Re: Acer Aspire One (150)

["Constantine A. Murenin" <mureninc@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 12/11/2008, Christopher Rawnsley <rawprawns@gmail.com> wrote:
> While I don't have a Acer Aspire I do have a netbook of some kind and I
> would like to raise the general issue that you get with them. They don't
> have CD drives. From the sounds of things, it doesn't seem like too big a
> deal for you as you have an external one (although you have dropped in to
> the kernel debugger...) but I would imagine that many people don't have such
> a luxury.
>
>  I think USB flash images are the way to go and I dug up a script from Dario
> Freni on FreeBSD front for converting ISO images to USB disc images[1]. I
> think this is a start and I would like to encourage the creation of one for
> the DragonFly Project. I want to work on this but it's bound to take me a
> while :) Anyone got any tips?
>
>  References:
>  [1] http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?4420AF56.60106
> (Script is garbled a little so I've attached a cleaned up one)

IMHO, that's the general problem with FreeBSD / DragonFly -- it's not
possible to install them from an existing installation, at least not
if you want to use the officially supported installation procedure.

What I do when I want to install OpenBSD is: download an appropriate
bsd.rd [0] to an existing OpenBSD installation on a USB HDD, boot from
the said USB HDD on the new hardware to which brand-new HDD we're
about to install an OS, type "boot bsd.rd" (or whatever the name
you've given to your copy of a bsd.rd for this specific installation),
and there we go -- no CDs wasted and no netboot configuration or
expertise required, and we could easily be using the latest bsd.rd, so
no further updates would be required after the installation.  The
above procedure is much better for the environment and usually saves a
lot of time.  YMMV.

Cheers,
Constantine.

[0] http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#bsd.rd