Some very rough initial notes on playing with DragonFly BSD on Linode for when I find time to come back and play some more; Of the rest of the BSDs after NetBSD it’s DragonFly BSD that interests me the most.

  • Need a 3GB rescue disk (The zipped image is tiny but extracts to 2GB).
  • 2GB installer disk (to dd the USB image onto).
  • A XGB disk to actually install onto.
  • The install disk will boot fine in paravirtualisation, but won’t recognise the second disk therefore boot the installer in full virtualisation.
  • When the installer boots (para or full) you’ll get an error trying to mount from ufs:da8s2a (must have been how that usb image was set up). You need to enter ufs:ad0s2a (or ufs:da0s2a for paravirtualisation).
  • I elected to use Hammer on the install. The install image will fail similarly on boot moaning about not being able to find /dev/serno/QM00002.s1a, etc. You need to enter hammer: ad0s1a to boot.
  • You can then fix /etc/fstab and change all the /dev/serno/QM00002.s1a to be /dev/ad0s1a, etc.
  • As well as fstab also need to fix boot/loader.conf. Then it’ll boot fine.
  • I didn’t set up a network or anything else so that was the end of the experiment this time.