Last week, I tried to install my new FreeBSD on my new laptop as a dual boot partition, but ran into problems since my first bootable partition had already been formatted as an NTFS drive (Windows 2000 Server).
I thought all was lost, but then remembered VMWare. I have heard great reviews from others, and decided to give it a try myself. I downloaded the 30-day evaluation copy, and installed the software without a hitch. I set up the virtual machine environment for my FreeBSD, and presto -- I was on my way to installing FreeBSD.
I have had to re-install FreeBSD a couple of times because I didn't allocate enough space for the root directory the first time. Easy enough, though, to wipe out the virtual machine and start again. One of the great things about VMWare (among many others) is that I am able to use VMWare as my DHCP server and set up the virtual machine networking with NAT to route the network connection through my server connection to the internet.
I have spent a couple of late nights doing this. I didn't get a chance to compile Rotor yet, but that's tonight. Last night, while waiting for everything to install for my FreeBSD, I listened to David Stutz talk about how they intentionally targeted FreeBSD first as the platform (other than Windows, of course) to demonstrate the portability of the CLI specification. The video I watched came from his book on the Rotor code.
After I get Rotor working and tested, I am thinking of installing my Red Hat Linux version with VMWare in order to install and test the Mono code base. I will let you know how that goes as well.
Anyone else have experiences with intalling Rotor (or Mono) on non-Windows systems? I would like to know what problems and/or solutions you have encountered.
I know Sam has written recently of his experiences of compiling and testing Rotor on his new Mac (using Mac OS X, a flavor of FreeBSD).
