I have just tried NomadBSD 1.4-RC1 . I found something that might help others.
Before installing to the hard drive, you should run your pkg commands while running on the USB image:
pkg update
pkg upgrade
The reason is that if you install to the hard drive before updating pkg, you’ll wind up with a pkg that refuses to run without trying to update from pkg-1.16-1 to pkg-1.16-3. Then when it downloads the new pkg, it refuses to install it because the most recent version of pkg-1.16.1 is already installed
If you upgrade pkg before the HDD installation, your installation will complete correctly.
Another note, shutdown -r now does not work. The laptop behaves as if it received a shutdown -h now. The only way I see to restart without provoking errors is to shutdown -p now, then starting up fresh.
Thanks again for NomadBSD.