<html><head></head><body>Sorry for not responding sooner, my freebsd installation is progressing nicely and my command line skills are getting a good workout. I will upload my dmesgs this week. By my laptop model is an Asus ux32vd. Thanks again to George for your patience and guidance. The installment was immensely helpful. <br>
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Assaf<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On January 27, 2014 11:15:10 PM EST, George Rosamond <george@ceetonetechnology.com> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<pre class="k9mail">No one from the installfests posted anything yet, so I thought I'd take<br />it upon myself to post...<br /><br />First of all, we have *never* been big with installfests. There never<br />really seemed to be a need, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.<br />If those who don't need installfests don't organize them, those who need<br />them can't come :)<br /><br />We should change that. People might be running BSD on servers, but<br />putting it on a laptop, configuring wireless cards and X seem to be<br />completely different hurdles. And with the advent of UEFI and netbooks<br />that are so Windows-centric, there is certainly a case to start having<br />installfests.<br /><br />We had one session last week. One laptop was a Thinkpad X120e, and I<br />don't remember offhand the model of the other, but I believe it was an Asus.<br /><br />From experience, even with a hacked BIOS, FreeBSD 8.x and 9.x installs<br />but doesn't boot the x120e. Instead of
waging that battle and jumping<br />into what is likely a gpt-related issue again, we went with an OpenBSD<br />snapshot that was recent, which not only builds quickly and cleanly, but<br />also hibernates and resumes nicely.<br /><br />The Asus also installed OpenBSD fine. FreeBSD 9.1/amd64 installed but<br />also didn't boot. The participant with that laptop should post the<br />model/make so we can look at more.<br /><br />Tonight we dealt with an Asus S400C. This laptop is six months or so<br />old, and a full UEFI nightmare. It takes a bunch of reboots and power<br />downs to deal with UEFI and BIOS settings. That took a good hour of<br />tinkering to get things to recognize the USB with the install media, and<br />a few more reboots to get it to boot back from the disks. If this is<br />the future of laptops, then the future is grim.<br /><br />(yes, I'm aware of the FreeBSD Foundation's grant for dealing with UEFI,<br />but don't forget it's an ugly road we're all being
forced down. . .)<br /><br />After finally getting a recent OpenBSD snapshot to boot on the Asus<br />S400C, *no* physical network devices were listed in ifconfig. The wired<br />is an Attansic AR8161, and the wireless is Atheros AR9485, and were<br />recognized out of the message log.<br /><br />It is useful to have multiple install medias on hand, plus a wired<br />switch. This should include the stable and most current version of the<br />particular BSD in question. And I need to figure out how to install<br />OpenBSD firmware blobs manually :)<br /><br />We've generally thought of doing installfests on more esoteric hardware,<br />from the newer ARM SoC systems and beyond. But clearly, basic x86<br />hardware has a relevance for installfests when it comes to a lot of<br />consumer-geared laptops today.<br /><br />On that note, I'm hoping the participants upload their dmesgs to dmesgd,<br />and we can deal with any further configuration issues they may have.<br /><br />And we
should look at planning more installfests. Maybe even doing a<br />show of hands at each meeting to decide whether to have one that month,<br />and to sort out what the hardware targets are.<br /><br />g<br /><hr /><br />talk mailing list<br />talk@lists.nycbug.org<br /><a href="http://www.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk">http://www.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk</a><br /></pre></blockquote></div><br>
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