installfest statuses

[George Rosamond]

No one from the installfests posted anything yet, so I thought I'd take
it upon myself to post...

First of all, we have *never* been big with installfests.  There never
really seemed to be a need, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If those who don't need installfests don't organize them, those who need
them can't come :)

We should change that.  People might be running BSD on servers, but
putting it on a laptop, configuring wireless cards and X seem to be
completely different hurdles.  And with the advent of UEFI and netbooks
that are so Windows-centric, there is certainly a case to start having
installfests.

We had one session last week.  One laptop was a Thinkpad X120e, and I
don't remember offhand the model of the other, but I believe it was an Asus.

>From experience, even with a hacked BIOS, FreeBSD 8.x and 9.x installs
but doesn't boot the x120e.  Instead of waging that battle and jumping
into what is likely a gpt-related issue again, we went with an OpenBSD
snapshot that was recent, which not only builds quickly and cleanly, but
also hibernates and resumes nicely.

The Asus also installed OpenBSD fine.  FreeBSD 9.1/amd64 installed but
also didn't boot.  The participant with that laptop should post the
model/make so we can look at more.

Tonight we dealt with an Asus S400C.  This laptop is six months or so
old, and a full UEFI nightmare.  It takes a bunch of reboots and power
downs to deal with UEFI and BIOS settings.  That took a good hour of
tinkering to get things to recognize the USB with the install media, and
a few more reboots to get it to boot back from the disks.  If this is
the future of laptops, then the future is grim.

(yes, I'm aware of the FreeBSD Foundation's grant for dealing with UEFI,
but don't forget it's an ugly road we're all being forced down. . .)

After finally getting a recent OpenBSD snapshot to boot on the Asus
S400C, *no* physical network devices were listed in ifconfig.  The wired
is an Attansic AR8161, and the wireless is Atheros AR9485, and were
recognized out of the message log.

It is useful to have multiple install medias on hand, plus a wired
switch.  This should include the stable and most current version of the
particular BSD in question.  And I need to figure out how to install
OpenBSD firmware blobs manually :)

We've generally thought of doing installfests on more esoteric hardware,
from the newer ARM SoC systems and beyond.  But clearly, basic x86
hardware has a relevance for installfests when it comes to a lot of
consumer-geared laptops today.

On that note, I'm hoping the participants upload their dmesgs to dmesgd,
and we can deal with any further configuration issues they may have.

And we should look at planning more installfests.  Maybe even doing a
show of hands at each meeting to decide whether to have one that month,
and to sort out what the hardware targets are.

g