Just following up re: my initial install of FreeBSD on my new AMD64 box

[Conrad J. Sabatier]

Well, I'm happy to report that I now have a *very* nicely working
install of FreeBSD 5.2-CURRENT (amd64) on my new AMD64 box.  It took
some doing at first, but it was certainly well worth the time and
trouble.  :-)

I had some problems burning the 5.2.1-RELEASE ISOs for the amd64.  Not
the fault of the image files, I'm sure, but nonetheless, I couldn't get
a disc to burn successfully.  The burncd operation would run
successfully until the fixate phase, at which point I would get an i/o
error and end up with yet another coaster.

It *may* be the discs I'm using, or I may need to tweak the speed parm;
I have to do more experimentation in this area, for sure, being on a
totally new system and a totally new version of FreeBSD.  So it would
be premature, of course, to call this a bug report per se.

What I ended up doing was using the i386 CD set I had from my FreeBSD
subscription (5.2.1-RELEASE), and doing an ftp install, pointing the
installer to the amd64 subdir on one of the ftp sites.  This was
sufficient to get a base install I could boot into.  After that, I
grabbed the current sources and ports via CVS (is it possible to use
the i386 cvsup package, by the way?  I was a little surprised to see
an amd64 version was not available), rebuilt the world and kernel, and
voila!  A fully functioning amd64 install of 5.2-CURRENT.  I later
customized the kernel config and did another build/install.

Only problem I'm having at this point is that booting with ACPI enabled
hangs just after the two ATAPI devices are probed.  Not sure why, as I
can't get any further logging, even with a verbose boot.  Not a big
problem for me at this point, but one that I would like to see
eventually resolved, of course.

Sorry if this post is a little too "personal", but I'm just really very
happy and excited right now, with the new machine itself and its
awesome speed and power, at having succeeded with the install of
FreeBSD for the AMD 64, and at the prospect of getting involved in the
amd64 side of FreeBSD's continuing development.

I'm open to any suggestions as to any areas I may want to explore in
the hope of being able to contribute something useful as an AMD64
newbie (but not a FreeBSD newbie; been running FreeBSD since June '96).

OK, I'll shut up now.  :-)

-- 
Conrad J. Sabatier <conrads at cox.net> -- "In Unix veritas"