Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2000 10:01:03 -0700 From: Kent Stewart <kstewart@3-cities.com> To: Steve Mitchell <WSGM@srskansas.org> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD Message-ID: <3947BA4F.4618A805@3-cities.com> References: <s94756ea.098@srskansas.org>
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Steve Mitchell wrote: > > I just purchased a copy of your FreeBSD from CompUSA and am having a hell of a time installing it. I have never used Unix before. I am a NT tech for the state of Kansas. > > PII 350 Intel MMX > E-IDE CD-ROM 40X/AKU > > I get all the way through the installation and then get a gray screen. Can you tell me what I'm doing wrong? I have followed the text The Complete FreeBSD step by step; tried 3 times, not luck. I looked at several other books at Barnes and Noble but none of them explained Installation. I'm obviously not giving you enough information so What should I be telling you so you can help me? Well, you need to describe your system and which install method you used. Did you boot from the floppies or the CDROM. There are known problems with sysinstall on 3.4 and new boot floppies from ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/3.4-RELEASE/floppies/ will help. FreeBSD needs the root partition ("/") to be under cylinder 1024. With LBA turned on , that is ~8.4GB. If you slice a 20GB drive into one slice and then only use one partition, you violate that rule. I have a 100MB /, a 300MB swap, 500MB /var, 1.5GB /tmp, and ~12GB /usr. FreeBSD 4.0 has a different set of quirks but the new ata driver handles large drives better than 3.x did. Some 4.0 systems have problems with UDMA66 and you have to watch the boot to see what is going on. It doesn't sound like you are getting that far. My first install used the "novice" and typical. I can't tell what all I did because it worked. I would only remember what went on if I had problems. Don't expect your first custom install of a Unix system to work any better than a custom install of NT would for your first try. The typicals almost always work and then you can fine tune it. The big difference with FreeBSD is you can fine tune it without rebooting. You won't have to do that until you do a make world or customize your own kernel. Some terminology - Freebsd doesn't require anything but mode 3 on your video card. The gui is x-windows and that is an application that was included on the CDROM. If your video card isn't on the hardware list, that isn't a FreeBSD problem, it is an www.xfree86.org problem. You just may be able to get help on -questions. There are some sites that have first hand experiences at http://www.freebsd.org/docs.html. You should also spend sometime in the "for newbies" and "tutorials" sections on http://www.freebsd.org. Good luck, Kent > > Thank you for your help. I'm very excited to learn Unix... > > Steve Mitchell, ITC II > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message -- Kent Stewart Richland, WA mailto:kstewart@3-cities.com http://www.3-cities.com/~kstewart/index.html FreeBSD News http://daily.daemonnews.org/ SETI(Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) @ HOME http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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