Ok, there does appear to be some level of interest for FreeBSD, and no one seems to be mightily offended, so I'll do a few posts.
The first thing is to note some quirks you need to be aware of, if you choose to play the FreeBSD game, and some installation details. This isn't a complete installation guide! 1) There is extensive documentation available at www.freebsd.org, most especially the FreeBSD Handbook which is pretty good. This is also where you find links to the download sites. You want the iso image for 4.4 install (4.5 will be out in a few days) which is the current stable release. Since this is a 3 hour download on cable, you may want to search google for CDs (cheapbytes is one source). 2) Other sites of interest - freebsd.dei.uc.pt/news/ (links to other sites) or slahdot.org/bsd (includes stuff for all BSD variants). The primary user list is freebsd-questions (warning, a real fire hose!) 3) You need to do some advance planning. FreeBSD unlike linux can only be installed to a PRIMARY disk partition. I allocated about 6G and I'm currently 60+% used with full gnome and kde installed. Also, there is no way that I'm aware of to boot using Lilo, so there is a grub in your future! Since I haven't installed grub on my mbr, I'm using a grub boot floppy. Here's my partition setup on hdd (my second harddrive) and the grub menu.lst that I use. (I repartitioned first using good old linux fdisk, so /dev/hdd1 was a type 83 partition when I started the FreeBSD install.) /dev/hdd0 good ole Win98 (mbr currently has Lilo) /dev/hdd1 about 6.4 G type a5 (BSD/386) /dev/hdd2 about 480M type 82 (Linux swap) /dev/hdd3 about 6.4G type 83 (Linux) timeout 10 default 0 title Win98 root (hd0,0) makeactive chainloader +1 title bsd-4.4 root (hd1,a) (This is "slice a" - see below for what this means!) kernel /boot/loader boot title hdd3-elx-17 root (hd1,2) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.17 had=ide=scsi hdb=ide=scsi root=/dev/hdd3 ro 4) It is possible to mount linux ext2 partitions under BSD, but I haven't been successful with this yet. Get all the information you need for X, communications, etc. before you start the install! 5) FreeBSD subdivides the harddisk partition(s) you give it into "slices." The standard setup is four slices - / (/dev/ad3s1a), swap (/dev/ad3s1b), /usr (/dev/ad3s1f), and /var (/dev/ad3s1e) filesystems. The /, swap, and /var filesystems are quite small; most of the space goes to /usr which contains the bulk of your system. The "a" slice contains /boot, so this is what you put in the grub boot sequence for FreeBSD. ad3s1a translates into - ad3 (fourth drive on IDE), s1 (partition1), a(the "a" slice). 6) Be prepared to give up some of your peripherals, esp. sound cards. FreeBSD does not support a wide range of peripherals, yet. Fortunately, my FA310TX (tulip) ethernet card works, or I would have abandoned the project. If your video card requires a vendor supplied driver, you may want to use a plain-jane model instead. 7) The install from CD Rom is pretty well self explanatory, once you get past setting up the partition. I used the "default" slice structure; if you plan ahead, you could allocate the slices differently. 8) Unless you are setting up a FreeBSD only machine, decline the option to write anything to the mbr. Use grub. The install does not require you to create a boot floppy, so do your grub work in advance. 9) The install looks a lot like Slackware. I chose all packages and the ports tree (more next time). You will have the opportunity to setup users, communications, X, kde or gnome or other wm. FreeBSD install uses X3.3.x, so you could be without X until you can install 4.1.x, if you have a new fancy card. In my case, S3 Savage4 is (barely) support by 3.3.x. 10) You may (probably will) need to resolve kernel conflicts for certain devices before continuing the install. In my case, the installer could not choose between four or five ethernet choices, and I had to delete the inappropriate choices. This is explained by on screen prompts during the install. 11) After all the packages are installed, you get to configure X the hard way (nothing like the automagic of the latter day linux installs). 12) After I completed the install, I rebooted linux and modified the grub boot floppy (lengthy search on google to find this) to boot FreeBSD, and it worked like a champ - command prompt, then startx to bring up KDE. You can avoid the searches, since I've given you the grub boot stanza for FreeBSD. 13) As you will have noticed above, FreeBSD device names are totally different. Although /dev/fd0 and /dev/lpt0 do look familiar. 14) In the next post, I'll note some of the capabilities and my experience with the product. 15) I recommend that you RTFM, instead of jumping in with both feet like I did. On the other hand, I almost believe you need to try it for some of the RTFM to make sense. Enjoy -- Collins Richey - Denver Area WWTLRD? - FreeBSD 4.4 + xfce + sylpheed _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list Archives, Digests, etc at http://linux.nf/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
