# installation failure



## caieng (Jan 15, 2012)

Greetings.

I read this thread, well written, in my opinion:
http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=28500

I receive an error message upon attempting installation, so I have some questions, for I imagine that my problem lies with my relative inexpertise, rather than with the FreeBSD installer itself:

a.  is there a minimum quantity of characters required for user name?  I customarily employ only a single letter.

b.  Is there a place in the installer that asks the user if the user prefers to avoid overwriting the MBR?  I do not wish to have the installer modify my MBR.

c.  I note at distrowatch dot com that the current version of VLC, 1.1.13 is available for FreeBSD, but, it is unclear to me, having not yet succeeded in completing the installation, whether or not this version is installed by default, or, if the user is obliged to remove the other streaming audio software programs, and then download and install VLC?

d.  Is there a link to a location on the forum, that specifies, very clearly, exactly how, in detail, a user is able to invoke an automatic login, bypassing the username and password, features entirely unnecessary for my particular application?  Typically, with a proper installer, for example, Lubuntu comes to mind, this capability is offered during the installation step, itself.  With the two distributions which I more typically employ, myself, CrunchBang Linux and PCLinuxOS-LXDE, the installer fails to offer the user that choice, however, "automatic" login is effortlessly accomplished, post install, by clicking the mouse a couple of times.

Here is the error message I received upon attempting installation:


```
commitDIskLabel was called without any partition entries for it!
```

I have no idea what that means.

regards, 

CAI ENG


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## numpad5 (Jan 19, 2012)

maybe you didn't set up your partitions? otherwise you probabaly would have seen the screen about selecting the MBR, it will  have 3 options, FreeBSD Bootloader, Standard MBR, and no changes to MBR, the error message is probabaly where you might have skipped the label section of disk setup (where to make swap space, mount folders, and how big they should be)


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## wblock@ (Jan 19, 2012)

FreeBSD 9 does not use sysinstall and so does not give the bootloader choice.

caieng, if you're expecting a standard graphical desktop, PC-BSD is going to be closer to what you're expecting.  FreeBSD does not install VLC or even a GUI by default.


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## numpad5 (Jan 19, 2012)

Sorry about that, I haven't tried installing 9.0 yet and haven't been using a newly burned cd since 7.2 or so - when I install fresh I just use 7.2 sysinstall and change the target ftp directory (last time I did that was 8.2) so that it says whatever the stable release was at the time.  For me it was just changing the 7.2-RELEASE in path to 8.2-RELEASE, probably going to have to get a new disk burned if/when I install 9.0 now.


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