FreeBSD Special Cases

Something not-so-common…

Note: Need to test this…

• Get the desired packages on a FreeBSD machine with internet connection

    # mkdir /root/offline
    # pkg fetch -d -o /root/offline xorg mate slim firefox

  • -d for dependencies
  • -o specifies destination path for the fetched packages
• Copy those files to a portable USB drive
• On the target machine, copy everything to /var/cache/pkg
• Then, do a

    # pkg -U install xorg mate slim firefox git geany networkmgr

  • -U is the short form for –no-repo-update

I want to try to install to a USB thumb-drive… from my FreeBSD virtual machine (VirtualBox). I have a 16GB USB3 Kingston Data Traveller drive, and already installed FreeBSD 12 on a virtual machine.

To prepare the drive layout, checkout here. I'm going to prepare for UEFI boot on a GPT formatted disk.

- plug in usb drive

• find device name (i.e. /dev/???)
• usually da0 is the first usb drive?

- refer to this…

to be continued…

Find boot1.efi as place it in EFI System Partition. It will look for first partition with type freebsd-ufs (which can even be on another disk) and load loader.efi.

Note: Generally, it seems that this is no longer an issue - some just did a normal install and have no problems at all. But, I want to put this here anyways.

Creating partitions (from: https://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/ssd.html)

# gpart create -s gpt ada0
# gpart add -t freebsd-boot -s 1m -a 4k -l ssdboot ada0
# gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr -p /boot/gptboot -i1 ada0

# gpart add -t freebsd-ufs -l ssdroot -b 1m -s 4g ada0
# gpart add -t freebsd-ufs -l ssdvarfs -a 1m -s 2g ada0
# gpart add -t freebsd-ufs -l ssdusrfs -a 1m ada0

# newfs -U -t /dev/gpt/ssdrootfs
# newfs -U -t /dev/gpt/ssdvarfs
# newfs -U -t /dev/gpt/ssdusrfs

create fstab (save as /tmp/bsdinstall_etc/ fstab)

# Device	Mountpoint	FStype	Options	Dump	Pass#
/dev/gpt/ssdroot	/	ufs	rw	1	1
/dev/gpt/ssdvarfs	/var	ufs	rw	2	2
/dev/gpt/ssdusrfs	/usr	ufs	rw	2	2
tmpfs	/tmp	tmpfs	rw,mode=01777	0	0

• got FreeBSD13 arm64 aarch64 image
• write to microsd card
• boot issue
  • ok if boot from usb (note: starting pi4, usb boot is possible!)
  • need to update u-boot binary (look for that in forum)
• console display is not ok when using on tv (high res?)
  • edit config.txt and comment out hdmi_safe=1

going for dwm

• pkg install libX11 libXft libXinerama
• pkg install git

work in progress…