I just managed to get a Raspberry PI with a USB hard drive to self-compile FreeBSD. It took nearly a week!

Personally I think the image looks pretty good. But the PI playing didn't go well.

I couldn't work out how to put the root partition on the external drive. And that's singular, since the mirroring didn't work either; the module version didn't match the kernel. But I managed to stuff /var and /usr onto faster media.

I also need to name these toys. The blue and red ones are azul and rosa. Those I've got on the operating table exposing their guts are daisy and saffron, and the other two I'll call peter and aaron, because I haven't got enough p's or a's.

I'm pretty sure a lot of the time it takes a PI to recompile itself must be down to the slow SD card, so I've hooked up a couple of old USB drives to another PI. I'm going to mirror them, and chuck everything except the boot code there.

I didn't have suitable drives at home, so I've taken the liberty of, um, borrowing a couple I found lying around at work.

And I'm also trying to link an image: