I've been looking around for a driver for my ralink rt61 network card, which is the essential piece of hardware/driver needed for me to use an OS. Ralink offers good drivers themselves, but couldn't find a BSD driver. I was actually thinking about attempting to port the linux driver to BSD, but I guessed that would take a lot of work since its a module. Then i found this place: Ralink chipsets based wireless devices Which lists my CNET 854 card as supported, so I'll try FreeBSD now. However, for me to install it, I want to know if the partition table formats are incompatible with msdos partition tables. I dual boot Linux with XP, using an msdos partition table type and if freeBSD requires a different one what types should be required to maintain compatibility?
If I understand the question correctly, then you shouldn't have an issue. BSD partitioning is different than any linux/DOS partitioning scheme. Check out the disk allocation section of the freeBSD handbook. What you would want to do is create a partition the size of the maximum space that you plan to use for BSD. Then you subdivide that partition with slices. /..../usr.../var... and so on. In BSD a partition is labeled like this; if your disk is ad0 then partition one would be ad0s1, partition two would be ad0s2. Slices then subdivide from there. Slice one on partition one would be ad0s1a, then ad0s1b and so on. If windows is on the first part of the drive and is on one partition then it would be ad0s1 (or whatever drive number it is) and you would make a ad0s2 partition for freeBSD. Then something like ad0s1a for root, ad0s1b for swap and so on until you allocate all the space you need. I have never installed BSD on a system with windows on it so I could not tell you if the bootloader will work or not. GRUB will load freeBSD as will a few other open-source bootloaders. **************************************** As always, use at your own risk and read the freeBSD handbook.
What bootloader does freeBSD use, and what is it like? Would using BSD allow me to dual boot linux/xp/bsd easily? At the moment, I'm using GRUB.
The default freeBSD bootloader is called boot0 and is a very simple text menu but will boot linux/windows etc.. You can configure GRUB to boot BSD if you don't want to mess with a new bootloader. Here is the section of the handbook covering the boot process. It does not have instructions for GRUB but google should get that for you.
