Re: 9.0 beta2 & the new bsdinstaller

Actually, I think this kind of question is for the freebsd-current list, so I respond on that list.

Problem with the old sysinstall is that sysinstall expects installation sets to be broken into 1392 KB chunks as opposed to a full .tgz, .tbz or .txz, or so I believe: I could be wrong.

I thought NetBSD had a much better installer (sysinst) compared to FreeBSD sysinstall, but the new installer may reverse that.  New installer still leaves me confused at times.

I downloaded BETA2 amd64 memstick file and dd'ed it to a USB stick but haven't booted it yet.

Base installation ought to be preselected because it is necessary for installed system to be functional, but others might be optional.  For ports, I prefer to use portsnap.  I intend to keep ports tree from BETA1 and use 'portsnap fetch update' but will have to note in /etc/make.conf that the ports tree is on a different partition, like maybe PORTSDIR=/BETA1/usr/ports

Keyboard selection with regard to language in BETA1 was confusing.

It is not always necessary to remove the CD, DVD or memstick after installation.  One might go into the BIOS or UEFI and change the boot priority, or on my MSI motherboard, I can get a boot menu by hitting F11 when the MSI motherboard splash screen appears.

In my case, I intend to delete my nonfunctional NetBSD partitions and make FreeBSD partition in that space; not sure if I need a special boot partition.  64K boot partition for BETA1 played no role, since I started BETA1 from the System Rescue CD (http://sysresccd.org/), selecting Super Grub Disk, then hitting c for command prompt, and

set root=(hd0,9)
kfreebsd /boot/loader
boot

I had a problem with the memstick running out of inodes, since the partition on the USB stick had no extra space even though there was plenty of extra space on the USB stick.

Tom