Im thinking about installing freebsd on a swap partition that i dont use. The partition is about 4 gigs (5068 mb).
Would that be enough space to install freeBSD plus xorg and fluxbox?

What are the options for data migration from xfs and reiserfs filesystems?

How easy is it install to a partition without harming my ability to boot slackware and windows?

Can lilo handle that or does freebsd install a boot loader that would allow booting to slackware and windows?

Thanks

FreeBSD must reside on an mbr type primary partition or a GPT partition. 4GB should be more than enough for X.org, window manager and browser.

Don't install the bootmgr (I don't think you'll even be asked to install it unless you are installing an old release like e.g. FreeBSD 8.x which uses the old sysinstall installer), and have your Linux OS boot loader just chainload to the FreeBSD partition.

To avoid possible data loss, I'd suggest backing up your data and using a dedicated disk rather than a partition. Also device naming is not the same as Linux, so ensure that if you have more than one hard disk that you can identify which is which. See the FreeBSD handbook, before attempting an install.

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It's best to just use a spare drive for FreeBSD. This way the only time you need to do anything with the bootloader is during installation only and you can use the system bios to select the boot drive during startup.

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I think you will find that 4 GB is not enough.

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A free vm may also provide a very easy way to test freebsd.

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I'm a NetBSD user, but into the FreeBSD handbook I read:

"A FreeBSD installation will require at least 64 MB of RAM and 1.5 GB of free hard drive space for the most minimal installation. However, that is a very minimal install, leaving almost no free space. A more realistic minimum is 4 GB without a graphical environment, and 8 GB or more if a graphical user interface will be used. Third-party application software requires more space. It is recommended to increase RAM and hard drive space to meet the needs of the applications that will be used and the amount of data that will be stored."

This is just FreeBSD 9.3, X.org and seamonkey and a few other bits (in a vm).
But yes I would suggest allocating a bit more space - or just installing in a vm.

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Maybe, if you're careful when installing packages. Just wondering where you're going to put the swap space for FreeBSD.

Open up Linux and transfer it by some means, or think of using a USB stick in some capacity.

Read-write transfer via ext2 (both sides) is best. Read-write transfer via UFS2 (both sides) is possible, but run fsck from the FreeBSD side after Linux writes to it. I think I once got FreeBSD to read ReiserFS, but it's read-only support. There is probably not any current XFS support, and the read-only support that once existed did not seem to work with Linux XFS. Maybe it was for a really old XFS that would require quite a few switches from Linux mkfs.xfs.

With one disk? Maybe easy if you read enough directions and keep a lot of backup on hand.

With two disks? Trivial.

I use the FreeBSD bootloaders on FreeBSD-only disks, and they're fine. Otherwise, I would use LILO and have it boot FreeBSD off a second disk that in turn has a FreeBSD bootloader on it. That way works every time and doesn't place the rest of your system in jeopardy.

If you're willing and genuinely have no other way of installing FreeBSD, I'd be willing to try a dual-boot system with Linux on one disk myself, despite it being a long time and despite it being way less than fun. My FreeBSD upgrade-from-ports project is going south anyway. [vt isn't my cup of tea on this PC, and the i915 driver is failing to build so far, though hacking and an X11 rebuild might make things better.] Maybe I can come up with instructions that are recently verified and actually work. Otherwise, I'll leave my fine Linux PC as-is.

P.S. - I'm scared like crazy of that FreeBSD installer program WRT systems that already have data on it. Expect any instructions to be fairly insane.

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I have been happily running FreeBSD since earlier this year and love it so far!

I think the 4GB disk space will be a problem for you unless you are not planning to install X and a lot of other things!

My own install was to a 120GB partition, currently showing 11GB used. That is with X, Firefox and a few other necessary things installed from ports, so it includes the source code and resulting packages, but still fairly representative I think.

I installed to a two drive system, but not to a dedicated drive. I installed to the second primary partition with Slackware64-14 being on the first primary on that drive, and Slackware-14 installed to the first drive.

My notes on the partitioning and other install topics are here and here.

I tried to do the partitioning with GParted first, but it does not support ufs, so I then used cfdisk from within Slackware. But I then found the FreeBSD partitioning tools to be a little confusing and was unsure whether it was going to use the Slackware created partition or try to create its own.

In the end the key was to simply convince myself that the FreeBSD partitioning tools were unambiguously referring to the same primary partition space (slice) on the drive that I wanted to use, then let it have its way. I then chain boot to that partition using LILO and it works out of the box.

For exchanging files with other systems I use nfs and sftp, but I also created a smallish ext2 partition to allow interchange with the Slackwares running on the same system (discussed here). FreeBSD can mount ext2 r/w with no problems.

Good luck! Make a little more room for it and you will be a happy camper!

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I agree with the above sentiments. You will fair better with more than 4 GB. You may be able to get away with a very minimal system with 4 GB, but, compiling programs with ports may prove problematic.

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You can use the Linux partitioning tools to create an mbr and reserve some space/create a slice, but when it comes to the actual partitioning, you need to use the FreeBSD tools, (disklabel, gpart, fdisk - as part of the install process) to set up your partitions - no way around it.

The common source of confusion for Linux and windows users is that a UNIX partition is not the same thing as a windows or Linux "partition" (a slice).

//edit: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.IS...anization.html

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Speaking practically, the / on a FreeBSD system here always ends up being about 12 GB. I'll try to test to see if just X and Fluxbox fit into 4 GB, not my usual X + Windowmaker + Xfce + Perl + MySQL + audio tools + CD-R tools + CUPS + SANE + source.

What it appears to me is this: On GPT partitions, if FreeBSD's /boot/pmbr is placed at the beginning of a partition that does not use that first sector, then LILO can use that partition for starting the FreeBSD GPT boot process. /boot/pmbr can be dd'ed over to the partition that has UFS2 already on it, or it can be dd'ed over to a tiny partition of similar size to the freebsd-boot partition. In particular, the verify function in Linux gdisk did not find a problem with this setup.

IOW, if you want a UFS2-based setup, you can get by with a 64k freebsd-boot partition loaded with /boot/gptboot, the UFS2 partition that has been marked "bootme" by gpart and has /boot/pmbr dd'ed to the start of it, and a swap partition. You might be able to get away with this on a ZFS-based setup, but ZFS was tested using the additional tiny partition with /boot/pmbr on it.

The relevant section of /etc/lilo.conf in Linux looks like this:
I haven't dual-booted against an NT-based version of Windows, so this was tested only with Linux and FreeBSD.

If you use GPT partitions and really want the ugly instructions for a manual partition/mkfs and install; provide the output of `gdisk -l` for whatever drive you plan to use. Maybe I'll be able to adjust the commands that I have here on paper; somebody could look over them to judge the sanity of the instructions.

Again, a separate disk is the best way to go.

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Thanks all. You have talked me into buying another drive