This guide will teach you to install FreeBSD on a mac. We'll do a fast and advanced install.

What you need:

- 2 cd

- refit installed

So I'll assume you have installed Mac OS X on your first partition and left free space for FreeBSD. I'll also assume you have installed refit. Now burn the refit image to a CD as well as FreeBSD on another cd.

Install FreeBSD booting the cd form refit and go in the live cd option in the installer.

You will get a shell and you can login as root. Doesn't need a password.

Check what your disk looks like with 'gpart show'

It should show your ada0 disk with a 0 partition for the efit and 1, a HFS+ partition for Mac OS X and empty space.

Now we'll make the partitions necessary fo FreeBSD:

- gpart add -t freebsd-boot -s 64k ada0

- gpart add -t freebsd-swap -s <swapsize> ada0 -- (put the swap size you want, I use 1g)

- gpart add -t freebsd-ufs ada0 -- (will use the rest of the space for the root partition, use -s to specify size)

Now you have an
- ada0p3 partition: freebsd-boot
- ada0p4 partition: freebsd-swap
- ada0p5 partition: freebsd-boot

Now make the root partition ready for UFS:

- newfs -j -L disk ada0p5

(check newfs help page for info; ie. -t for trim)


Now mount the root partition and install the kernel and base software:

- mount /dev/ada0p5 /mnt

- tar -xpf /usr/freebsd-dist/kernel.txz -C /mnt

- tar -xpf /usr/freebsd-dist/base.txz -C /mnt

Now make sure FreeBSD mounts the right partitions in /etc/fstab:


Now we want to write the bootcode on the freebsd-boot partition (ada0p3)

- gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr -p /boot/gptboot

The install is finished!

Reboot and normally the mac should not boot anything, just a grey screen.

Insert the refit cd and reboot holding the alt key. Select the refit cd and go to the partition manager and press 'y' to update. Now you can reboot and refit should start and show your OS X and FreeBSD partition. But it will show as a generic system. You can tweak the refit config to make it prettier in /efi/refit/* (on the mac ;))

I have not yet managed to make a single boot FreeBSD partition on a Mac.

After all that, reboot in your glorious FreeBSD install from refit and configure your stuff. I have a 10gb partition for Mac OS X now which is not even updated.

10/10 Would bang again.

The tut is not very long so I didn't bother with colors.

Excellent, I've experimented with FreeBSD on a virtualbox, I'm going to hold off on a dual boot until I'm confident I can use it without fucking it up. Thanks for the tutorial!:D

Good luck with FreeBSD!, I've updated a bit :)

Your last few sentences. Are you saying you haven't found it possible to have a macbook pro with only FreeBSD on it, like no OSX?

Now it is possible, Marco Peereboom from the Bitrig/OpenBSD projects did it: https://github.com/bitrig/bitrig/wiki/Bi...acBook-Pro

You'll just have to use FreeBSD instead :p

Oh and be very careful with your partitioning!

Yeah, I've fucked it up before:P Luckily, there's backups! Hence i'll be experimenting with the majority of the time on virtual box!