Reviving an old ghostBSD 32 bit install in Virtualbox
Posted: Mon May 02, 2022 4:48 pm
So, I posted a few weeks ago about trying (and failing) to revive a 32 bit ghostBSD as a hobby project. I'm not too worried about security issues, I just want to give this perfectly good 32 bit system a repurposing rather than haul it to the dump because it's a few years old.
I first tried with a 10.3-RELEASE, and got nothing but frustration. I then downloaded a prealpha 11.0 release, but the installer essentially installed the installer, and had no good functionality. Then I noticed another, more recent version of the prealpha, and downloaded it. I ran the install, but I couldn't get ports or packages working because of the lack of repositories for old release free/ghost bsd's. I tried several times to run version upgrades, but upgrading to any 12.x releases resulted in not being able to login.
Then I discovered the virtues of VirtualBox snapshots, and did a fresh install of the prealpha. I let the ghost updater do it's thing, then once it updated, I ran a freebsd-update. It gave me the now-familiar "your system sucks, we don't like you anymore" message. But I'd found a repository mirror site at pk0.nyi.freebsd.org, and pointed to that in a /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos conf file. At first, trying to run a pkg update failed, complaining about pkg version. So, I found a pkg.txz from the 11.1 folder, downloaded it, and did a sudo pkg install, and it upgraded the pkg to a higher version, and suddenly I had packages working, so I installed a few things, and everything was great.
Alas, I then tried to get ports working as well, and things fell apart. Somewhere along the way, probably running the pkg2ng program, the pkg version shifted back to the old version.
So, I'm getting ready to restore the vbox snapshot to the 11.0 release after the updates and try to get packages up again. Am I missing a trick to get the ports working after I get pkg up? And is this still a ghostBSD install after all the freebsd updates?
If this is off-topic, I apologize, but I've seen other posts about EOL systems, and this seems to be a way to rejuvenate an old "useless" machine.
I first tried with a 10.3-RELEASE, and got nothing but frustration. I then downloaded a prealpha 11.0 release, but the installer essentially installed the installer, and had no good functionality. Then I noticed another, more recent version of the prealpha, and downloaded it. I ran the install, but I couldn't get ports or packages working because of the lack of repositories for old release free/ghost bsd's. I tried several times to run version upgrades, but upgrading to any 12.x releases resulted in not being able to login.
Then I discovered the virtues of VirtualBox snapshots, and did a fresh install of the prealpha. I let the ghost updater do it's thing, then once it updated, I ran a freebsd-update. It gave me the now-familiar "your system sucks, we don't like you anymore" message. But I'd found a repository mirror site at pk0.nyi.freebsd.org, and pointed to that in a /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos conf file. At first, trying to run a pkg update failed, complaining about pkg version. So, I found a pkg.txz from the 11.1 folder, downloaded it, and did a sudo pkg install, and it upgraded the pkg to a higher version, and suddenly I had packages working, so I installed a few things, and everything was great.
Alas, I then tried to get ports working as well, and things fell apart. Somewhere along the way, probably running the pkg2ng program, the pkg version shifted back to the old version.
So, I'm getting ready to restore the vbox snapshot to the 11.0 release after the updates and try to get packages up again. Am I missing a trick to get the ports working after I get pkg up? And is this still a ghostBSD install after all the freebsd updates?
If this is off-topic, I apologize, but I've seen other posts about EOL systems, and this seems to be a way to rejuvenate an old "useless" machine.