When I bought my Lenovo Thinkcentre, it was of course set up for Windows. It had two ESPs, one for normal boot and one for emergencies. That's a Lenovo thing btw; you press a special key and you get this alternative boot which originally took you into a rescue partition. There were a few small partitions for special Windows black magic and a huge partition for Windows itself. Also one for snapshots/dumps (sda6) and one that contained a manufacturer's reinstallation image (sda7).

I cleared most of these and reassigned them, so this is my current setup:
You will notice that partitions 8-10 were carved out of the space between 5 and 6, so my partition numbers are in the wrong order, which fdisk complains about every time I run it!

Having two LFS partitions is an old habit. One is for the old LFS and the other for the current version. Whenever a new LFS came out, I would clear the old LFS partition and create the new LFS on it, using the current LFS as build host, after which the "current" one would become the old one. I've done this for several years (it's about a 6-month release cycle), but I am becoming very disillusioned with LFS, due to creeping dependency hell. It used to be easy and fun to put together fairly quickly a nice minimalist distro that contained all the apps and libraries that I actually needed and only those. Now you can't build anything without needing all kinds of additional bumf and it definitely isn't fun any more. So I think it's time to say goodbye.

I'm thinking of installing FreeBSD as my second system, replacing LFS. I've never used a BSD before and I'm curious about how easy it is to learn. But I also want to reorganise to get my partitions into order. This would involve deleting sda6 and sda7, creating a new sda6 and moving Slackware onto it. Then I could eventually put BSD on a new sda7 and, if I do create rescue partitions, they would be sda8 and sda9. Installing SystemRescue on sda8 would be a nice project.

It would be a big job and I'd have to go about it very carefully but I think it's doable.

FreeBSD is rather easy and has a very good handbook. Unfortunately, the handbook is quite necessary. You might consider starting with a desktop oriented fork (formerly a distro) of FreeBSD like TrueOS. A big advantage of TrueOS is that a lot is set up for you including OpenZFS.

If you like to put things together and like coherent well organized, well documents components, then you might look at OpenBSD instead. It does not have OpenZFS support but will otherwise have a lot of advantages. The documentation is second to none and most things can be figured out from the manual pages or, at worst, with a nudge from the rather short FAQ.

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ZFS looks very complicated to me. I don't really have a use for snapshots. I've been browsing the FreeBSD handbook and they use UFS, which I can just about get my head around as it's very similar (at least conceptually) to an extended partition with logical disks in it.

Good documentation is an essential requirement for me, but it also needs to be pitched to my level, which is very basic when considering an OS that I've never used before. The FreeBSD book looks quite newbie-friendly; the OpenBSD stuff is much more austere.

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I've just started using FreeBSD as a 3rd OS, well 4th if I count Windows 10, anyways, it is really easier then I thought, and with version 12 it now has read/write for ext format. I'm actually on it right now.

I've got it installed on its own drive/partition on a laptop. My BIOS is setup to boot up showing me my drives to pick which one to boot from, with the FreeBSD hdd as the first selection with a 10 sec time out before booting it. Using its own boot loader to boot it, I also have it in 41_custom on a grub boot so I can boot it via grub with my other drive if I so wanted to.

the drive I have it on is a split partition. 500GB SSD, I created a blank partition on the first part, then the second as ext4. when I installed FreeBSD I let it take that first one and it divided it up into what it needed using its native format.
the ada0 being the drive I have FreeBSD and data sharing on, and the ada1 is my windows/linix/linix on.

It is really not that difficult of a system to setup and operate, and there is plenty of how tos on it, and a forum sight to sign up if wanted.

To get a gui, I installed xorg-minimum and all of xorgs fonts. then a W/M xfce,wmaker,e16, and slim to manage them all. I use pkg (packages), not the ports for that, as it takes too long to compile xorg, and why bother when they're already in a package?


I've already installed it, I donno, about 4 to 6 times so I've got it whittled down to what I need it to have and not the everything the how tos say to do.

the auto-mounting and mounting other drives that are not its native format has a lot to be desired (MO), but I do have it working.

But yeah there documentation some of it old so it is obsolete, yet parts of it still useful from what I've discovered, there is still plenty of useful docs for the taking to be used. just google with freebsd as one of the key words, or ask in the its forum.

lets see, file system structure is a little different, some of the cli commands are different, no lsblk, blkid, to see partitions, some sed, awk and others are FreeBSD and not GNU but GNU can be installed...

I really don't think you'd have an issue with FreeBSD in getting to know it and use it. so yeah go for it.

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As a die hard Mac user If I was going to use BSD "just because" which seems to be how you treat LFS I'd just virtualize it like I do..I mean you gotta keep up and you need to keep your nerd skills so there is no reason not to vBox it.

As the legal eagles say, ignorance is no excuse.
Uses for snapshot will find you. For example I use them as point-in-time sources for backups. Another good use is when I'm editting photos - take a snap, start playing. At the end of a session, decide if I want to keep the updates or not. Either delete the snap, or roll-back. Could not be simpler. As it happens I don't use ZFS, but properly implemented snaps are fantastic (I don't consider rsnapshot a proper implementation in this context, although I also use it).

As for BSD, I hated it when I tried it years ago - openSolaris to test ZFS. I couldn't find anything, and got as frustrated as hell, and so gave it a miss ever since. YMMV.

I only have one drive but there's lots of room on it. I boot with elilo, which I like, though I could switch to grub if I had to. I set up a bios boot partition for grub just in case. But istr you could boot bsd from lilo in the old days (using the "other" option), so I hope you can from elilo too.
So I need a blank partition before I install. That's no problem.
I never do automounting (except at boot of course). If I want a drive mounted, I'll mount it myself. I really hate it when computers do things behind your back!

Thanks a lot! That's going to be useful.

I assume the way it would be written out to find and boot will be not much different than what you s written in grubs 40 custom file.

The main part being
Just make sure you tell it the right slice (partition) and set it to root / then let it do the rest.

I got some links for that, or just google how to install freeBSD then look over a few of them to get a better idea of what to do as everyone has their own way of doing it. Or ideas on what to install and such.

Before I do any partition renumbering, I want reassurance that this will work!

I know that the actual operation can be done with fdisk. x will get me into expert mode, f will activate the fix option and w will alter the partition table accordingly.

Obviously after that, fstab will need to be edited for each system and elilo.conf too. But is it safe to do all this from a live system on that same hard drive? After all, the running kernel must have the location of the root partition stored somewhere; what happens if its partition number suddenly changes?

before you repartition, consider exploring lvm2

I would give *bsd a "normal" partition
have a small "normal" partition for a small linux for resuce
the rest as LVM

optionally having a new VG for each distro, or one big VG for all

the VG could be considered as individual disks., containing partitions ( LV )

Grub2 understands LVM2 and will have no problem booting it
( {e}lilo , I have no idea )

lvm2 will be much more flexible than traditional partitioning
worth the background reading.

this is my 40_custom for grub, it is just the standard disk 0 - x and partition setting, and freebsd has it's own loader, so I am not using chainloader which too works.

as far as the partition to be used when you figure that part out, leave it raw, not formatted. Let the installer deal with it.

This is the page I used and adding my already knowledge of installing from Linux in how to figure out what partition I am using.

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/b...scratch.61659/

where it says to use ports, unless you want to take the time it takes to compile the source code and not guaranteed to finish, then use pkg to install it.

LVM and FressBSD a post on it
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/c...-on-lvm.55252/

turns out you can do *bsd ( well FreeBSD at least ) on lvm2

https://davidnewall.com/papers/Boot-...D-on-LVM2.html

Well, the BSDs are worth getting to know, but FreeBSD generally takes up the most disk space, I used to use it, but now I tend to use OpenBSD when I want a BSD, I would consider NetBSD, but I've never got wifi working when I've tried it.

(I, personally, don't multi boot, not even Linux, each system has its own disk, whether internal or external.)

P.S. A lot of my computers are pre used laptops, bought cheaply, & mainly to experiment on; I usually keep two for regular use with my present distro on, but I use small disks; some run from an 8GB SDHC card, others from 60GB SSD, or even 160GB HDD. I keep backups of my music & videos, etc, on bigger (500GB) external disks.

Disk space isn't an issue. I assume 30 GB would be enough. It's certainly enough for a Linux root partition. There's more room available if not.

I gather NetBSD is an orphan now. I would rather stick to a maintained fork. But wifi isn't an issue. This is an ethernet-only machine and the card is Realtek (uses r8169 on Linux). Apart from the space issue, I'd be interested to know more about FreeBSD versus OpenBSD.

@firerat I don't want lvm. It's an additional complication. I have a lot of disk space and I don't have a track record of overfilling my root partition!

No one has yet answered my question about what happens when you renumber partitions and one of them is your current root partition.

I've been a casual user of OpenBSD for over a decade, even using it on the main desktop for a while. I've also used it in classes I have taught in the past because if its clean design and organization and ease of use. I've only dabbled in FreeBSD a little, lately for OpenZFS. My take is that FreeBSD is more complicated but neither should be off-putting if you have been comfortable with LFS and similar do-it-yourself systems.

One of the very nice things about OpenBSD is that while it is very capable, it only does what you yourself have decided to tell it to do and it does those things only when you have decided they shall be done. So as far as you being in control, it is the best. Another of the very nice things is the documentation. As mentioned the manual pages are second to none, but there is also the matter of sensible defaults in the configuration files and good example files. It is only very occasionally that I have to ask any questions about its use or configuration and those questions usually end up being just a way to formulate the problem in my head so I can find the answer in the manual pages. A third nice thing, and this is subjective, is that OpenBSD is rather enjoyable to work with even if you have to configure the details or import your customizations from backup.

For tesing and certain use-cases, both FreeBSD and OpenBSD run on certain models of cheap ARM boards. The Raspberry Pi 3B+ and the Beaglebone Black are two to look closely at. I've run FreeBSD on the former and ran a low-traffic web site on OpenBSD for a few years on the latter, that included a wiki. Those would be an inexpensive way of testing.

On the development side, the OpenBSD developers pretty much run OpenBSD throughout their daily activities and they are thus close to how it works in real life. The FreeBSD developers tended to get teased a little for being seen having other systems on the primary machines. Perhaps that has changed lately, I do not know. I prefer OpenBSD's PF for packet filtering, though there is a version in FreeBSD which has been tweaked a lot, is old in regards to functionality and syntax.

Installing packages is rather easy on both. There seems to me to be less setup required to get going with OpenBSD but there are far more packages available for FreeBSD and both are easy once you get going. If you would like a particular programming language, for example, it is probably there among FreeBSD's packages. OpenBSD also tries to tweak the defaults in the packages as well, so DoH disabled by default in Firefox there, and when possible the improvements are passed upstream, but since the packages are external to the Base system they are more risky.

Edit: Another point is that OpenBSD is by its developers for its developers, though anyone can use it and enjoy it too, while FreeBSD actually does outreach and encourages non-FreeBSD developers to use and enjoy the system.

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