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Comment by jrapdx3 | Hacker News Reader

As a long-time user of FBSD (since 4.x), the book looks like it's quite comprehensive. Keeping up with all the recent changes is difficult, and this detailed reference covers an impressive range of topics (as far as I can determine from the preview), particularly newer and updated features like the Capsicum framework, security features, ZFS, geom among others.

One disappointment is the book doesn't have much to say about UEFI and Secure Boot, which will be important to easily integrate FBSD with other systems on current PC hardware. Understandable though, as they're still in development and the authors not yet ready to discuss it.

For an 800+ page book the price is rather modest. Looks like one that will have to go on my "must get" list.

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If it wasn't ready by print date, it would be a very ugly section. ;) None of the tools people have made to get BIOS 'nixes to install on UEFI worked for me. (Debian still has no install for UEFI.) Maybe this process would work for FreeBSD. Here's what I had to do to get crunchbang going on a 2009 MacBook Pro (which is UEFI):

  1. Install Linux Mint via USB thumbdrive (Ubuntu has UEFI support)
     Use to format and partition destinination drive appropriately
  2. install grml-rescueboot
  3. cp crunchbang .iso to /boot/grml-rescueboot
  4. In the grub CLI (that 40x80 first stage GRUB prompt), set the $root variable
  5. > linux ($root)/install/vmlinux
     > initrd ($root)/install/initrd.*
  6. Insert Crunchbang install DVD, locate CDROM drive in the GRUB CLI
     (enjoy finding things in the 40x80 context)
  7. Install, reboot, sudo update-grub, reboot
  8. Celebrate, and then weep bitterly because it took ten hours to figure out

Bonus: Apple's bootloader is now gone, speeding things up and removing an extra bootup selection. Straight to GRUB.

Does anyone know if this process might work for 'BSD? Haven't installed one since the mid-2000s.

> Debian still has no install for UEFI.

It works fine for me? What's missing? I installed Debian on a UEFI system with gpt disk sometime around May 2013 and it's been running fine since.

https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/ch03s06.html.en...

Yes you're right, except I wasn't able to get a Debian install image to burn to a thumb drive the Mac would recognize. That's why I had to use Mint. Unfortunately, for this particular MBP there are no nvidia drivers that work well or at all in Mint, so I went the masochistic #! install route. I'm glad I did though.

It's about Ubuntu, but using this I was able to create a bootable USB drive with rEFIt, and then booting a FreeBSD live CD image on another stick for installing.

http://www.michaelevans.org/blog/2013/01/15/boot-ubuntu-from...

First this:

> Debian still has no install for UEFI.

Then this:

> I wasn't able to get a Debian install image to burn to a thumb drive the Mac would recognize

Blaming Debian for the locked down nature of Macs and the general shortcomings of Apple-computers for hacking-purposes seems a bit far-fetched.

Get a laptop not made by patent-trolls, and you may expect better Debian-support.

I don't think he is blaming Debian in any way.

Something got lost in translation- I use Debian exclusively as my Linux distro, and Crunchbang is a thin veneer over it. It was a lot of effort to get it going on that MacBook and worth every hour. The distro has zero responsibility to support Mac hardware, but they were close, and the last mile was my job. That's entirely reasonable.

Do you know how happy I was to figure out how to get the Apple bootloader off of the machine? Joyous! I was proud ;)

UEFI just went into FreeBSD (it might make 10.1-RELEASE)

In other words: it's too early.

Feel the Force, Read the Source! :-)

UEFI is in 10.1-BETA1, so I think it's safe to assume that it will be in 10.1-RELEASE. ;-)

But the book claims to "cover all major improvements between Versions 5 and 11". :-)

The UEFI memstick works for me. But there's no EFI ZFS boot loader, root on ZFS is an open feature still.

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