Installation

[Jim]

Frustrated isn’t the word. Am on Linuxmint 20.1 on a mini commercial pc for advertising displays. 64 gmmc. sweet as. only 4gb ram, fast and never working hard. n4100. Have assortment of external drives. And 128 gb mini sd permanent.
Downloaded , tried 15 advertised and raved about distros last 2 weeks. All broken or needing pc specialist to get going. The old school distros all but passed on. System d and big guys of commerce and tech taking over the captive audience including older tech being outdated and incompitable to monopolies.
Verdict for me being a noob is that you need a uni pass in pc tech to particpate. Lot of late nights -4am often of late.
Found NomadBSD. Can’t find any software to load the image and a lot of it appears blocked or changed from doing so these days. Unetbootin loaded it onto usb and it’s not supposed to. came up in grub screen but would’nt boot. Tried over 30 scripts online and from official linuxmint sites to dd the image over. Command box rejects them all. Nomads linux scripts the same. I thought i finally found a good one. Looks and sounds great. Guy on Youtube vid loads it from Windows which i haven’t got access to.

I don’t understand why download can’t be an ISO. I have a 128 g Samsung 3.1 USB , my pocket PC, loaded full install with mint 20.1 from an iso, it’s fast and mint is not a lightweight and getting full of bloat. . Nomad says same result- if you can get it loaded .
Any easy answers i’d be grateful. i might be able to find and willing to pay a tech locally to load it, get it up and running, if i can find one.
I have a feeling nomad is going to dissappear with all the others gone to the wayside and the big guys taking over the net. They were all too much a closed shop of techies circles playing and no time for anyone. Been a long f/night of little sleep. I don’t bother signing up to anything these days only because nomad looks great and i think the older yrs of do it yourself are coming to and end.
Techies failed us with linux. All these yrs should have done a linux bios. Now linux is stuck between proprietary bios and system D and it’s tricks on top.5hrs with nomad today, i’m done

[yodar101]

Welcome to this forum, Jim! Now to your questions:

I don’t understand why download can’t be an ISO.

Because it would mean the OS would be in an read-only file system as ISO 9660 standard does not permit write access to your USB pen drive which NomadBSD needs to do if you want to permenantly install it onto your USB flash drive and use it as your drop-in desktop OS replacement.

Can’t find any software to load the image and a lot of it appears to be blocked or changed from doing so these days.

The NomadBSD Handbook(let) and the NomadBSD Download Section of the NomadBSD homepage describe in detail how to properly flash a NomadBSD image onto your USB flash drive for various operating systems (including GNU/Linux).

(1) NomadBSD - Handbooklet
(2) NomadBSD - Download

Ventoy and other multiboot methods as well as UNetBootin and Co. don’t work either.

Came up in grub screen but wouldn’t boot.

As you may (not) have noticed, FreeBSD - and so does NomadBSD - have their own bootloaders which have to be started from a properly flashed USB pen drive. To set an entry in GNU GRUB2, you’ll have to modify various menuentry files inside your /boot directory inside your Linux distribution.

I have a feeling nomad[BSD] is going to disappear with all the other gone to the wayside and the big guys taking over the net. They were all too much a closed shop of techies circles playing around and no time for anyone. […] Techies failed us with linux. All these yrs should have done a linux bios. Now Linux is stuck between proprietary bios and system D and it’s tricks on top. 5 hrs with nomad today, I’m done.

No, that doesn’t happen, not in the near future. NomadBSD’s hardly going to disappear unless it’s “mother project/OS” or - how you want to call it - FreeBSD disappears which won’t happen because FreeBSD is demanded in various (big tech) companies and businesses nowadays, yes, even those big tech companies who would pleasantly get rid of GNU/Linux and FOSS in general and over which you rambled and cursed them of doing so.

Regarding the BIOS thingy, every computer needs a BIOS, maybe a closed-source one and I doubt FreeBSD can boot without, but I could be wrong, I’m just yet another user who’s not permitted to judge about those topics…

Oh, and systemd doesn’t exist here in the lands of BSDs. Only rc shell scripts loaded onto every boot by init(1) inside /etc/rc.d/, see also rc.d(8) in the official FreeBSD man pages. You may find a web frontend to those here:

(3) for rc.d(8):
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=rc.d&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+13.0-RELEASE+and+Ports&arch=default&format=html

(4) for man pages in general:
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi

Happy BSDing!

YD | yodar101

[tthenrie]

@Jim…
I can feel your frustration, but your issue is not with NomadBSD or FreeBSD, but with your initial assumption that NomadBSD is another linux distribution. IT IS NOT.

Your first step should be to take a break, get some sleep, and come back in the morning. Your second step is to read the NomadBSD handbook (After that, open a tab on the FreeBSD Handbook at freebsd.org for further reference) It’s not too long and won’t take you more than a few minutes. Your third step is to go into your computer’s BIOS (you may have to read your computer’s user manual for that) and set it to boot from a USB drive as the first boot device.

Once that’s done, then you can burn the installation image to your thumb drive, then just plug it in, boot, and start setting it up through the BSD installer. If you haven’t read the manuals as suggested, you won’t be able to make heads or tails of the install options. Just go with defaults if in doubt. It’s easy to reinstall on the next boot if you screw up.

Having said all that, if you are having trouble with Mint, then maybe NomadBSD is not your cup of tea. If you are not willing to spend some time READING a manual, then you won’t have a good experience with FreeBSD. If you ARE willing to read the manual, you will find FreeBSD (on which Nomad is based) to be an enlightening and good experience. You will also find the BSD community very helpful IF you have read the manual. FreeBSD is easier to learn than linux, because of the documentation as well as its stability. It is not a cutting-edge OS, but it is very robust, secure, and stable. It works very well with older hardware, like it appears you may have.

Good luck.
P.S. Try Balena Etcher to burn your install image to the USB. Easy peasy!