Dual Boot two GhostBSD on same disk

grandpa

Hello,

(Yes, I know that bectl is a more proper way to manage more than one ghostbsd installation)

After booting USB of first ghost install run a terminal and search for pc-sysinstall.
Edit pc-sysinstall/backend/functions.sh and change BASENAME to something different than zroot (zroot_first)
Run the GUI installer, pick custom disk partitioning, and leave free space for next installation. Pick the bsd bootmanager.
Once install is finished - do not reboot. As root i terminal check if /dev/ada0p1 is mounted (mount)
If /dev/ada0p1 isn't mounted- run mount -t msdos /dev/ada0p1 /mnt/
Rename /mnt/EFI/ghostbsd to something else than ghostbsd (ghost_first)
Reboot
Run the second USB installation, pick custom diskpartioning and create zfs and swap partitions, run the GUI installer and reboot
After reboot run the following depending on what zroot that is running
If the zroot_first has booted
efibootmgr -c -a -L FBzroot -l ada0p1:/efi/ghostbsd/BOOTX64.EFI -e "rootdev=zfs:zroot/ROOT/default:"
(And of course if the zroot has booted change path to ghostbsd_first and zroot name to zroot_first)
Reoot and pick from BIOS what Ghost install to start

Disclaimer. There is no garantuee that this will work for anyone else but me.

The hardware for this is a 10 year old ASUS R517S with Pentium N3700 that has Braswell Intel HD graphics, 4Gb RAM and an SSD with room for GhostBSD 22.06.18 and GhostBSD 24.10.1.

So why did I do this?

I wanted to get the fs-uae to work with hw acceleration on this old ASUS. I found that the GhostBSD 22.06.18 did this using the xorg modesetting gfx driver. The 22.06.18 only upgrades to FreeBSD 13.2 for some strange reason.
I also wanted to see if fs-uae worked with hw acceleration on the GhostBSD 25.02-R14.3p2 and it did not. I realized when I did the install that I had to install the GhostBSD 24.10.1 because this version installs despite this 10 year old ASUS laptop only having 4Gb of RAM and then upgrade 24.10 to 25.02.

I learned that the xorg modesetting driver worked on 13.2. I also learned that modesetting does not on work on 14.3. Neither does the xf86-video-intel nor the xlibre-video-intel. And how to dual boot different versions of GhostBSD.

I'd like to thank some people that probably are not on this forum but still are in the BSD community.

Thanks to

SirDice over at the FreeBSD forum for keeping the fs-uae alive
T-bone, also over at the FreeBSD forum for the efibootmgr line

/grandpa