Installing FreeBSD
The hard but fruitful path to installing freeBSD
GParted
The first issue I ran across is in running gparted on i3. If I ran via commandline, I would get
Error executing command as another user: No authentication agent found.
If I did sudo gparted, I’d get
No protocol specified
(gpartedbin:9428): Gtk-WARNING **: 11:50:24.881: cannot open display: :0
So I ran around trying different authentication agents.
None seemed to be able to authenticate me. While trying to figure out how this is happening inside journalctl -u polkit I found out a workaround used in wayland to make sudo work:
$ xhost si:localuser:root
This worked like a charm. I could run sudo gparted after this and later xhost -si:localuser:root would remove the hack.
USB Image
The handbook mentioned “Additional installation files are included for computers that boot with UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface). The names of these files include the string uefi.”
But when I went through the list of images from the homepage none of the files had the string uefi in them. Turns out it was only in version 10 that these files were named differently and now the uefi support comes baked in.
SHA512
How do I check the integrity of the download over my flaky network? Well there’s a checksum file they have given. But I wanted to do it the right way. md5sum didn’t even accept the checksum file. But sha512sum did.
$ sha512sum -c CHECKSUM.SHA512-FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64 --ignore-missing
FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img.xz: OK
tar
Can I untar this without bombs going off?
$ tar xzvf FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img.xz
gzip: stdin: not in gzip format
tar: Child returned status 1
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
$ tar xvf FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img.xz
tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
$ tar xbvf FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img.xz
tar: Old option 'f' requires an argument.
Try 'tar --help' or 'tar --usage' for more information.
$ tar x --xz FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img.xz
tar: Refusing to read archive contents from terminal (missing -f option?)
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
$ tar xf --xz FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img.xz
tar: --xz: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
$ tar --xz xf FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img.xz
tar: You must specify one of the '-Acdtrux', '--delete' or '--test-label' options
Try 'tar --help' or 'tar --usage' for more information.
$ tar --xz xzvf FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img.xz
tar: You must specify one of the '-Acdtrux', '--delete' or '--test-label' options
Try 'tar --help' or 'tar --usage' for more information.
$ tar --xz xtzvf FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img.xz
$ tar xf FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img.xz
tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
$ tar xJf FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img.xz
tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
No. Nothing seems to be helping.
Is it an issue with xz?
Oh, notice the filename. There is no tar.xz in it. Maybe it’s only xz that is required?
$ unxz FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img.xz
$ sha512sum -c CHECKSUM.SHA512-FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64 --ignore-missing
FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img: OK
$ ls
CHECKSUM.SHA512-FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64
FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img
Aha, xz even deleted the original file.
Data Destroy
dd if=FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img of=/dev/sdb bs=1M conv=sync as per the manual
In hindsight, should have added status=progress
Finally, the dd command finished.
Nautilus seemed to think the USB drive was empty. Anyhow, should restart and see.
Ahem!!
This is after the reboot.
The bios/uefi stuff seems to have smoothly crossed. My laptop could easily boot from the USB drive I just made.
But once I choose the multi-user mode, I get a garbled screen with what were supposed to be messages being dots in the garble.
gop mode
After some ducking, figured out that the issue is with the mode that is used for the display driver. Used mode 2 and it did not work. Then, trying gop list and gop mode 3 accordingly worked. (To be followed by boot for booting the OS.
Network!
Most of the installation was easy and straightforward. Except network. I have a convoluted setup wherein I access internet on my android phone using wifi, login to the captive portal on the android and then give internet on the laptop by using USB tethering. I had no idea how to configure this manually. I think I chose one re0 network in the list thinking it would be the right interface. Anyhow, post installation there was no internet.
After some more searching around the web, figured out that rdnis protocol is already loaded and all I needed to do was dhclient ue0 for the USB network interface card and it started working. Also had to correct the /etc/resolv.conf entries that I randomly gave during the installation for ping learnlearn.in to work.
Installing xorg
Once connected to the internet, everything was smooth.
$ pkg install xorg
$ pkg install git
$ pkg install firefox
Eerie resemblance with pacman on archlinux. Mostly not a coincidence.
The next steps are configuring xorg, wm/de/dm, and figuring out how to do the gop set 3 automatically.