Fail!

Epic fail. :-D

I tried to install FreeBSD 8-CURRENT yesterday from this month’s snapshot. No good. Actually I did get ZFS up and running painlessly, and WOW… very cool stuff! But I had a heck of a time trying to get anything from the CD onto my computer. Finally I got a base system installed, but attempting to install really basic ports crashed and burned on me.

For example, first thing I did was install zsh, the Z shell, so I would be comfortable with my shell. Next I tried to install vim, my text editor of choice. FreeBSD already has vi installed, but it’s a little bit different and I wanted vim. I went into the vim directory under the ports tree and typed make install clean. The first time, it looked through about 200 files that it couldn’t find on the ftp server. The second time it just said there was no install file.

Then I tried to get wireless working, but when I went to get the package iwi-firmware, it said something like,

This program uses iwicontrol, which you don't need. Please type make rmconfig to remove it.

Which I did. It said, “No OPTIONS set.” or something. Then I did make config. And manually unchecked iwicontrol (even though I wanted it!) but it kept spitting out the same error message every time. OK, so that was no go.

So I figured I would just do the whole install at work plugged into the LAN. No! Even though I had my computer downloading files, etc on the proxy at work in Linux, I could not get it to work in FreeBSD. I read manpages for about 4 hours. Everything was set perfectly. Dhclient gave me an IP address and resolved domain names (i.e. yahoo.com – 78.243.134… blahblah). But the damn network would not return a ping.

Oh well! So, I guess I really AM waiting until summer vacation to work on FreeBSD. In the meanwhile, I just downloaded OpenSuse 10, which I’ll have installed in about 30 minutes, and that’ll hold me over for a few weeks.

Arg!

~ by digdoug on June 30, 2008.