Serial speed of installation medium. Fixed or what is set in BIOS?

[weust]

When the new version comes out today(?) I want to give it a go on my Soekris net6501-30, so I will need to use the USB with serial memstick file.
But I know from past experience that it doesn't like a baud speed of 115200. Something that made installing pfSense quite difficult to do because the screens wouldn't update properly.

So I was wondering whether the OPNsense serial installer is using a fixed speed, or does it read the speed from the BIOS?
The net6501 comes with a default baud speed of 19200 which works fine.

[franco]

The speed is fixed. Unfortunately, you'd have to go through the whole image build process, which is simple and easy, but will take some time to get settled into (setting up a build VM). The steps can be found here:

https://github.com/opnsense/tools (scroll down to "Setting up a build system")

The two lines you need to change are in this file:

https://github.com/opnsense/tools/blob/master/build/memstick.sh#L49
https://github.com/opnsense/tools/blob/master/build/memstick.sh#L63

I don't know if a better way to guess baud speed. Changing the default speed to something else will "break" other hardware. :/

[weust]

That sucks. But I will give 115200 a go.

Right now I'm trying to setup up a laptop with FreeBSD.
Not going too well.

[franco]

I wrote a little thingy: http://lastsummer.de/freebsd-desktop-on-the-t400/

[weust]

Thanks, will use it as a guide for later.
Right now, after the second installation, this HP ProBook 6540b still can't boot off of the hard drive.
"Non-System disk or disk error". I even got that to work in Hyper-V...

Windows Server 2012 R2, which I installed inbetween the FreeBSD installation, worked fine.
Even did a clean disk in diskpart from a Windows 8.1 recovery.

[franco]

Maybe UEFI-only boot? For 10.1 there are images AFAIK.

[weust]

That might be it actually.
The ISO is UEFI. The laptop only has a BIOS...
Burning a new DVD. At least I use those again. First time in 10+ years.

[franco]

There is a heap of issues with UEFI on FreeBSD. I remember countless mailing list reports, and I guess it's working for most now, but boot loader mods are not FreeBSD's strength. Too few Forth people around to review patches or do cleanups...

[weust]

Q&A on open source OS's is always a problem imo.

Anyway, the non-UEFI boot ISO doesn't help either.
Same message when trying to boot from the drive.
Can't imagine GPT would be a problem, but will try a old DOS trick (fdisk /mbr).

[franco]

Now that you mention gpt, there is a custom option for bsdlabel -- maybe try that instead.... that helped fix such a boot after install issue for a client.

[weust]

I'll have to look that up on how to put it in, just makes me wonder why the disk setup part of the installer sees a GPT label on the disk, yet doesn't do anything with it.
If that really is the problem in my case.

Edit: Nevermind what I said about the installer seeing a GPT label. It, if needed, converts the disk in GPT and then partitions it. I can select a scheme there.

[chemlud]

Regarding BSD, I had good success with PC-BSD installed on an old Dell Precision wordstation, as well as the old (32bit, no longer supported I guess) on old Precision Mobile notebooks...

[weust]

I wouldn't consider an Intel i3 that old?
And if FreeBSD would say it's too new, then FreeBSD is seriously behind on current hardware.

[chemlud]

Sorry for being not that clear, I just wanted to report on some positive experience with different hardware using PC-BSD :-)

No idea why BSD should not recognize your HDD/SSD (controller), sorry again!

[weust]

It wasn't a flame against you, just a general thought I had.
Nothing more

I could try PC-BSD, but would like to stick to one Unix OS for now.
They all differ too much as it is.