DragonFly on DigitalOcean

[Nuno Antunes]

> On 14 Dec 2015, at 11:19, Pierre Abbat <phma at leaf.dragonflybsd.org> wrote:
> 
> On Monday, December 14, 2015 09:42:58 Nuno Antunes wrote:
>> I installed DragonFly on DigitalOcean. There is a tutorial somewhere
>> explaining how to install OpenBSD there. What I did was adapting that
>> procedure to install DragonFly instead.
>> 
>> I can’t remember exactly but it was something like installing FreeBSD,
>> dd’ing the DFly installer into the swap partition and then boot from there.
> 
> How did you get it to boot the DFly kernel? The boot kernel is selected in the 
> hypervisor, not by GRUB or a similar bootloader. Maybe that's why they don't 
> support DFly. In Ubuntu and other Linux distros, the kernel is provided as a 
> package, while in DFly kernel and world are compiled from source and are 
> separate from packages.
> 
> Also, how come you got a swap partition? My Linux droplet doesn't have a swap 
> partition. If I want swap, I have to create a swap file in the single disk 
> partition.
> 

Hi Pierre,

Here’s what you have to do to install dfly 4.4 on DigitalOcean:

1. Create a FreeBSD droplet and login to it
2. fetch http://mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org/iso-images/dfly-x86_64-4.4.1_REL.img.bz2
3. bunzip2 dfly-x86_64-4.4.1_REL.img.bz2
4. sudo swapoff /dev/gpt/swapfs
5. sudo sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=0x10
6. sudo dd if=dfly-x86_64-4.4.1_REL.img of=/dev/vtbd0 bs=512k
7. At this point, shutdown /  reboot commands probably no longer work so just go ahead and power cycle the droplet
8. When asked, boot from ufs:vbd0s1a
9. login as root in order to have a shell
10. use fdisk to create a 2nd slice (the first slice is a 2G one created when you dd'ed the usb image into the disk)
11. exit the shell and login as installer
12. install dfly into the 2nd slice.

With this setup you lose the first 2GB to the installer slice but it could also be handy as an emergency slice.

Nuno