Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2000 08:11:58 -0500 From: Bob Martin <bob@buckhorn.net> To: xavian@professional3d.com, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: installing freebsd in an existing linux environment Message-ID: <39D7381E.B0C84F1A@buckhorn.net> References: <39D571DA.FCCDD909@home.com> <39D5D2F8.BFB645E6@buckhorn.net> <39D6D8B3.8DAA4C0D@home.com>
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Xavian,
First of all, welcome to FreeBSD. You'll find a lot people here that
came from Linux, many of them for the same reasons as you did. It's a
different environment, but once you get the feel of it, I think you'll
really like it.
I do have one small request. The etiquette of this list mandates that
e-mails are sent in plain text, and word wrapped at 72 charactors. A lot
of folks that read this list will simply ignore anything sent in html.
xavian anderson macpherson wrote:
>
> THIS WAS ADDRESSED TO BOB. BUT I AM ACTULLY WRITING MANY OF YOU AT
> ONCE. LAST NIGHT I STARTED WHAT WAS MEANT TO BE THE FIRST OF A
> CONTINUING NEWSLETTER, DOCUMENTING THE PROCESS OF MY TRANSITION TO AND
> INSTALLATION OF FREEBSD. SOME OF YOU I HAVE KNOWN FOR A LONG TIME,
> SOME OF YOU I HAVE BEEN ONLY RECENTLY CONTACTED THROUGH THE WEB. I
> HOPE THIS IS AN INTERESTING BUT NOT DAMNING EXPERIENCE!
If you take your time, I think it will be more a matter of interesting.
> hi bob, thanks for your response last night. i got my freebsd today
> by fedex. i am in the process of going through the manual. i am
> trying to determine the best way to configure my system. i have
> attached a copy of my SuSE-YaST generated /etc/fstab file. what i am
> trying to figure out is, does freebsd use a boot partition; or more
> accurately, is there a separate directory called /boot for freebsd?
> is the bootstrap a directory, or is it just a file? the reason why i
> bring this up, is that my `/' partition is not the first in my line of
> 4 disks. in fact it is the third, at /dev/hdc1. now granted i will
> change some of slice dimensions, as i was led to believe that my
> current root is too large (at 1.2 GB's). in df-dimensions, you will
> find the print-out of the current dimensions of my system as revealed
> by the `df' command. disk free for those in this list who are not
> unix savvy.
FBSD will boot from almost anywhere. It's easier to configure it to boot
from the first drive though (That's also true of Linux) FreeBSD has a
full blown bootstrapping environment, based on the language 4th. It does
have a /boot directory, but in 4.x most of the files, including the
kernel, are in /. /boot, /bin and /sbin all need to be mounted on the /
partition.
The size of the root partition dependend's on what you plan to keep on
it. Based on your current setup, (/usr and /var being separately
mounted) I'd allow for 64-128mb for root.
> based on what i've been reading, i'll certainly mount /tmp in mfs (the
> virtual memory file system) on my swap drive. i use all of my scsi
> disk for my swap buffer, 528MB's. and so far, it is hardly ever
> used. but then again i have 256MB's of ram. what i need to know is,
> does the data in /tmp when mounted on mfs get flushed back to (the
> ide) disk, or is it simply lost? i geuss it doesn't matter since it
> is only tempory anyway.
It doesn't flush back to disk.
> i have the rest of my system spread out over 4 ide drives, as you
> will see by using jed or someother editor to view the /etc/fstab
> file. what i want to know is, can i simply keep my old partition
> specifications but reformatting them to ufs? what does freebsd offer
> as an equivalent to LVM (the logical volume manager) used by linux.
Vinum.
> i will most likely change the current directory /pub to /usr/ports.
> /pub is where i keep all of my rpms. but i will do that after i have
> moved all of my data from the other partitions to new locations.
> something that i need to know is, can i get access to my partitions
> during the installation process. what i've done with linux is, open
> one of the tty's to mount `/' on /mnt so that i could have access to
> the programs (specifically, the rpm manager itself) during the
> installation. i don't really need to do that here, but i do need to
> juggle the data on my drives from one `slice' to another, while i am
> reformatting; because i don't have a single `slice' that is large
> enough to hold all of them in one location.
The question here is what data you need to keep from one OS to the
other. While most Linux apps will run on FreeBSD under emulation, it is
usually much better to use the native FBSD programs. (And there are
native versions of almost everything.) The real problem that I see here
is that Linux creates something rather more like a DOS extended
partition than a Unix partition. The odds are very good that you'll
loose access to all of the Linux slices if you convert any of them to
Unix.
Your best bet would be to tar everything to tape if you can. Failing
that, It looks like you can juggle things around and free up one whole
drive. Then load FBSD on that drive, and dual boot for a while. That
will give you a chance to really compare. You can mount ext2fs under
FBSD.
> actually i have two `/' filesystems on my computer. one is the
> linux-mandrake system which is not functional, the other is the suse
> distribution which i reinstalled because of mandrake's failure to
> perform. everytime i try to boot i keep getting errors. although it
> has gotten better. right now there is a problem with SysVinit not
> being able to read libc.so.6. it doesn't make any sense to me because
> it is there. i checked with `ls' (list). the only thing is that it
> is a symbolic link to another file. i think it is libc++-2.1.3, or
> something like that. i was trying to compile the mandrake
> hackkernel-2.4.0-0.24mdk. the compilation went just fine. but for a
> longtime, i couldn't get the modules to load properly. finally i have
> gotten it to make module_install. but there is one of my files
> missing that controls the system updatedb command. what's happening
> is that i load packages, but then the system doesn't know about it;
> and i have not figured out which package i have to reload to get it to
> work.
>
> frankly, i'm just tired of the incompatabilities between the linux
> distributions; as it was that that cause this problem in the first
> place. but then linux is still so much of a beta system, that i don't
> trust it anymore to devote anymore of my time to it. i mean i had the
> good fortune of talking to one of the packagers for mandrake who
> openly admitted that the linux set i purchased (mandrake 7.0) had only
> been beta tested for two weeks before it was released. that's a bunch
> of crap! i'm not about to subject myself to that kind of treatment
> again. when i buy a system (or anything else for that matters) i want
> to know that it will work properly out of the box, and not be
> something of a work in progress. that's kind of like going to a
> bakery to buy a cake that's not fully baked! and you know what
> happened to Marie Antoinette who had the audacity to tell her subjects
> to eat cake. well so much for history! ; ) and they said the
> future was looking brighter? well i hope so with freebsd.
None of the BSD's are distros. They are all complete OS's. IMHO, that's
the number one reason folks switch to BSD. The second reason is that of
stability. In the world of Linux, if there is a bug in kernel 2.x.1, the
solution is kernel 2.x.2. It will probably fix the first bug, but then
it will bring some of it's own. FreeBSD has a totally different
development model. There's a section in the book called keeping current
with FreeBSD. (You can also find it in the online handbook) It does a
great job of explaining things.
> i was prepared to stop. but realized that i haven't gotten the one
> answer which is most critical. how does freebsd deal with file
> conflicts? with linux, using the rpm system, you get notices of file
> conflicts even before you actually install any packages. i don't see
> where any such mechanism is available for that purpose in freebsd. if
> there really is none, then i want to know is how do i compile the
> source binaries for rpm so that i can use it under freebsd? because
> my main desire is for the bsd kernel. i want the stability and
> security of the bsd kernel, matched with the wide data base of linux
> packages, or as freebsd would refer to them, ports. it seems that
> freebsd would simply overwrite existing files with new ones is the old
> one has the same name. maybe the best that i could hope for is that
> the old would have it's name changed or altered to something like
> *.orig, *.old, etc. but then this may not be a problem at all. i
> just want to know before i embark on this journey into madness.
FreeBSD has a totally different methodology for maintaining software. We
have ports and packages. A port contains all of the information
necessary to install a source tarball on FreeBSD. It will also satisfy
and dependencies. I'll use apache as an example. You can go to apache's
web site, download the code, configure it, compile it and then install
it. If you use the port, the make command will download the source,
configure it, and compile it for you. Not to mention downloading,
configuring and compiling any other software that may be needed as well.
A package is like an RPM. It's a pre compiled binary, that installs into
your system. Packages will also satisfy software dependencies if they
can. Now, back to your question. If you install foo.1.1, and then later
install foo.1.2, there is an excellent chance that the old foo binary
would be overwritten with the new. But that would be the point of
upgrading, wouldn't it? While this is no guarantee that it won't happen,
I have never lost a config file during an upgrade using the ports.
>
> so, he who has an answer, let him speak!
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
>
If I'm following you correctly, the plan is to "overlay" Linux on
FreeBSD. It'll work, but with over 3000 programs in the ports, why would
you want to? I know it means a lot of work, but you already have the
config files, and the roms, so the download times are nearly 0, and in
the end, you won't have a patched version of Linux.
Bob Martin.
--
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not
certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
-- Albert Einstein
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