Today: Switching Swirls for Feebles?

Out of sheer boredom I decided to try FreeBSD again after 8 years (it seems like yesterday when we purchased the server we couldn't find linux SCSI drivers for ...). It went remarkably well, but spiteful people read on:

download the bootonly image from the current FreeBSD ISO download dir,
burn,
boot
installed it on a spare disk (custom installation: I didn't get the hang of the label program the first, second or third time, and then the setup utility complained about too many tasks or something to the effect; after reboot it worked fine)
after reboot, mkdir /usr/ports; portsnap fetch; portsnap extract (shouldn't have /usr/ports have existed in the first place? who cares) installed bash, gdm, fvwm (Xorg was already in the chosen X-Developer distro) from ports
Found pkg_add. Reverted to (silently) swearing since firefox from the packages repository refused to use the libraries installed from ports
```
aoe@df$ firefox
/libexec/ld-elf.so.1: Shared object "libgdk-x11-2.0.so.600" not found,
required by "firefox-bin"
```
Learned about pkg_add -rfv to install gtk20, pango, atk and probably some more
copied the root filesystem to the nfs-server with cp -r

linked pxeboot to my /tftpboot directory and told pxelinux to access it:

# ls -ld /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/df
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 20 Oct 11  2004 /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/df -> 01-00-0e-0c-37-d2-32
# tail -n 2 /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/df
label freebsd
        kernel pxeboot.0

rebooted via pxe and noted that pxeboot wanted to access /pxeroot, so symlinked the copied freebsd tree there
reboot, edit fstab not to use harddisk, edit users, mount correct home dirs, rinse, repeat
for the moment, instead of proper nis/kerberos etc I use a hardcoded uid, which works fine

pitfalls

see cp issues above: with mreindl we established that linux cp -raf (where the -r is redundant as it is implied in -a) does the same as cp -pfR on *bsd. For this reason I had to fix the suid binaries and /tmp, /var/tmp permissions
no nfs locking yet, so vipw refuses to work. So, either I'll have to use nfs locking or do without libdb support (not really an alternative, except for user authentication)
some minor xmodmap weirdness: Minus and Right were misplaced; nothing a little .Xmodmap editing wouldn't fix

So, I now have a dual remote boot nfsroot Debian GNU/Linux - FreeBSD Setup: I wonder how long it will stay that way ... ;)

Time consumed: a few hours (one evening and a long morning). I'm (very cautiously) proud of myself despite the issues.