Greetings to the list. Recent events have gotten me thinking about Linux alternatives again. Sigh... I remembered the Debian kFreeBSD effort and checked it out. I was pleasantly surprised to dig around and find a link to the amd64 installer image from late last year or so. Skimming the list archives for the past year or so it appears there is interest in keeping this port alive, which I think is essential for several reasons. Anyway, I first tried the installer with a VirtualBox image and found the graphic installer didn't work but the text installer worked just fine. I installed the Desktop and Xfce tasks and while lightdm starts and I can log in, once logged in the mouse doesn't work and I can't select a button on the XFCE dialog that is presented. Giving up on that I decided to try it on my Thinkpad T410 laptop. With an extra drive laying around I tried putting the image on a USB stick. That didn't work so I burned the ISO to a CD-RW. I was able to successfully boot and start the GUI installer but it stopped at the point of trying to access the CD for packages. I rebooted and used the text installer and it choked at the point of writing the partitions and formatting the drive which already had partitions and data from a previous experiment. I used a GParted Live CD to delete the partitions and then the text installer ran to normal completion. Once booted into the system, it appears to be functioning normally. At the moment I only have the wired Ethernet port in use which is fine for testing. I used apt-get to install mc (Midnight Commander) which went without error and then I tried to install aptitude and apt-get errors out saying that libcwidget3v5 is not going to be installed. I then installed that library through apt-get without apparent error and apt-get still complains that it is not going to be installed when trying to install aptitude. Running apt-cache policy libcwidget3v5 shows it is installed. Weird. Lastly, I tried startx and am met with a blank screen and an X log file in my home directory that rapidly gets megabytes in size! Ahh, but what fun would it be without a few challenges along the way? - Nate -- "The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true." Web: http://www.n0nb.us GPG key: D55A8819 GitHub: N0NB
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