A while ago, I reported I had trouble getting FreeBSD fully functional as a guest OS under Virtual PC. I've revisited this idea and gotten further.
I never got X running on my FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE guest under Virtual PC. Shortly after that, my Windows 2000 installation died after a windows update, and I sort of gave up on Virtual PC. It turns out I didn't really need Windows that desperately after all, and I have a FreeBSD desktop machine I can use if I want to (and it turns out with OS X handy I don't want to very much).
I decided more or less on a whim to resurrect the w2k VPC (it turns out it was quite easy - I just had to blow away the system hive of the registry and reinstall the VPC guest support), and that inspired me to have another go at FreeBSD.
It turns out that whatever was ailing X has been fixed sometime between 4.2.0 and 4.3.0, as I was quite easily able to get a nice 1152x768 16 bit color X server running without too much trouble. There's no trick to it. You just tell X that you need to use the "s3" driver.
The only issue now is that the real time clock runs very slow. I'm hoping that upgrading to 5.2-RELEASE will fix this. If it does, then that will make FreeBSD fully functional. Update! It appears that adding 'kern.timecounter.hardware=i8254' to /etc/sysctl.conf may fix this. Since the machine is virtual, you can't count on the TSC clock being accurate at all. There is also some special software you can run from cron to occasionally sync the virtual clock to the host clock. If it isn't already, I'll look into making that a port.
I'm not sure what use I'll put it to. After all, OS X itself is based on FreeBSD, so I have all of the *nix I really want and need without virtualization.
Posted by nsayer at December 17, 2003 09:46 AMLast but not least, it turns out that for FreeBSD to locate the virtual CDROM drive, you must uncheck the 'use standard configuration' box. I guess FreeBSD can't find it when it's sitting on the secondary controller. Go figure.
Hi, I would like to know how your XFree is configured on the virtual machine. I can't get past 800x600 (8bit) resolution. As soon as I switch to 16bit, X crashes.
Thanks!
Posted by: Jack at February 10, 2004 08:31 AMPosting this in hope of getting some help with others bsd's.
I have been trying fruitlessly to get freebsd5.1 to run xsever and tried every setting imagineable. I will try the setting from this post. Now I have the problem with 5.2 I get as far as the fdisk but it does not recognize the cdrom drive(vpc5 6 or 7), so I cannot install 5.2.1. i am abel to install 5.1. what are other possible options with trying to install 5.2.1 or 5.2.3?
I have same problem with Netbsd in regards to X server I have chosen s3 trio64 as all documentation states this is the video emulated. when xserver starts i get an initial white screen for half a second and then crash. I have been able to get solaris 8 running but cannot get networking dhp running. Also does anyone know if any thirdparty additions exist for BSD or unix on VPC.
will appreciate any response.
##@johnnyqq68 at hotmail dot com
Posted by: johny at November 24, 2004 03:34 PM"Last but not least, it turns out that for FreeBSD to locate the virtual CDROM drive, you must uncheck the 'use standard configuration' box. I guess FreeBSD can't find it when it's sitting on the secondary controller. Go figure."
What do you mean by this? Where do i uncheck it?
Posted by: Yassin Mouna at June 11, 2005 02:38 AM