I had a couple of hours free this afternoon, so decided to waste them having another play with TrueOS on my MacBook Air.
I’ve already blogged about the first attempt here but thought things might have moved on and wanted something to play around with FreeBSD outside of a VM on my FreeNAS server.
Booting the DVD I’d burnt with the latest ISO image worked fine, and the graphical installation started. The only thing to set before the installation begins is the installation disk, for which I was using the ZFS partition I’d created previously. I wasn’t too sure about the swap file, but just accepted the default and off it went copying the files from the DVD to the hard drive partition. Once copied, some further installation options need to be selected, like video driver, sound card, etc. but I just chose the defaults or auto-selected options. After creating a root password and user account, the system starts a TrueOS desktop environment.
After a little play, I suspect I have the same main issue as before – an unsupported wireless network card! After a frantic search, I managed to find the USB Ethernet dongle and managed to connect to the internet, but it not an ideal solution. Surely more people are repurposing old Apple laptops with FreeBSD? I did come across an excellent blog which documents this in a lot more detail than I’ve been bothered with, and while they seem to have the same wireless interface issue, they did find a solution for tethering to a mobile device using Bluetooth!
Can’t say I’m a big fan of the Lumina desktop, so I also installed Xfces which I’m a little more comfortable with. I might have another go at this using a standard FreeBSD install, rather than TrueOS, and configure things exactly as I want from the start, but without the wireless access, I can’t see me using it much.
Anyway, I only wasted part of the afternoon, so might just go and watch another episode of The Tudors (I’ve just seen the 1st Episode of Season 2) in the bath 😀
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