Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2010 19:25:27 -0500 From: "Michael D. Norwick" <mnorwick@centurytel.net> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE Installation success Message-ID: <4CC61FF7.9050605@centurytel.net>
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Good Day; It is with some pleasure that I have finally succeeded in building an operative workstation with a custom kernel and world, Xorg 1.7.5, KDE4-4.5.2 from ports, most common network applications as well as Firefox3, and Thunderbird 3.1.5. The machine is an older Dell GX270 P4 2.4 GHz PC with 3G of ram and an ATI Radeon video adapter. This install has not been without it's trials. 4 weeks ago I backed up all my data and reformatted from Debian 'lenny' to GPT/ZFS/8.1-RELEASE. The next two weeks did not go so well. While I tried hard to get ZFS formatted drives to work reliably, intermittent unexplained core dumps with reboots gave me cause for concern. I finally reinstalled msdos boot records and formatted the drives UFS. That install has lasted 2 more weeks. I liked ZFS v14 and would like to try it again when I get more current hardware with more ram and SATA drives. My next challenge was building KDE4, Firefox, and Thunderbird from ports. KDE4 and friends (QT4) took days on this machine to build, install and setup. I initially installed the ports tree using portsnap but was having so much trouble building the mozilla stuff from ports I moved to cvsup and portupgrade. This is also what I used to install the kernel and base source tree. Several iterations of make - clean and deinstall/reinstall along with cvsup'ing ports a couple of times finally got me to a working browser and mail client. I have had a time getting Flash working with Firefox. I have not yet got the plugin working in Firefox but Opera, using linux-f10 allows my kids view their on-line home school lessons. Audio was somewhat of a challenge to get sound from an AC97 on-board audio chipset. snd_hda was the module that eventually provided the needed audio driver for this chipset. I think I forgot what configuring this stuff was like during my 'hamm', 'bo', and 'slink', debian days. My thanks to the entire FreeBSD/KDE development team on allowing me to experience the fruit of their efforts. I still like turning the knobs myself. I'll keep reading the manuals. :) Michael
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