These classnotes are depreciated. As of 2005, I no longer teach the classes. Notes will remain online for legacy purposes

UNIX02/FreeBSD Installation

Classnotes | UNIX02 | RecentChanges | Preferences

FreeBSD's installation routine is text-based. However, don't let that frighten you as it is very straight-forward and simple to install. Some would even argue that it is easier to install than Red Hat because it tends to make very intelligent install choices for you (whereas Red Hat can be quite irritating with some of its install decisions).


This is the installation/configuration menu you get during install. It is actually also available once you have FreeBSD installed for reconfiguration and additional package installed. It has been hailed for this because it provides a very consistent interface for both setup and configuration. We are going to be picking "Standard".


FreeBSD's FDISK is very similar to CFDISK under Linux. Since we can, we will go ahead and create partitions for both Linux and BSD here.


Soon we come to a disk label editor. This is where we define which partitions become mount points. You will note that this has a very similar interface to the FDISK we've recently run.


FreeBSD, like other UNIXes, offers a number of "canned" installations (think back to the Red Hat installs choice of "Server", "Workstation", etc.). This is an area where FreeBSD really shines, as these canned choices are really quite intelligently setup. Go ahead and pick 'All'.


We can now choose installation media. FreeBSD can be installed over a network much easier than Red Hat and many other Linux distributions. However, we will be simple installing from CD-ROM.


Once we have selected media, installation of a base FreeBSD system will commence.


Once it has completed, we are reminded that this setup utlity can be run again via /usr/sbin/sysinstall. This means we can reconfigure using this program post-install. It also means if the install is interupted for any reason, we can continue it using this command.


Next comes the network configuration. We will be choosing DHCP in class, but here is what the static IP setup would look like.


We will configure our X server. You should be prompted to setup your mouse as well. It is generally safe to let FreeBSD autodetect your mouse.


Here is where we run into a slight bug in FreeBSD's install. Traditionally, XFree86 involved a manual configuration requiring intimate knowledge of your graphic system. However, there are new autodetection and configuration utilities available, and FreeBSD does not seem to be completely ready for them yet. If you run either of the text-based setups, you will avoid this bug. However, we will be running the 'xf86cfg' graphical setup.


Here is the graphical configuration program. By default, it runs at the highest resolution it can deduce your graphic card allows. We could fix that here, however, we want to look more in-depth into the configuration files later so we wont.


XFree86 stores its configuration files under /etc/X11 (which we will look at later). It also needs an /etc/X11/xkb directory for keyboard resource files which FreeBSD did not create for it (aha! a bug!) Bring up an xterm or switch to the emergency console (Alt-F4) to create this directory.


Once the directory is made, click "Quit" and enter the value for XF86Config as shown.


Next, enter the appropriate xkb path as shown.


Here we can select the default X window system to use. To keep our interfaces consistent across Red Hat and FreeBSD, choose KDE.


If we wanted to install additional packages from the FreeBSD ports system (more info on that later), we could do so here. For now, skip it and just select "Install".


Add a new user for student. Use the student model.


Set the administrator password. Use the administrator model.


We now have the option to go back and reconfigure anything we need to. If you do not need to, select no and exit the install.

You should now have a very functional FreeBSD install!



Classnotes | UNIX02 | RecentChanges | Preferences
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Last edited May 9, 2003 6:02 pm (diff)
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(C) Copyright 2003 Samuel Hart
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