Just for fun, putting FreeBSD onto an old 32-bit machine.

Just for fun, putting FreeBSD onto an old 32-bit machine, to get my mind away from W**doze. 

 

All this info, I pinched off t'internet thingy.

I don't want to use a DVD, so I grabbed an old USB stick to use.

Go to the FreeBSD web page here:- https://www.freebsd.org/

Then navigate to the downloads page, and find an image suitable for your machine's architecture.

As its a USB stick and not a DVD, we need to find an appropriate .img file and not a .iso.

I found FreeBSD-10.2-RELEASE-i386-memstick.img .

All the instructions to install it are here:-

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/bsdinstall.htm

Here is a precis:-

They suggest:-

dd if=FreeBSD-10.2-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img of=/dev/da0 bs=1M conv=sync

As I was using Linux for this, my output file was /dev/sde, and I carelessly used a blocksize of 512, and the first time I forgot the sync, and it didn't copy correctly.

Doing sync after this command is a good idea.

Booting the target machine from this USB stick worked ok, and I selected install.

All the questions and answers are the usual for any install, I had an unused disk to install to, so plodded on and selected commit. There are then more of the usual questions, and at last we get to reboot into our newly-installed disk.

Unfortunately this only gets to a command line interface. Not everyone's cup of tea.

So we plod on:-

Log in as root, and you get a # prompt:-

Then:-

pkg install xf86-video-fbdev mate-desktop mate xorg

Add the following lines to /etc/rc.conf

moused_enable="YES"
dbus_enable="YES"
hald_enable="YES"
Test it with:-
xinit mate-session

Now, in a command box,
Install Slim

pkg install slim

Add the following line to /etc/rc.conf

slim_enable="YES"

Add the following line to .xinitrc file in the user’s home directory

exec mate-session

Probably, the file .xinitrc doesn't exist yet, so just make it.
N.B. Do this for root as well as your user. I forgot, and had to do some sneaky recovery.
Root's home dir is /root, and not in /home/root!
It's also worth installing and configuring sudo, so while still root:-
pkg install sudo
and add this line with visudo (where username is your login name).

 username ALL=(ALL) ALL

And while we're still root, remove some rubbish you get when logging in:-

:>/etc/motd

touch /etc/COPYRIGHT

And most annoyingly, login as your user and edit .profile
Find a line similar to
-x /usr/games/fortune ] && /usr/games/fortune freebsd-tips 

and put a # and the beginning to comment it out.
You'd probably best then reboot and test all the logins.
Obviously, this is only your starter for 10, and there's lots more installing and configuring you might want to do, once you've found out what it can do.

It never ends.

Well, I haven't done anything here for a while, so it's about time. 

I have been carefully ignoring Windows 10, as I don't use it myself, but I have to maintain a few Windows machines for the other half. These were supposed to be Windows 7, with one Windows 8.1 for testing. This all went wrong, some updated themselves to windows 10, and someone got few up with the nagging, and let the main production machine update. This resulted in days and days of on-and-off downtime, and much banging my head against a brick wall. 

The final straw was my dual-boot system, where the Windows 10 update removed my Linux partition completely. Is that badly behaved, or what? Anyway, things are settling down slowly, although I can't believe how sluggish this supposedly snappy new system is, and some small peripherals still don't work.

Just as a flavour of the sort of issues, things have been reasonably quiet for almost a month, when the scanner part of the multi-function printer stopped working. Some update has borked the driver. Further investigation, and the manufacturer is no longer listing a Windows 10 driver for this model.

What! 

I cast my mind back to similar nonsense from years ago, and I go to the American website, and find a driver for a similar model. It looks the same, but the American one has a different model number to the European one. This driver has no resemblance to the old one, either in name or look, but it works. I wonder for how long? Who thought automatic updates without details of what was being updated was a good idea?

And just in case you thought it was only Windows 10, we have a couple of old laptops that are stuck on XP. No more updates, so stable enough for searching for W10 problems on the internet.  Unfortunately, other stuff is still changing, and both went wrong at the same time.  One continually reboots as soon as it starts, and the other blue screens with that IRQ_NOT_EQUAL nonsense. Fortunately it accuses timfsony.sys of causing this.  This is the driver for the sony/TI memory stick adapter. 

You can cure this by booting into safe mode and removing flash. Who'd have thought of that?  This isn't convenient, so we go into system/devices and disable the sony/TI memory stick (which I don't use anyway).  I could then re-install flash and carry on. 

Rant over.  The sun's out, and it's time to walk the dog.