General Information
I have an IBM X30 (Pentium III-M) with an Intersil Prism 2.5 Wireless card inside. I am running FreeBSD-8.0-RELEASE.
Installation
I installed from a USB stick, following the instructions given by FreeBSD to prepare the USB stick. This was more tricky than it should have been. It is not FreeBSD’s fault. The IBM X30 can boot from a USB stick, contrary to what I saw on some blog or forum or other. Here’s how.
A USB stick is not listed as a “Removable Device” in the BIOS. Instead, it is listed as a Hard Drive. So, inside the BIOS, inside the Boot section, go to the hard drive drop down list and move the USB drive above in internal Hard Disk. Then you should be good to go.
Also, be sure to choose option #2 at the FreeBSD bootloader to disable ACPI. For some reason, if ACPI is enabled, FreeBSD won’t be able to find your USB stick once it’s time to install the system. The same is true of an external USB CD drive.
GNUstep
I installed GNUstep at first from ports,
# cd /usr/ports/devel/gnustep # make install clean
and everything seemd to compile fine. However, for reasons I never determined, most applications would crash with a segmentation fault, either right away or after trying to do something in the program like save a file with TextEdit.app. Things like TimeMon and Batmon ran well if you didn’t bother them, but TimeMon crashed if I tried to change the colors it used and Batmon crashed if I tried to see the “Info Panel.” Ink ran, but would crash if I tried to click on “Save File,” among other things.
So, following a suggestion of David Chisnall, I fetched and compiled the latest revision of GNUstep via svn on March 20 A.D. 2010. See here for details. I did not configure back using cairo
./configure --enable-graphics=cairo ## I didn't do it this way.
when compiling gnustep-back. Instead I ran ./configure with no options to use the more stable libart backend.
Everything compiled very smoothly. I went on to compile the example applications found in the usr-apps/examples directory of the source downloaded via svn and compiled those. Everything I’ve tried so far works (Ink and GSTest).
Right now I am loking to start the GNUstep system services: gdomap, gdnc, and gpbs in a sane manner. I plan to follow the directions given here in the GNUstep Build Guide.
