Having trouble install on old Dell laptop

Questions about the installation of FreeBSD
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mikepwagner
Posts: 5
Joined: Sun Apr 26, 2020 2:57 am

Having trouble install on old Dell laptop

Post by mikepwagner »

I set up the bootable USB stick, when when it boots, it gets stuck in an endless loop trying to exec “getty” for hundreds of ttys.

I booted into single user mode, and I think the first problem I see is

md1.uzip: UZIp(zlib) inbflate() failed

A bunch of thise scroll off the screen, and then I see

g_vfs_done():md1.uzip[READ(offset=65536, length=8192)] error = 86

How do I get around this?

It is an DELL Lattitude E6510, with 8 GB of memory. I an trying install 20.03
mikepwagner
Posts: 5
Joined: Sun Apr 26, 2020 2:57 am

Re: Having trouble install on old Dell laptop

Post by mikepwagner »

It looks like the problem might have been 2 different bad USB sticks - I used another one, and I got the OS installed.

Right now, I am trying to get the Nvidia driver I need installed. That’s been frustrating because my pkg install nvidia-driver-... command taking forever, and the machine eventually freezes - I suspect some buggy power management issue, and I have to start over.

Is there any way to tell if the pkg command - which seems to be updating the repository catalogue, etc. is making forward progress between boots?

The messages all seem to say;

New version of pkg detected: it needs to be installed first.
Checking integrity ... done (0 conflicting)
The most recent version of packages are already installed

In an endless loop until something hangs.
mikepwagner
Posts: 5
Joined: Sun Apr 26, 2020 2:57 am

Re: Having trouble install on old Dell laptop

Post by mikepwagner »

I finally figured out - from a search here - that I needed to delete a conf file. I installed the driver, and then got machine that would only boot into single user mode. I need to use the machine for something this week, so I just threw Ubuntu on there.
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