More PC-BSD

Here's yet another release of PC-BSD, this time 0.8.2. It fixes a few more installation problems, including the one I'm seeing, where the"mountroot" command doesn't work when rebooting after installation. It says that the online update will pick up the changes but either that isn't working, or my installation is the 0.8 installation. It's too bad they don't label these things somewhere. You'd think a README on the root level of the ISO would say exactly which version of the ISO you have?

Anyway, a little update on my BSD follies. I still have my KVM mouse problems (sigh), but I've gone and plugged in another mouse to this box in order to get around them. My PC-BSD install went pretty smoothly, but then I ran into the above mentioned 'mountroot' problem. It seems to be trying to get the OS from the wrong slice (partition). Luckily, I barely remembered both where I installed it and the nomenclature for specifying it. I think they are having a problem with it defaulting to one (ad1s1a) no matter where you actually installed it (in my case, ad6s1a). It's 'ad6' because this is such an old box, it has a funky "fast" controller, back in the days when a UDMA 66 was fast, that isn't part of the normal 4 IDE controllers.

Anyway, I get the following error when I boot PC-BSD:

Mounting root from ufs:/dev/ad1s1a
setrootbyname failed
ffs_mountroot: can't find rootvp
Root mount failed: 6

Then it gives me a little info on how to use the manual input portion of mountroot (whatever that is - it isn't documented in the handbook as far as I can tell). By using the '?' command, I get a list of the possible boot devices, and there I can see 'ad6s1a', which is the 'a' (root file system) partition (in BSD speak) of the first slice (s1) of the 7^th IDE device (like I said, it gets put way past the normal 0-3 due to the funky controller). So, if I type in:

mountroot> ufs:ad6s1a

I'm off and running.

But I'm also downloading this 0.8.2 version. I will start again from scratch. I have a big hard drive (120gb) empty, so I can play there. I will probably continue to try out PC-BSD, so as to keep my hand in the BSD game, despite the wickedly annoying KVM problem.

Development Release: PC-BSD 0.8.2 (Beta)