The arrow of time

After trying other things, I resorted to using UNetbootin, a very handy utility that prepares bootable USB drives with pre-defined operating systems. It's mainly created for Linux and support for FreeBSD is poor (for example, giving it a regular bootable FreeBSD installer ISO image produces an unbootable USB drive) but in this case I managed to tweak it enough to make it work.

The first obstacle is that UNetbootin has FreeBSD 7.0 image defined but not FreeBSD 7.1. As I discovered, 7.0 doesn't support the LAN chip (a newer Realtek / re chip). Luckily, I noticed that the "ubninit" file UNetbootin creates on the USB drive is a gzipped disk image - actually a fully prepared and disklabeled UFS image. I had a 7-STABLE machine conveniently present so I extracted and mounted the image and copied the newer kernel into the image (overwriting the old one). After returing the ubninit file back, the system successfully booted 7-STABLE which has the driver. After booting this unholy combination of syslinux and FreeBSD, sysinstall needed to be told what to install in the "Options" screen ("7.1-RELEASE" in my case) and it happily performed a network install.

I think I could have copied the 7.1-RELEASE directory and the cdrom.inf file from a bootable ISO image to the USB drive and coerced sysinstall to perform a local installation from the given files, but this is left as an excercise for the reader :)

I decided to waste some more time compiling KDE 4.2 on the laptop. I'm happy to announce that with this operation I conclude my quest to compile large software packages on underpowered CPUs and wish to spend the rest of my days using binary packages somewhere warm. After about 55 hours of compiling, KDE 4.2 was actually built successfully and as far as I can tell, works. Speed is nothing to brag about but it's usable, even with desktop effects.