FreeBSD 7 Install on an older Mac Mini

[Colin Dick]

Hey Garance,
  I did reference your message for that iso_install.txt doc and did exactly as you describe.  I have it booting (albeit
with the need for OFW and the FreeBSD 7.0 CD in the drive).  If there is ever a way to be able to run this thing
remotely, I will be quite interested.  However, since it is my home server, I guess if it ever crashes or if I have to
reboot, I can have a keyboard on standby to get to OFW and issue the boot "cd:,\boot\loader hd:3" command.
  I have just run portsnap fetch/extract and I am ready to start building ports.  Before I begin and break things, is
there anything special I have to do before building or can I now just start to run this thing like I would any i386 device?
  Thanks for all your help thus far and for anything else I bother you with as I go down this road.  TTYL.

--
Colin

On Tue, 27 Jan 2009 19:48:25 -0500, Garance A Drosihn wrote
> At 3:50 PM -0800 1/27/09, Colin Dick wrote:
> >
> >   So, as long as it boots, I will be in business.  Ugh, it didn't
> >boot.  The build completed but I think I am going to have to do
> >some OFW magic to get it to boot.  I have seen a document on this
> >list or referenced in this list that may point me in the right
> >direction.  If anyone has specifics to save me some research,
> >please feel free to chime in!
> 
> check the end of:
> 
> http://people.freebsd.org/~grehan/iso_install.txt
> 
> (which was probably also on the 7.1 install CD).  The heading on
> that web page says "FreeBSD/PPC 6.0-RELEASE install.iso", but I
> expect the section about booting issues is still correct.  Read
> the part down at:  "5. First boot"
> 
> In my case, I copy the file "/boot/loader" to the MacOS partition
> that was the first partition created on my internal hard disk.  I
> name the copy "fbsd_loader" just so I remember what it is if I
> come across it sometime when running MacOS, and wonder what it's
> doing there.  And then whenever I want to boot up freebsd I use
> the openfirmware command:
> 
>     boot hd:3,fbsd_loader hd:5
> 
> It looks like you did not create a MacOS partition, so you won't
> be able to use that.  But the iso_install write-up tells you how
> you can boot up using the initial freebsd install CD.
> 
> Note that I'm pretty sure that OpenFirmware still has no idea about
> how to find any file on a FreeBSD-formatted partition, so I think
> you will be stuck with using the CD-booting method.  The write-up
> provides a sample command of:
> 
>     boot cd:,\boot\loader hd:11
> 
> but in your case "/" is on "ad0s3", so you'd want that "hd:11" to
> be "hd:3".
> 
> -- 
> Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
> Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
> Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu