Yeah, I got networking working; I just needed to recompile the kernel to specify the correct IRQ for the NE2000-compatible card in the machine. I installed via floppies, because I was using a machine with no CD-Rom. General process was:
- Image the three base system floppies and follow the install sequence to get a nominally functional file system.
- Copy the pieces of the bin and kernel portion of the src distribution onto however many floppies it takes (I just cycled through two, replacing as I copied to the dest), then unpack.
After networking was set up, pkg_add was indeed supported, but I only had the set of packages that came on the install CD to install this way (transferred via FTP). I didn't dig too carefully to see if it supported internet fetching or not. Most other applications I wanted I ended up compiling from source. I grabbed a few old versions from the Debian archives http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/debi … .1/main/source/
Got X properly set up with a Cirrus logic 1 MB deal. I was running it at 800x600, but I probably could have gotten 1024 x 768 if I wanted. I was just running the built-in TDM as a display manager and starting via 'startx' rather than using X D M (spaces to prevent smiley detection 😐). This old version of X was a bit ugly to configure, but fairly lightweight on RAM once it was going. The machine only had 16 MB, and this setup fit quite nicely.
If you want more information or what have you, we should probably spin this off into its own thread. I took down a bunch of notes that might be helpful to someone, I suppose.
Here's the link for FreeBSD 1.1, for reference:
http://ftp-archive.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-Ar … SD-1.1-RELEASE/