When trying to boot the FreeBSD installation disk, GRUB2 starts instead. I first burned the ISO to a memory stick, but when that failed several times I burned a DVD. It fails in exactly the same way. There's a free partition on my disk, ready for an alternate system. The other system partition contains Linux Mint 17.3, if that makes a difference. The computer is a fairly modern thing with i7 processor, 8GB RAM and a Xeon E3-1200 graphics card. This is a very bad start for someone who wants to test the FreeBSD system. Does not seem to be worth the effort.
Thanks for your report. It would be very helpful if you could say which version you were trying to install, I am assuming latest, 10.3? Or more precisely which image did you download. Please note we have USB specific images which are the -memstick.img ones: ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/amd64/ISO-IMAGES/10.3/ When you say that GRUB2 starts instead, I'm guessing your existing installation's grub? Which would imply the installation media is not bootable, that's why it would help to know what you did exactly.
I gave the version number as 10.3. The file I burnt to USB first, then to DVD, was PCBSD10.3-RELEASE-03-31-2016-x64-DVD.iso Both behaved the same way; instead of booting, transfer was done to the existing boot manager, GRUB2 (Only one system on the disk; Linux Mint 17.3), and I intended to install FreeBSD on a free partition. You gave me a link to several ISO images, none of which resemble or come close to the size of the above. To begin with I would like a complete desktop installation, but I have a fast link so whether it's downloaded from the net or from the DVD doesn't really matter - except that I might get more updated modules from the Net? I have an Intel 64-bit processor, 8GM RAM, and a 120GB SSD disk as the primary disk. It has three partitions that I can use: System, swap and storage. I prefer to boot from USB since it's much faster and can be re-used (my DVD's can't). So which one should I use? I've been using linux for 8 years and unix several years before that, so I guess I could manage OK.
Looks like you were installing PCBSD. It is a derivative of FreeBSD (like, for example, Ubuntu is of Debian) but not quite FreeBSD. It is desktop oriented and the installer does full stack desktop installation. Of the ISOs on the link I gave you, for FreeBSD proper, the -disc1 is CD and -dvd1 is, well, DVD. To boot from USB, use the -memstick.img. The .xz are xz compressed versions, you'll have to unxz before burning the installation media. The handbook explains it all better: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/bsdinstall.html Note that the USB image is basically a boot only installation media that then pulls in the base from the network. The uefi images are required if you can't boot in legacy, but my knowledge of efi is too limited to give a good advice beyond this. None of them install a desktop, only the base system. FreeBSD has no default desktop installation. The handbook has more on installing the desktop: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/index.htmlhttps://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/index.html See chapter 5 and 5.7 Please let us know if using the FreeBSD installation media works or is problematic as well, for this bug report. For support with installing and using, you can drop by at #freebsd on Freenode (IRC), or the forums at: https://forums.freebsd.org/ Thanks, and welcome to FreeBSD!
Eh, I broke the link above. The handbook is here: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/index.html
OK, thanks for the information. I guess a system without desktop is OK. Done that before too. :) I need some time to go through this. I'll check it out and join the forum if I want to continue on this path. Thanks again! inge
Well, this was a huge disappointment. FreeBSD evidently hasn't entered into this century yet. First, it took a long time to boot even with the tiny 26MB image. It asked for all kinds of codepages, but none of them is UTF-8, which is the de-facto standard nowadays. I chose ISO-8859-1 for Norway, but it did not understand my Norwegian keyboard at all. I guess this is not the way to go. Really; this is 2016.
Thanks for your feedback. Since you managed to boot into FreeBSD, I am going to mark this report as closed, since the issue was apparently with PCBSD. It might help to tap their bugzilla about it too. :) As for other things you mention, if you think there's a bug or a problem with keyboard selection, please feel free to open a new report here in Bugzilla. For any other discussion about FreeBSD, please understand this is not the place for it, you're more than welcome to drop by on the forums or IRC. ;)