Boot on SANJAY REGMI

Pxe Boot to Install Any Operating System the Quickest Way

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 12:18:06 -0800

If your (old) machine doesn’t have a CD ROM drive or does not boot from USB, PXE boot to re-install a new operating system is the best option if you do not want to buy any more hardware to solve the situation. In the past, setting up a PXE server was a hassle. The internet is littered with linux configurations on tftp server. But if all you want to do is to boot your machine and autoload the ISO, here’s the fastest way with minimal fuss.

Configure FreeBSD on an Old Intel Machine with ATI Graphics

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 01:41:28 -0800

Steps
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Default install using Ventoy USB with FreeBSD install ISO
update pkg by running to install any package ex. pkg install vim
pkg install bash
Install video drivers for ati - ref AMD section in https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/x11/. This should take the screen to VGE mode with max resolution
Make default shell bash: chsh and edit (vim editor runs) the tcsh out with bash
install kde5, xorg, xfce, firefox-esr, mc, elinks, htop, libreoffice
allow root to login as ssh: edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and set PermitRootLogin to yes; restart sshd

Tips
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Make root writable in single user mode (if you cannot login as root because you messed up the shell or have some corruption:

Install FreeBSD via pxeboot Using mfsbsd for Systems That Have Less Than 512MB Memory

Tue, 09 Apr 2019 13:30:37 -0800

If you are PXE booting a client machine with an ISO file that is bigger than available memory on your client, the PXE boot will probably fail. This is because PXE boot is copying the ISO into memory. Nowadays, most of the OS install ISOs are more than 512MB, even for FreeBSD. So here’s the process to install FreeBSD on your very old hardware with 512MB memory or less.