I had some remarkable progress with FreeBSD today, which included compiling my first kernel (after which I was eventually able to mount my linux partition) and making my DSL run. The latter was a particular pleasure since it only took two minutes and thus beats the same procedure on Linux (where I still don't quite know why my DSL works).
Automating the dialing-up however through rc.conf led into a fiasco. I was left in a sort of primitive single user mode with none of the two available text editors (ee and vim) working any longer. So you tell me how to reverse changes to a text file without an editor.
But of course, Perl was still working and I was able to repair rc.conf with a one-liner (typing it took me a while since I only had the American layout on my German keyboard...hard to find characters such as ', ! and /).
Btw, this journal entry here is my first contribution to the www backed by FreeBSD.
mount -u/
mount/usr
mount/var
Alternatively, you could have used ed(1). It's not pretty, but not impossible either. It's saved my bacon a number of times...
-Dom
Re:Single User Mode
ethan on 2003-01-27T19:36:53
I don't think this was actually single user mode (I wasn't able to find out really). It looked as though booting was incomplete: it tried to dial with the messagePPP started as rootand that was it then. No login, it simply dropped to a shell.
I am not yet fully grokking FreeBSD, I am afraid. After my succesful compilation of the kernel I had to learn that it no longer asked for the password when logging in as root so I had to re-set the password using/stand/sysinstall. Very weird.
But still, it appears to be an extremely solid and well laid-out operating system. Now that I have access to my Linux partition it should be possible to steal a bit of the configuration from their. And since I have a working internet-connection as well, google can assist me with resolving things. Before that I had to boot into Linux to look something up, reboot BSD to realize that it didn't quite work that way and so forth.:-/
