff isn't what you were looking for. But I don't think the PXE process is necessary or relevant for the autosysinstall bits. The real trick is finding out where the mfsroot filesystem is. Is it part of the 2.88MB bootable-CD floppy image, or is that just the kernel, which in turn loads the UFS filesystem image off of the standard ISO filesystem on the CD-ROM?
I do see that the sysinstall(8) manpage specifies that sysinstall is end of life. But it doesn't specify what the replacement should be. I'd interpret that as, "We don't like it, but we don't have anything else ready yet." See below...
Hope that brings you better luck. :)
Of course, there's always another option: make a properly booting system using a real init instead of sysinstall, and do the install gentoo-like with manual steps. "Roll-your-own installer!" IIRC there are "Live FreeBSD" boot CDs, one of which would be an ideal choice for this. You'd just have to find the appropriate place to insert your "Install!" scripting.
daniel
9 Jan 2005, 6:38 p.m. |
that's exactly what i was trying to figure out. 'course i didn't know that's what i needed, since was still confused about the difference between init and sysinstall, and why the livecd seemed to think they were the same thing.
basically, i think i'm outta my league for the moment on the above, so i'll likely start setting up a sysinstall-like thing on monday. once i've had more time to play with it (consider for a moment the fact that i'd never touched freebsd before last week) i might be able to write my own scriptable installer that does away with sysinit.
...and then i'll gpl it ;-)
John Greiman
10 Jan 2005, 10:17 p.m. |
Using cdroot-1.2.5, I have successfuly created a bootable CD-R which contains a full FreeBSD 5.2.1 installation (minimal: base, crypto, and manpages). The bootable CD-R successfully fdisk, disklabel, newfs, and installed on a test system. The cdroot scripts required modifications, as there were issues with the FreeBSD 4.X implementation and dependencies:
1. mkisofs
2. mount_mfs
3. MAKEDEV
4. The diskless_mount entry in /etc/rc.conf
daniel
10 Jan 2005, 10:21 p.m. |
would you look at that. complete strangers are coming to my aid on my blog. who'da thunk it?
thanks for your help there guy. i've already managed to get sysinstall to setup a basic system without any user input by using the install.cfg file, so now i'm working on building packages without installing them (not so much fun).
i appreciate your help though. feel free to check back when i've figured it all out ;-)
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