A (partial) installation report
Dear people,
As I mentioned in a previous message, I installed kFreeBSD on a real
computer and I am seeing some issues, for which I would appreciate any
comments if they should "just work" or not.
First of all, the computer here is a Duron 1.3GHz, with a SiS chipset
and it shares memory between the system and the graphics chip. It
currently has 512MB.
The xserver-xorg-video-sis seems to be working OK, but I saw some screen
corruption on when I tried to scroll the front page of slashdot.org on
iceweasel. I was using e17 when this occoured. It seems that swiching to
fluxbox is a workaround. I will see the problem is reproducible or not.
One good thing is that purely computational programs (i.e., those which
don't need specific hardware) work well and this means TeX, which is
nice (since I need it).
The sound is not working, but I don't know if this is a configuration
problem or lack of support. The sound card here is a Trident4D card. It
works fine under Linux, but I don't know how the sound on FreeBSD is
supposed to work.
If I understand it correctly, FreeBSD uses OSS and programs with support
for that should work. Is that right? I don't know if I would need to
load any possible module or not.
Regarding the kernel, I have grub2 installed here and while I can boot
the version 7.2 of the kernel, the very same configuration doesn't work
with kfreebsd-8. I suspect that there may be an error passing the
name/device of the root filesystem to the kernel, but I don't know. The
parts that seem to be relevant are here:
,----
| ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/10_kfreebsd ###
| menuentry "Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, with kFreeBSD 8.0-1-686" {
| insmod ufs2
| set root=(hd0,1)
| search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 4b68848d0cf9f3f3
| echo Loading kernel of FreeBSD 8.0-1-686 ...
| kfreebsd /boot/kfreebsd-8.0-1-686.gz
| set kFreeBSD.vfs.root.mountfrom=ufs:/dev/ad2s1
| set kFreeBSD.vfs.root.mountfrom.options=rw
| }
| menuentry "Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, with kFreeBSD 7.2-1-686" {
| insmod ufs2
| set root=(hd0,1)
| search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 4b68848d0cf9f3f3
| echo Loading kernel of FreeBSD 7.2-1-686 ...
| kfreebsd /boot/kfreebsd-7.2-1-686.gz
| kfreebsd_module_elf /lib/modules/7.2-1-686/acpi.ko
| set kFreeBSD.vfs.root.mountfrom=ufs:/dev/ad2s1
| set kFreeBSD.vfs.root.mountfrom.options=rw
| }
| ### END /etc/grub.d/10_kfreebsd ###
`----
kfreebsd-8 doesn't boot, while kfreebsd-7 does. Any hint here?
I don't really need this computer working. It is just a guinea pig that
I was interested to have to compile some packages of mine. So, I can
play with it a little bit, if desired, with the intention of helping the
project.
I can give many other details as soon as I discover them (the computer
is not mine, it is my girlfriend's).
Regards,
--
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{ime.usp.br,gmail.com} : GPG key 1024D/7C2CAEB8
http://rb.doesntexist.org : Packages for LaTeX : algorithms.berlios.de
DebianQA: http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=rbrito%40ime.usp.br
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