[nycbug-talk] Headless FreeBSD Install

[Miles Nordin]

>>>>> "ms" == Mark Sams <msams992000 at yahoo.com.au> writes:

    ms> I tried to force the -h step by unpacking disc1 and adding
    ms> /boot/loader -h to /boot/boot.config

yes, do it that way!

    ms> My laptop is Windows, and the unpacked iso is almost
    ms> 1GB. When I recreate the changed iso with mkisofs or ISO
    ms> recorder it leaves it at 1GB, which doesn't fit on a CD so I
    ms> can't even test it.

This is probably because of hard links, but in general it's not safe
to unpack the ISO into a windows filesystem because of
case-sensitivity and user/group/permission bits and maybe other stuff.
My two suggestions are more why-didnt-i-think-of-that than expert
knowledge, but:

 * go across town to the monitor, perfect your serial boot CD-ROM, on
   some other machine where you have all tools available, then go back
   and work on the heavy machine later with the known-good CD.

 * If you don't have another FreeBSD box for CD-building, download a
   FreeBSD or Linux appliance for the VMWare Player.  This should have
   mkisofs and tar already in it.  You can stick the CD in the Windows
   box's drive, but mount the CD from inside the virtual machine, not
   Windows.  Then copy it onto the virtual disk using

   Linux:
   mount -t iso9660 -o ro /dev/hdc /cdrom
   ( cd /cdrom && tar cf - . ) | ( cd /extract-to && tar xpf - )

   BSD:
   mount -t cd9660 -o ro /dev/acd0a /cdrom
   cd /cdrom && pax -rwpe . /extract-to

   this will preserve hard links, and files with ``holes'' in them.
   Run mkisofs inside the VM, too.  then burn the .iso with whatever
   you want.

 * You will need to pass special options to mkisofs to make the CD-ROM
   bootable.  The .iso itself is of course what's bootable---if you
   use mkisofs, you don't need to click anything boot-related in Nero.

   You can maybe see how FreeBSD is making its .iso's by browsing
   through the Makefiles that run the build procedure in cvsweb.

   Have a look in src/release/i386/mkisoimages.sh
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