First of all, as a long time user of FreeBSD server-side, I am thrilled to make the jump to a desktop powered by my favourite OS. Congratulations on the great job you have done.
I have been installing and reinstalling PCBSD this last week as some weird events left my installs crippled and it was faster to start over than keep looking for a fix.
I am a bit fed up with re-configuring and reinstalling everything so I am having a go at a custom install which would cover some ground and make it easier if, heavens forbid, I had to reinstall again.
I have mounted the img and unpacked the PCBSD.tbz file. I have several questions:
- Once I am done making my changes there, will I be ok if I just tarball back what I have done into a new PCBSD_xx.tbz and create a PCBSD_xx.tbz.md5 to reflect the md5 of the edited tarball? I would then specify installFile=PCBSD_xx.tbz in the config file.
- What is PCBSD.tbz.count for?
- Am I right in assuming PCBSD.ufs.uzip.count doesn't have anything to do with that and that I can safely leave it alone?
- Where should I put the customized options file in my img file? Or should it be specified as an argument for the /us/share/pc-sysinstall scripts that I should previously put on one of my FreeBSD boxes and run from there?
- The auto install config file goes into /boot/pc-autoinstall.conf in the img file (eg later on the installation device), correct?
- Can I specify any of the PBIs I would otherwise install later in the installComponents config (making sure the corresponding PBI files are in extras/PBI/)? Or does this work only for a specific subset of PBIs?)
I am planning on going ZFS this time so I can guard myself from harm using a lot of snapshots. Which is why I need to be able to customize my datasets more than pc-sysintall currently allows. A really perfect way would be if I could bypass pc-sysinstall altogether and go about it as I usually do, something close to the method described in
http://www.b0rken.org/freebsd/zfs.html.
Another reason I am going custom is because I need a user id that matches that on my other FreeBSD boxes, whether at home or online. I keep them in sync as far as uids and gids go which makes backups and general file sharing much simpler. Trying to change the uid of my PCBSD user to do that (after chrooting in single user mode) resulted in me and any other user I create somewhat excluded from using resources such as network and sound. I went back but no go. It could be useful to add as an advanced option that of specifying users' uid, I don't think I will be the only one in that situation.
Despite these small hiccups I loved my ride in PCBSD. Thanks again
custom installation
Linear Mode
