The Never Ending Upgrade Cycle (Part II)
Posted: 09/03/2009 Ron Scheckelhoff
The Perpetual Upgrade Machine
It seems that I have been playing around with FreeBSD 8.0 snapshots for quite a while. Recently, a so-called "Beta-3" version was made available, and I decided to load it onto one of my machines.
The main site's "BETA announcement" page contains a suggestion that the prospective tester make use of the mirror list for BETA-3 downloads,
but I chose to use the main site, as the first few mirrors that I
checked did not have the latest version 8.0-BETA3-i386 ISO images. The direct link to the main site's 8.0-BETA3-i386 ISO image follows:
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ISO-IMAGES-i386/8.0/8.0-BETA3-i386-disc1.iso
Ed. Note that as of 9/6/2009 BETA4 is available:
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ISO-IMAGES-i386/8.0/8.0-BETA4-i386-disc1.iso
After the ISO file was downloaded, I burned it to a blank CD:
burncd -f /dev/acd0 data ./8.0-BETA3-i386-disc1.iso fixate
Subsequently, I installed the OS and a few packages ...
After generating a template xorg.conf.new file via -- "Xorg -configure", I renamed it to xorg.conf and placed it into the /etc/X11 directory. I added a section at the top of the xorg.conf file as follows:
Section "ServerFlags"
Option "AutoAddDevices", "False"
Option "AllowEmptyInput", "False"
Option "DontZap", "False"
EndSection
Into my /etc/rc.conf file I added the following lines ...
hald_enable="yes"
dbus_enable="yes"
The FreeBSD "Beta" images typically do not have Xorg or Gnome selections in the standard installer (for the edification of
those who have not
installed any of the beta versions of this OS).
The whole process took about an hour or so ... it's not a terribly time consuming project to install, albeit there are a few more parts and pieces involved in the Beta version. The "ports tree" directory on the install disk does not yet include a usr/ports/misc/compat7x compatibility port. I managed to find one at www.freshports.org/misc/compat7x/ which points to a cvsweb link at http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/misc/compat7x/compat7x.tar.gz?tarball=1 and I installed it in order to run some of my 7.x package software. I think that the 7x compat just missed the ISO deadline, since it obviously does exist on the cvsweb. I wanted the 7x compat package because I generally build a master cd-installer disk to install favorite packages, with all of the little details fleshed out ... (filling in the the little "added" things that must be done to completely install many packages. I usually include subsets of programs as "suites". An example is Postgresql, which I normally install along side the GUI administration tool (pgamdin). I have "regular" database schemas that I create and so forth ...
The 7.x packages for Postgres installed and executed fine on FreeBSD 8.0-BETA3, after the 7x compatibility package was installed. The 8.0-BETA3 ISO contains Python 2.62, which was fine with my regular scripts (that never fails anyway)
For versions 7.x of FreeBSD, I had previously prepared QT 4.5.1 packages (the first LGPL licensable version) and an associated all-in-one installer disk. This installed on the 8.0-BETA3 version of the operating system with no problems.
I was not so lucky with my installer disk for VirtualBox ... due to the fact that VirtualBox requires a loadable kernel module.
To be continued ...
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More info about Haiku operating system from the source at: http://www.haiku-os.org
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More info on Sun's VirtualBox environment at: http://www.virtualbox.org
1 More info on Sun's Solaris 10 operating system at: http://www.sun.com
More info about Flash, as described in this editorial, at: http://www.adobe.com
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