FreeBSD PPC Tier 1

[Robin Stevens]

Hey guys.

Some of you have bee helping me get FreeBSD up and running on my PPC.  
(Thanks for all the help)

I have just a more general question, which is, when do you think (if  
ever) FreeBSD will be supported on PPC via Tier 1.

More specifically I guess, do you think it will ever be to the point  
where the installer will work smoothly without having to hack around  
with the open firmware etc.?

It would be so nice to re-commission this otherwise useless computer  
to a speedy FreeBSD server. Standalone OS wise too. I hate having a  
seperate partition for OS X.

Part of my reason for wanting to put just the underbelly of UNIX on  
the mac was so I could avoid the bloat of OS X (I love os x to death,  
its just too much for this poor mac)

I'm curious because I've seen other systems do it (Debian for one)  
and it just seems like if their code is open source, sharing it  
shouldn't be that hard.

Oh well, I guess I can keep dreaming :)

-- Robin

On Nov 7, 2007, at 1:55 PM, Peter Grehan wrote:

> Hi Robin,
>
>> When I got home, I reformatted my drives, and partitioned into 3  
>> sections:
>> swap UFS
>> root HSF+
>> Mac OS X Extended+Journalized.
>
>  Other than the partition that is running OSX, the types of the  
> other partitions don't matter. FreeBSD treats them as raw  
> partitions without respect to what type they have been set to in  
> the partition table.
>
>> well, needless to say, that didn't seem to work. After it was all
>> installed, I couldn't mount those partitions from OS X. The weird
>> thing was that I couldn't mount root. Swap seemed to be ok. So, I  
>> went
>> into Disk Utility, and wiped root. Made sure it was still HSF+, and
>> rebooted. I tried installing FreeBSD again, and it went smoothly.  
>> When
>> I came back into OS X, there was nothing in root. It was completely
>> empty. Why!!?!?
>
>  OSX can't understand FreeBSD's UFS format, so it won't mount the  
> volume.
>
>  The next thing to do is to
>
>   - boot OSX
>   - mount the FreeBSD install CD
>   - copy /boot/loader from the CDROM to /loader on OSX
>   - reboot into OpenFirmware
>   - remembering the partition number that FreeBSD root lives on  
> (e.g. 8 for the purposes of this example)
>
>      0 > boot hd:loader hd:8
>
>  .. and then you should be away.
>
> later,
>
> Peter.