Failure to install 8.0 RC i386

[tankist]

The first failure happened on IBM Thinkpad T42. I downloaded CD for network install, verified MD5 sum, burned without errors. Installation booted and started normally, but after I selected Network install if looks it failed to connect. The Network dialog had Internet option disabled. I tried both DHCP and manual network settings over Ethernet cable (not wireless). The network card was recognized correctly.

FreeBSD 8 and PC BSD 7.1 installed and worked just fine on that laptop, though I didn't use the network install for them.

The second attempt was on an HP workstation. I downloaded, verified and burned the install DVD i386. It booted normally, but after saying "Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/ufs/ROOTFS" it went to rescue shell: "Enter full pathname of shell or RETURN for /bin/sh":.

FreeBSD 8.0 amd64 works just fine on that computer.

Would be happy to provide more details if necessary.

[Lsayre]

The same thing happened on my Dell desktop computer. The internet install option was grayed out. None the less, it appears to properly pre-check for DHCP, yet it fails every time as soon as it looks for the very first file to download and install. Very frustrating.

[Lsayre]

I just tried an internet upgrade of my PC-BSD 8.0 Beta on my HP Media Center PC (not my Dell as in the disaster I reported above) to PC-BSD 8.0 RC and it completely hosed my Beta version. It deleted all of the files that it intended to upgrade, and then after it accomplished this it failed to upgrade a single file. Can you imagine that it permitted itself to go this far without the ability to realize that it was not going to be able to go out and grab the necessary replacement files. The pre-checking and safeties to prevent this are non functional to non existent.

[llothar]

I tried to install it in a vanilla VMWare 6.5 image.
Crashs during the first boot seconds.

After this i tried it on a Gigabyte Mainboard with IDE CDROM and HDD and it stopped because it couldn't read the CDROM from which it was started.

It's still the - it doesn't work, so it has to be BSD - feeling i get for the last 3 years when i tried PCBSD, DesktopBSD or FreeBSD. I have no hope that quality will ever come back. Disgusting.

[llothar]

Okay on my dedicated machine i changed the IDE DVD with an SATA one and after this it installed fine.

But two problems:

1) I wanted to change the partitions but while there was an edit custom partition in the installer it only configured the slices inside the partition. Thats not good enough.

2) Network configuration is missing and failed. I have an old 3COM 100Mbit card in the system but it seems to be not working. I get a SIOCDIFADDR permission denied when i try ifconfig but i'm root????

And a final note - can we please switch to GNOME. This KDE sucks, it hurts my eyes and i feel very unfortable with it.

[NaX]

When it comes to Gnome:
Firstly PCBSD is a KDE system. All their tools are written in Qt for KDE and Kris Moore is a KDE/Qt developer. To ask them to switch the default to Gnome would be like asking Microsoft to switch to OpenOffice.

KDE is very flexible, have you tried customizing it. Try changing the theme, I even think I saw a Gnome Clearlooks theme the other day for KDE.

But if you want Gnome you might have to wait a while. Have a look at the mailing lists, it looks like Mike has decided to help with a Gnome PBI. If want it to go faster maybe you can help him test it.
http://lists.pcbsd.org/pipermail/testin ... 03384.html
http://lists.pcbsd.org/pipermail/testin ... 03388.html

[Lsayre]

RC2 has fixed the internet install problem. Well done!!!!