diff --git a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/eresources/chapter.sgml b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/eresources/chapter.sgml index a558e58787..cd5ab48ba8 100644 --- a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/eresources/chapter.sgml +++ b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/eresources/chapter.sgml @@ -1,1652 +1,1654 @@ Resources on the Internet The rapid pace of FreeBSD progress makes print media impractical as a means of following the latest developments. Electronic resources are the best, if not often the only, way stay informed of the latest advances. Since FreeBSD is a volunteer effort, the user community itself also generally serves as a technical support department of sorts, with electronic mail and USENET news being the most effective way of reaching that community. The most important points of contact with the FreeBSD user community are outlined below. If you are aware of other resources not mentioned here, please send them to the &a.doc;so that they may also be included. Mailing Lists Though many of the FreeBSD development members read USENET, we cannot always guarantee that we will get to your questions in a timely fashion (or at all) if you post them only to one of the comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.* groups. By addressing your questions to the appropriate mailing list you will reach both us and a concentrated FreeBSD audience, invariably assuring a better (or at least faster) response. The charters for the various lists are given at the bottom of this document. Please read the charter before joining or sending mail to any list. Most of our list subscribers now receive many hundreds of FreeBSD related messages every day, and by setting down charters and rules for proper use we are striving to keep the signal-to-noise ratio of the lists high. To do less would see the mailing lists ultimately fail as an effective communications medium for the project. Archives are kept for all of the mailing lists and can be searched using the FreeBSD World Wide Web server. The keyword searchable archive offers an excellent way of finding answers to frequently asked questions and should be consulted before posting a question. List Summary General lists: The following are general lists which anyone is free (and encouraged) to join: List Purpose cvs-all Changes made to the FreeBSD source tree freebsd-advocacy FreeBSD Evangelism freebsd-announce Important events and project milestones freebsd-arch Architecture and design discussions freebsd-bugs Bug reports freebsd-chat Non-technical items related to the FreeBSD community freebsd-config Development of FreeBSD installation and configuration tools freebsd-current Discussion concerning the use of FreeBSD-current freebsd-isp Issues for Internet Service Providers using FreeBSD freebsd-jobs FreeBSD employment and consulting opportunities freebsd-newbies New FreeBSD users activities and discussions freebsd-policy FreeBSD Core team policy decisions. Low volume, and read-only freebsd-questions User questions and technical support freebsd-stable Discussion concerning the use of FreeBSD-stable freebsd-test Where to send your test messages instead of one of the actual lists Technical lists: The following lists are for technical discussion. You should read the charter for each list carefully before joining or sending mail to one as there are firm guidelines for their use and content. List Purpose freebsd-afs Porting AFS to FreeBSD freebsd-alpha Porting FreeBSD to the Alpha freebsd-arm Porting FreeBSD to ARM processors freebsd-atm Using ATM networking with FreeBSD freebsd-audit Source code audit project freebsd-binup Design and development of the binary update system freebsd-cluster Using FreeBSD in a clustered environment freebsd-database Discussing database use and development under FreeBSD freebsd-doc Creating FreeBSD related documents freebsd-emulation Emulation of other systems such as Linux/DOS/Windows freebsd-fs Filesystems freebsd-hackers General technical discussion freebsd-hardware General discussion of hardware for running FreeBSD freebsd-i18n FreeBSD Internationalization freebsd-ia64 Porting FreeBSD to Intel's upcoming IA64 systems freebsd-ipfw Technical discussion concerning the redesign of the IP firewall code freebsd-isdn ISDN developers freebsd-java Java developers and people porting JDKs to FreeBSD freebsd-libh The second generation installation and package system freebsd-mobile Discussions about mobile computing freebsd-mozilla Porting mozilla to FreeBSD freebsd-multimedia Multimedia applications freebsd-new-bus Technical discussions about bus architecture freebsd-net Networking discussion and TCP/IP source code freebsd-platforms Concerning ports to non-Intel architecture platforms freebsd-ports Discussion of the ports collection freebsd-ppc Porting FreeBSD to the PowerPC freebsd-qa Discussion of Quality Assurance, usually pending a release freebsd-realtime Development of realtime extensions to FreeBSD freebsd-scsi The SCSI subsystem freebsd-security Security issues freebsd-security-notifications Security notifications freebsd-small Using FreeBSD in embedded applications freebsd-smp Design discussions for [A]Symmetric MultiProcessing freebsd-sparc Porting FreeBSD to Sparc systems freebsd-tokenring Support Token Ring in FreeBSD Limited lists: The following lists are for more specialized (and demanding) audiences and are probably not of interest to the general public. It is also a good idea to establish a presence in the technical lists before joining one of these limited lists so that you will understand the communications etiquette involved. List Purpose freebsd-core FreeBSD core team freebsd-hubs People running mirror sites (infrastructural support) freebsd-install Installation development freebsd-user-groups User group coordination freebsd-www Maintainers of www.freebsd.org Digest lists: Many of the above lists are also available as digests. New messages posted to the list are collected and sent out as a single email when the sizes goes over 100KB. The lists available in digest form are: List freebsd-afs-digest freebsd-alpha-digest freebsd-chat-digest freebsd-current-digest freebsd-cvs-all-digest freebsd-database-digest freebsd-hackers-digest freebsd-ia64-digest freebsd-isdn-digest freebsd-java-digest freebsd-questions-digest freebsd-security-digest freebsd-sparc-digest freebsd-stable-digest freebsd-test-digest CVS lists: The following lists are for people interested in seeing the log messages for changes to various areas of the source tree. They are Read-Only lists and should not have mail sent to them. List Source area Area Description (source for) cvs-all /usr/src All changes to the tree (superset) How to Subscribe All mailing lists live on FreeBSD.org, so to post to a given list you simply mail to <listname@FreeBSD.org>. It will then be redistributed to mailing list members world-wide. To subscribe to a list, send mail to &a.majordomo; and include subscribe <listname> [<optional address>] in the body of your message. For example, to subscribe yourself to freebsd-announce, you would do: &prompt.user; mail majordomo@FreeBSD.org subscribe freebsd-announce ^D If you want to subscribe yourself under a different name, or submit a subscription request for a local mailing list (this is more efficient if you have several interested parties at one site, and highly appreciated by us!), you would do something like: &prompt.user; mail majordomo@FreeBSD.org subscribe freebsd-announce local-announce@somesite.com ^D Finally, it is also possible to unsubscribe yourself from a list, get a list of other list members or see the list of mailing lists again by sending other types of control messages to majordomo. For a complete list of available commands, do this: &prompt.user; mail majordomo@FreeBSD.org help ^D Again, we would like to request that you keep discussion in the technical mailing lists on a technical track. If you are only interested in important announcements then it is suggested that you join freebsd-announce, which is intended only for infrequent traffic. List Charters All FreeBSD mailing lists have certain basic rules which must be adhered to by anyone using them. Failure to comply with these guidelines will result in two (2) written warnings from the FreeBSD Postmaster postmaster@FreeBSD.org, after which, on a third offense, the poster will removed from all FreeBSD mailing lists and filtered from further posting to them. We regret that such rules and measures are necessary at all, but today's Internet is a pretty harsh environment, it would seem, and many fail to appreciate just how fragile some of its mechanisms are. Rules of the road: The topic of any posting should adhere to the basic charter of the list it is posted to, e.g. if the list is about technical issues then your posting should contain technical discussion. Ongoing irrelevant chatter or flaming only detracts from the value of the mailing list for everyone on it and will not be tolerated. For free-form discussion on no particular topic, the freebsd-chat freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.org mailing list is freely available and should be used instead. No posting should be made to more than 2 mailing lists, and only to 2 when a clear and obvious need to post to both lists exists. For most lists, there is already a great deal of subscriber overlap and except for the most esoteric mixes (say "-stable & -scsi"), there really is no reason to post to more than one list at a time. If a message is sent to you in such a way that multiple mailing lists appear on the Cc line then the Cc line should also be trimmed before sending it out again. You are still responsible for your own cross-postings, no matter who the originator might have been. Personal attacks and profanity (in the context of an argument) are not allowed, and that includes users and developers alike. Gross breaches of netiquette, like excerpting or reposting private mail when permission to do so was not and would not be forthcoming, are frowned upon but not specifically enforced. However, there are also very few cases where such content would fit within the charter of a list and it would therefore probably rate a warning (or ban) on that basis alone. Advertising of non-FreeBSD related products or services is strictly prohibited and will result in an immediate ban if it is clear that the offender is advertising by spam. Individual list charters: FREEBSD-AFS Andrew File System This list is for discussion on porting and using AFS from CMU/Transarc FREEBSD-ANNOUNCE Important events / milestones This is the mailing list for people interested only in occasional announcements of significant FreeBSD events. This includes announcements about snapshots and other releases. It contains announcements of new FreeBSD capabilities. It may contain calls for volunteers etc. This is a low volume, strictly moderated mailing list. FREEBSD-ARCH Architecture and design discussions This list is for discussion of the FreeBSD architecture. Messages will mostly be kept strictly technical in nature. Examples of suitable topics are: How to re-vamp the build system to have several customized builds running at the same time. What needs to be fixed with VFS to make Heidemann layers work. How do we change the device driver interface to be able to use the same drivers cleanly on many buses and architectures. How to write a network driver. FREEBSD-AUDIT Source code audit project This is the mailing list for the FreeBSD source code audit project. Although this was originally intended for security-related changes, its charter has been expanded to review any code changes. This list is very heavy on patches, and is probably of no interest to the average FreeBSD user. Security discussions not related to a particular code change are held on freebsd-security. Conversely, all developers are encouraged to send their patches here for review, especially if they touch a part of the system where a bug may adversely affect the integrity of the system. FREEBSD-BINUP FreeBSD Binary Update Project This list exists to provide discussion for the binary - update system, or binup. Design issues, implemetation details, + update system, or binup. + Design issues, implementation details, patches, bug reports, status reports, feature requests, commit - logs, and all other things related to binup are fair game. + logs, and all other things related to + binup are fair game. FREEBSD-BUGS Bug reports This is the mailing list for reporting bugs in FreeBSD Whenever possible, bugs should be submitted using the &man.send-pr.1; command or the WEB interface to it. FREEBSD-CHAT Non technical items related to the FreeBSD community This list contains the overflow from the other lists about non-technical, social information. It includes discussion about whether Jordan looks like a toon ferret or not, whether or not to type in capitals, who is drinking too much coffee, where the best beer is brewed, who is brewing beer in their basement, and so on. Occasional announcements of important events (such as upcoming parties, weddings, births, new jobs, etc) can be made to the technical lists, but the follow ups should be directed to this -chat list. FREEBSD-CORE FreeBSD core team This is an internal mailing list for use by the core members. Messages can be sent to it when a serious FreeBSD-related matter requires arbitration or high-level scrutiny. FREEBSD-CURRENT Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current This is the mailing list for users of freebsd-current. It includes warnings about new features coming out in -current that will affect the users, and instructions on steps that must be taken to remain -current. Anyone running current must subscribe to this list. This is a technical mailing list for which strictly technical content is expected. FREEBSD-CURRENT-DIGEST Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current This is the digest version of the freebsd-current mailing list. The digest consists of all messages sent to freebsd-current bundled together and mailed out as a single message. This list is Read-Only and should not be posted to. FREEBSD-DOC Documentation project This mailing list is for the discussion of issues and projects related to the creation of documentation for FreeBSD. The members of this mailing list are collectively referred to as The FreeBSD Documentation Project. It is an open list; feel free to join and contribute! FREEBSD-FS Filesystems Discussions concerning FreeBSD filesystems. This is a technical mailing list for which strictly technical content is expected. FREEBSD-IPFW IP Firewall This is the forum for technical discussions concerning the redesign of the IP firewall code in FreeBSD. This is a technical mailing list for which strictly technical content is expected. FREEBSD-IA64 Porting FreeBSD to IA64 This is a technical mailing list for individuals actively working on porting FreeBSD to the IA-64 platform from Intel, to bring up problems or discuss alternative solutions. Individuals interested in following the technical discussion are also welcome. FREEBSD-ISDN ISDN Communications This is the mailing list for people discussing the development of ISDN support for FreeBSD. FREEBSD-JAVA Java Development This is the mailing list for people discussing the development of significant Java applications for FreeBSD and the porting and maintenance of JDKs. FREEBSD-HACKERS Technical discussions This is a forum for technical discussions related to FreeBSD. This is the primary technical mailing list. It is for individuals actively working on FreeBSD, to bring up problems or discuss alternative solutions. Individuals interested in following the technical discussion are also welcome. This is a technical mailing list for which strictly technical content is expected. FREEBSD-HACKERS-DIGEST Technical discussions This is the digest version of the freebsd-hackers mailing list. The digest consists of all messages sent to freebsd-hackers bundled together and mailed out as a single message. This list is Read-Only and should not be posted to. FREEBSD-HARDWARE General discussion of FreeBSD hardware General discussion about the types of hardware that FreeBSD runs on, various problems and suggestions concerning what to buy or avoid. FREEBSD-HUBS Mirror sites Announcements and discussion for people who run FreeBSD mirror sites. FREEBSD-INSTALL Installation discussion This mailing list is for discussing FreeBSD installation development for the future releases. FREEBSD-ISP Issues for Internet Service Providers This mailing list is for discussing topics relevant to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) using FreeBSD. This is a technical mailing list for which strictly technical content is expected. FREEBSD-NEWBIES Newbies activities discussion We cover any of the activities of newbies that are not already dealt with elsewhere, including: independent learning and problem solving techniques, finding and using resources and asking for help elsewhere, how to use mailing lists and which lists to use, general chat, making mistakes, boasting, sharing ideas, stories, moral (but not technical) support, and taking an active part in the FreeBSD community. We take our problems and support questions to freebsd-questions, and use freebsd-newbies to meet others who are doing the same things that we do as newbies. FREEBSD-PLATFORMS Porting to Non-Intel platforms Cross-platform FreeBSD issues, general discussion and proposals for non-Intel FreeBSD ports. This is a technical mailing list for which strictly technical content is expected. FREEBSD-POLICY Core team policy decisions This is a low volume, read-only mailing list for FreeBSD Core Team Policy decisions. FREEBSD-PORTS Discussion of ports Discussions concerning FreeBSD's ports collection (/usr/ports), proposed ports, modifications to ports collection infrastructure and general coordination efforts. This is a technical mailing list for which strictly technical content is expected. FREEBSD-QUESTIONS User questions This is the mailing list for questions about FreeBSD. You should not send how to questions to the technical lists unless you consider the question to be pretty technical. FREEBSD-QUESTIONS-DIGEST User questions This is the digest version of the freebsd-questions mailing list. The digest consists of all messages sent to freebsd-questions bundled together and mailed out as a single message. FREEBSD-SCSI SCSI subsystem This is the mailing list for people working on the scsi subsystem for FreeBSD. This is a technical mailing list for which strictly technical content is expected. FREEBSD-SECURITY Security issues FreeBSD computer security issues (DES, Kerberos, known security holes and fixes, etc). This is a technical mailing list for which strictly technical content is expected. FREEBSD-SECURITY-NOTIFICATIONS Security Notifications Notifications of FreeBSD security problems and fixes. This is not a discussion list. The discussion list is FreeBSD-security. FREEBSD-SMALL Using FreeBSD in embedded applications This list discusses topics related to unusually small and embedded FreeBSD installations. This is a technical mailing list for which strictly technical content is expected. FREEBSD-STABLE Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-stable This is the mailing list for users of freebsd-stable. It includes warnings about new features coming out in -stable that will affect the users, and instructions on steps that must be taken to remain -stable. Anyone running stable should subscribe to this list. This is a technical mailing list for which strictly technical content is expected. FREEBSD-USER-GROUPS User Group Coordination List This is the mailing list for the coordinators from each of the local area Users Groups to discuss matters with each other and a designated individual from the Core Team. This mail list should be limited to meeting synopsis and coordination of projects that span User Groups. Usenet Newsgroups In addition to two FreeBSD specific newsgroups, there are many others in which FreeBSD is discussed or are otherwise relevant to FreeBSD users. Keyword searchable archives are available for some of these newsgroups from courtesy of Warren Toomey wkt@cs.adfa.edu.au. BSD Specific Newsgroups comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.announce comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Other Unix Newsgroups of Interest comp.unix comp.unix.questions comp.unix.admin comp.unix.programmer comp.unix.shell comp.unix.user-friendly comp.security.unix comp.sources.unix comp.unix.advocacy comp.unix.misc comp.bugs.4bsd comp.bugs.4bsd.ucb-fixes comp.unix.bsd X Window System comp.windows.x.i386unix comp.windows.x comp.windows.x.apps comp.windows.x.announce comp.windows.x.intrinsics comp.windows.x.motif comp.windows.x.pex comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine World Wide Web Servers http://www.FreeBSD.org/ — Central Server. http://www.au.FreeBSD.org/ — Australia/1. http://www2.au.FreeBSD.org/ — Australia/2. http://www3.au.FreeBSD.org/ — Australia/3. http://freebsd.itworks.com.au/ — Australia/4. http://www.br.FreeBSD.org/www.freebsd.org/ — Brazil/1. http://www2.br.FreeBSD.org/www.freebsd.org/ — Brazil/2. http://www3.br.FreeBSD.org/ — Brazil/3. http://www.bg.FreeBSD.org/ — Bulgaria. http://www.ca.FreeBSD.org/ — Canada/1. http://www2.ca.FreeBSD.org/ — Canada/2. http://www3.ca.FreeBSD.org/ — Canada/3. http://www.cn.FreeBSD.org/ — China. http://www.cz.FreeBSD.org/ — Czech Republic. http://www.dk.FreeBSD.org/ — Denmark. http://www.ee.FreeBSD.org/ — Estonia. http://www.fi.FreeBSD.org/ — Finland. http://www.fr.FreeBSD.org/ — France. http://www.de.FreeBSD.org/ — Germany/1. http://www1.de.FreeBSD.org/ — Germany/2. http://www2.de.FreeBSD.org/ — Germany/3. http://www.gr.FreeBSD.org/ — Greece. http://www.hu.FreeBSD.org/ — Hungary. http://www.is.FreeBSD.org/ — Iceland. http://www.ie.FreeBSD.org/ — Ireland. http://www.jp.FreeBSD.org/www.FreeBSD.org/ — Japan. http://www.kr.FreeBSD.org/ — Korea/1. http://www2.kr.FreeBSD.org/ — Korea/2. http://www.lv.FreeBSD.org/ — Latvia. http://rama.asiapac.net/freebsd/ — Malaysia. http://www.nl.FreeBSD.org/ — Netherlands/1. http://www2.nl.FreeBSD.org/ — Netherlands/2. http://www.no.FreeBSD.org/ — Norway. http://www.nz.FreeBSD.org/ — New Zealand. http://www.pl.FreeBSD.org/ — Poland/1. http://www2.pl.FreeBSD.org/ — Poland/2. http://www.pt.FreeBSD.org/ — Portugal/1. http://www2.pt.FreeBSD.org/ — Portugal/2. http://www3.pt.FreeBSD.org/ — Portugal/3. http://www.ro.FreeBSD.org/ — Romania. http://www.ru.FreeBSD.org/ — Russia/1. http://www2.ru.FreeBSD.org/ — Russia/2. http://www3.ru.FreeBSD.org/ — Russia/3. http://www4.ru.FreeBSD.org/ — Russia/4. http://freebsd.s1web.com/ — Singapore. http://www.sk.FreeBSD.org/ — Slovak Republic. http://www.si.FreeBSD.org/ — Slovenia. http://www.es.FreeBSD.org/ — Spain. http://www.za.FreeBSD.org/ — South Africa/1. http://www2.za.FreeBSD.org/ — South Africa/2. http://www.se.FreeBSD.org/ — Sweden. http://www.ch.FreeBSD.org/ — Switzerland. http://www.tw.FreeBSD.org/www.freebsd.org/data/ — Taiwan. http://www.tr.FreeBSD.org/ — Turkey. http://www.ua.FreeBSD.org/www.freebsd.org/ — Ukraine/1. http://www2.ua.FreeBSD.org/ — Ukraine/2. http://www4.ua.FreeBSD.org/ — Ukraine/Crimea. http://www.uk.FreeBSD.org/ — United Kingdom/1. http://www2.uk.FreeBSD.org/ — United Kingdom/2. http://www3.uk.FreeBSD.org/ — United Kingdom/3. http://www6.FreeBSD.org/ — USA/Oregon. http://www2.FreeBSD.org/ — USA/Texas. Email Addresses The following user groups provide FreeBSD related email addresses for their members. The listed administrator reserves the right to revoke the address if it is abused in any way. Domain Facilities User Group Administrator ukug.uk.FreeBSD.org Forwarding only freebsd-users@uk.FreeBSD.org Lee Johnston lee@uk.FreeBSD.org Shell Accounts The following user groups provide shell accounts for people who are actively supporting the FreeBSD project. The listed administrator reserves the right to cancel the account if it is abused in any way. Host Access Facilities Administrator storm.uk.FreeBSD.org SSH only Read-only cvs, personal web space, email &a.brian dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org Telnet/FTP/SSH Email, Web space, Anonymous FTP Lee Johnston lee@uk.FreeBSD.org diff --git a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install/chapter.sgml b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install/chapter.sgml index 33586fd81b..c146159442 100644 --- a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install/chapter.sgml +++ b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install/chapter.sgml @@ -1,5310 +1,5311 @@ Jim Mock Restructured, reorganized, and parts rewritten by Randy Pratt The sysinstall walkthrough, screenshots, and general copy by Installing FreeBSD Synopsis installation FreeBSD is provided with a text-based, easy to use installation program called Sysinstall. This is the default installation program for FreeBSD, although vendors are free to provide their own installation suite if they wish. This chapter describes how to use Sysinstall to install FreeBSD. After reading this chapter you will know: How to create the FreeBSD installation disks. How FreeBSD refers to, and subdivides, your hard disks. How to start Sysinstall. The questions Sysinstall will ask you, what they mean, and how to answer them. Before reading this chapter you should: Read the supported hardware list that shipped with the version of FreeBSD you are installing, and verify that your hardware is supported. In general, these installation instructions are written for i386 (PC compatible) architecture computers. Where applicable, instructions specific to other platforms (for example, Alpha) will be listed. Pre-installation Tasks Inventory Your Computer Before installing FreeBSD you should attempt to inventory the components in your computer. The FreeBSD installation routines will show you the components (hard disks, network cards, CDROM drives, and so forth) with their model number and manufacturer. FreeBSD will also attempt to determine the correct configuration for these devices, which includes information about IRQ and IO port usage. Due to the vagaries of PC hardware this process is not always completely successful, and you may need to correct FreeBSD's determination of your configuration. If you already have another operating system installed, such as Windows, or Linux, it is a good idea to use the facilities provided by those operating systems to see how your hardware is already configured. If you are really not sure what settings an expansion card is using you may find it printed on the card itself. Popular IRQ numbers are 3, 5, and 7, and IO port addresses are normally written as hexadecimal numbers, such as 0x330. We recommend you print or write down this information before installing FreeBSD. It may help to use a table, like this; Sample Device Inventory Device Name IRQ IO port(s) Notes First hard disk N/A N/A 4GB, made by Seagate, first IDE master CDROM N/A N/A First IDE slave Second hard disk N/A N/A 2GB, made by IBM, second IDE master First IDE controller 14 0x1f0 Network card N/A N/A Intel 10/100 Modem N/A N/A 3Com 56K faxmodem, on COM1: …
Backup Your Data If the computer you will be installing FreeBSD on contains valuable data then ensure you have it backed up, and that you have tested the backups before installing FreeBSD. The FreeBSD installation routine will prompt you several times before writing any data to your disk, but once that process has started it can not be undone. Decide Where to Install FreeBSD If you want FreeBSD to use all your disk then there is nothing more to concern yourself with at this point, and you can skip to the next section.. However, if you need FreeBSD to co-exist with other operating systems then you need to have a rough understanding of how data is laid out on the disk, and how this affects you. Disk Layouts for the i386 A PC disk can be divided in to discrete chunks. These chunks are called partitions. By design, the PC only supports four partitions per disk. These partitions are called primary partitions. To work around this limitation, and allow more than four partitions, a new partition type was created, the extended partition. A disk may contain only one extended partition. Special partitions, called logical partitions, can be created inside this extended partition. Each partition has a partition ID, which is a number, used to identify the type of data on the partition. FreeBSD partitions have the partition ID 165. In general, each operating system that you use will identify partitions in a particular way. For example, DOS, and its descendants, like Windows, assign each primary and logical partition a drive letter, starting with C:. FreeBSD must be installed in to a primary partition. FreeBSD can keep all its data, including any files that you create, on this one partition. However, if you have multiple disks then you can create a FreeBSD partition on all, or some, of them. When you install FreeBSD you must have one partition available. This might be a blank partition that you have prepared, or it might be an existing partition that contains data that you no longer care about. If you are already using all the partitions on all your disks then you will have to free one of them for FreeBSD to use, using the tools provided by the other operating systems you use (e.g., fdisk on DOS or Windows). If you have a spare partition then you can use that. However, you may need to shrink one or more of your existing partitions first. A minimal installation of FreeBSD takes as little as 100MB of disk space. However, that is a very minimal install, leaving almost no space for your own files. A more realistic minimum is 250MB without a graphical environment, and 350MB or more if you want a graphical user interface. If you intend to install a lot of third party software as well then you will need more space. You can use a commercial tool such as Partition Magic to resize your partitions to make space for FreeBSD. The tools directory on the CDROM contains two free software tools which can carry out this task, FIPS and PResizer. Documentation for both of these is in the same directory. Incorrect use of these tools can delete the data on your disk. Be sure that you have recent, working backups before using them. Using an existing partition unchanged Suppose that you have a computer with a single 4GB disk, that already has a version of Windows installed, and you have split the disk in to two drive letters, C: and D:, each of which is 2GB in size. You have 1GB of data on C:, and 0.5GB of data on D:. This means that your disk has two partitions on it, one per drive letter. You can copy all your existing data from D: to C:, which will free up the second partition, ready for FreeBSD. Shrinking an existing partition Suppose that you have a computer with a single 4GB disk, that already has a version of Windows installed. When you installed Windows you created one large partition, giving you a C: drive that is 4GB in size. You are currently using 1.5GB of space, and want FreeBSD to have 2GB of space. In order to install FreeBSD you will need to either: Back up your Windows data, and then reinstall Windows, asking for a 2GB partition at install time. Use one of the tools such as Partition Magic, described above, to shrink your Windows partition. Disk Layouts for the Alpha Alpha You will need a dedicated disk for FreeBSD on the Alpha. It is not possible to share a disk with another operating system at this time. Depending on the specific Alpha machine you have, this disk can either be a SCSI disk or an IDE disk, as long as your machine is capable of booting from it. Following the conventions of the Digital / Compaq manuals all SRM input is shown in uppercase. SRM is case - insensitve. + insensitive. To find the names and types of disks in your machine, use the SHOW DEVICE command from the SRM console prompt: >>>show device dka0.0.0.4.0 DKA0 TOSHIBA CD-ROM XM-57 3476 dkc0.0.0.1009.0 DKC0 RZ1BB-BS 0658 dkc100.1.0.1009.0 DKC100 SEAGATE ST34501W 0015 dva0.0.0.0.1 DVA0 ewa0.0.0.3.0 EWA0 00-00-F8-75-6D-01 pkc0.7.0.1009.0 PKC0 SCSI Bus ID 7 5.27 pqa0.0.0.4.0 PQA0 PCI EIDE pqb0.0.1.4.0 PQB0 PCI EIDE This example is from a Digital Personal Workstation 433au and shows three disks attached to the machine. The first is a CDROM drive called DKA0 and the other two are disks and are called DKC0 and - DKC100 repectively. + DKC100 respectively. Disks with names of the form DKx are SCSI disks. For example DKA100 refers to a SCSI with SCSI target ID 1 on the first SCSI bus (A), whereas DKC300 refers to a SCSI disk with SCSI ID 3 on the third SCSI bus (C). Devicename PKxrefers to the SCSI host bus adapter. As seen in the SHOW DEVICE output SCSI - CDROM drives are treated as any other SCSI harddisk drive. + CDROM drives are treated as any other SCSI hard disk drive. IDE disks have names like DQx, PQx is the associated IDE controller. Collect Your Network Configuration Details If you intend to connect to a network as part of your FreeBSD installation (e.g., if you will be installing from an FTP site, or an NFS server) then you need to know your network configuration. You will be prompted for this information during the installation so that FreeBSD can connect to the network to complete the install. Connecting to an Ethernet Network, or Cable/DSL Modem If you connect to an Ethernet network, or you have an Internet connection via cable or DSL then you will need the following information: IP address. IP address of the default gateway. Hostname. DNS server IP addresses. If you do not know this information then ask your system administrator or service provider. They may say that this information is assigned automatically, using DHCP. If so, make a note of this. Connecting Using a Modem If you dial up to an ISP using a regular modem then you can still install FreeBSD over the Internet, it will just take a very long time. You will need to know: The phone number to dial for your ISP. The COM: port your modem is connected to. The username and password for your ISP account. Check for FreeBSD Errata Although the FreeBSD project strives to ensure that each release of FreeBSD is as stable as possible, bugs do occasionally creep in to the process. On very rare occasions those bugs affect the installation process. As these problems are discovered and fixed they are noted in the FreeBSD Errata, posted on the FreeBSD web site. You should check the errata before installing to make sure that there are no late-breaking problems which you should be aware of. Information about all the releases, including the errata for each release, can be found on the release information section of the FreeBSD web site. Prepare the Boot Discs FreeBSD can be installed from a number of different media; CDROM, DVD, FTP (both anonymous and non-anonymous), NFS, tape, or an existing MS-DOS partition. If you have FreeBSD on CDROM or DVD, and your computer allows you to boot from the CDROM or DVD (typically a BIOS option called Boot Order or similar) then you can skip this section. The FreeBSD CDROM and DVD images are bootable, and can be used to install FreeBSD without any other special preparation. The FreeBSD installation process is started by booting your computer in to the FreeBSD installer—it is not a program you run from within another operating system. To do this you must create some floppy disks that can be booted from, and then boot from them. If you are not installing directly from CDROM, DVD, or FTP then you are probably preparing your own installation media (e.g., an MS-DOS partition), which must be prepared before you install FreeBSD. This is a slightly more advanced, and infrequent activity, and is documented in . This includes the scenario where you want to create your own FTP site on your own network so that other computers can use your site as a FreeBSD FTP installation site. Acquire the Boot Floppy Images The boot discs are available on your installation media, and can also be downloaded from the floppies directory. The floppy images have a .flp extension. The floppies/ directory contains a number of different images, and the ones you will need to use depends on the version of FreeBSD you are installing, and in some cases, the hardware you are installing to. In most cases you will need two files, kern.flp and mfsroot.flp, but check README.TXT in the same directory to be sure. Your FTP program must use binary mode to download these disk images. Some web browsers have been known to use text (or ASCII) mode, which will be apparent if you can not boot from the disks. Prepare the Floppy Disks You must prepare one floppy disk per image file you had to download. It is imperative that these disks are free from defects. The easiest way to test this is to format the disks for yourself. Do not trust pre-formatted floppies. If you try to install FreeBSD and the installation program crashes, freezes, or otherwise misbehaves one of the first things to suspect is the floppies. Try writing the floppy image files to some other disks, and try again. Write the Image Files to the Floppy Disks. The .flp files are not regular files you copy to the disk. Instead, they are images of the complete contents of the disk. This means that you can not use commands like DOS' copy to write the files. Instead, you must use specific tools to write the images directly to the disk. DOS If you are creating the floppies on a computer running DOS/Windows then we provide a tool to do this called fdimage. If you are using the floppies from the CDROM, and your CDROM is the E: drive then you would run this: E:\> tools\fdimage floppies\kern.flp A: Repeat this command for each .flp file, replacing the floppy disk each time, and being sure to label the disks with the name of the file that you copied to them. Adjust the command line as necessary, depending on where you have placed the .flp files. If you do not have the CDROM then fdimage can be downloaded from the tools directory on the FreeBSD FTP site. If you are writing the floppies on a Unix system (such as another FreeBSD system) you can use the &man.dd.1; command to write the image files directly to disk. On FreeBSD you would run: &prompt.root; dd if=kern.flp of=/dev/fd0 On FreeBSD /dev/fd0 refers to the first floppy disk (the A: drive). /dev/fd1 would be the B: drive, and so on. Other Unix variants might have different names for the floppy disk devices, and you will need to check the documentation for the system as necessary. You are now ready to start installing FreeBSD. Starting the Installation By default, the installation will not make any changes to your disk(s) until you see the following message. Last Chance: Are you SURE your want continue the installation? If you're running this on a disk with data you wish to save then WE STRONGLY ENCOURAGE YOU TO MAKE PROPER BACKUPS before proceeding! We can take no responsibility for lost disk contents! The install can be exited at any time prior to the final warning without changing the contents of the hard drive. If you are concerned that you have configured something incorrectly you can just turn the computer off before this point, and no damage will be done. Booting Booting for the i386 Start with your computer turned off. Turn on the computer. As it starts it should display an option to enter the system set up menu, or BIOS, commonly reached by keys like F2, F10, Del, or Alt S . Use whichever keystroke is indicated on screen. In some cases your computer may display a graphic while it starts. Typically, pressing Esc will dismiss the graphic and allow you to see the necessary messages. Find the setting that controls which devices the system boots from. This is commonly shown as a list of devices, such as Floppy, CDROM, First Hard Disk, and so on. If you needed to prepare boot floppies then make sure that the floppy disk is selected. If you are booting from the CDROM then make sure that that is selected instead. In case of doubt you should consult the manual that came with your computer, and/or its motherboard. Make the change, then save, and exit. The computer should now restart. If you needed to prepare boot floppies, as described in then one of them will be the first boot disc, probably the one containing kern.flp. Put this disc in your floppy drive. If you are booting from CDROM then you will need to turn on the computer, and insert the CDROM at the first opportunity. If your computer starts up as normal, and loads your existing operating system then either: The disks were not inserted early enough in the boot process. Leave them in, and try restarting your computer. The BIOS changes earlier did not work correctly. You should redo that step until you get the right option. FreeBSD will start to boot. If you are booting from CDROM you will see a display similar to this: Verifying DMI Pool Data ........ Boot from ATAPI CD-ROM : 1. FD 2.88MB System Type-(00) /boot.config: -P Keyboard: yes BTX loader 1.00 BTX version is 1.01 Console: internal video/keyboard BIOS drive A: is disk0 BIOS drive B: is disk1 BIOS drive C: is disk2 BIOS drive C: is disk3 BIOS 639kB/64512kB available memory FreeBSD/i386 bootstrap loader, Revision 0.8 (jkh@bento.freebsd.org, Mon Nov 20 11:41:23 GMT 2000) | Hit [Enter] to boot immediately, or any other key for command prompt. Booting [kernel] in 9 seconds... _ If you are booting from floppy disc you will see a display similar to this: Verifying DMI Pool Data ........ BTX loader 1.00 BTX version is 1.01 Console: internal video/keyboard BIOS drive A: is disk0 BIOS drive C: is disk1 BIOS 639kB/261120kB available memory FreeBSD/i386 bootstrap loader, Revision 0.8 (jkh@narf.osd.bsdi.com, Sat Apr 21 08:46:19 GMT 2001) /kernel text=0x24f1bb data=0x307ac+0x2062c | Please insert MFS root floppy and press enter: Follow these instructions by removing the kern.flp disc, insert the mfsroot.flp disc, and press Enter. Irrespective of whether you booted from floppy or CDROM, the boot process will then get to this point. Hit [Enter] to boot immediately, or any other key for command prompt. Booting [kernel] in 9 seconds... _ Either wait ten seconds, or press Enter. This will then launch the kernel configuration menu. Booting for the Alpha Alpha Start with your computer turned off. Turn on the computer and wait for a boot monitor prompt. If you needed to prepare boot floppies, as described in then one of them will be the first boot disc, probably the one containing kern.flp. Put this disc in your floppy drive and type the following command to boot the disk (substituting the name of your floppy drive if necessary): >>>BOOT DVA0 -FLAGS '' -FILE '' If you are booting from CDROM, insert the CDROM into the drive and type the following command to start the installation (substituting the name of the appropriate CDROM drive if necessary): >>>BOOT DKA0 -FLAGS '' -FILE '' FreeBSD will start to boot. If you are booting from a floppy disc, at some point you will see the message: Please insert MFS root floppy and press enter: Follow these instructions by removing the kern.flp disc, insert the mfsroot.flp disc, and press Enter. Irrespective of whether you booted from floppy or CDROM, the boot process will then get to this point. Hit [Enter] to boot immediately, or any other key for command prompt. Booting [kernel] in 9 seconds... _ Either wait ten seconds, or press Enter. This will then launch the kernel configuration menu. Kernel Configuration The kernel is the core of the operating system. It is responsible for many things, including access to all the devices you may have on your system, such as hard disks, network cards, sound cards, and so on. Each piece of hardware supported by the FreeBSD kernel has a driver associated with it. Each driver has a two or three letter name, such as sa for the SCSI sequential access driver, or sio for the Serial I/O driver (which manages com ports). When the kernel starts each driver checks the system to see whether or not the hardware it supports exists on your system. If it does then the driver configures the hardware, and makes it available to the rest of the kernel. This checking is commonly referred to as device probing. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to do this in a safe way. Some hardware drivers do not co-exist well together, and probing for one piece of hardware can sometimes leave another piece of hardware in an inconsistent state. This is a basic limitation of the design of the PC. Many older devices are what is called ISA devices—as opposed to PCI devices. The ISA specification requires each device to have some information hard coded in to it, typically the Interrupt Request Line number (IRQ) and IO port address that the driver uses. This information is commonly set by using physical jumpers on the card, or by using a DOS based utility. This was often a source of problems, because it was not possible to have two devices that shared the same IRQ or port address. Newer devices follow the PCI specification, which does not require this, as the devices are supposed to cooperate with the BIOS, and be told which IRQ and IO port addresses to use. If you have any ISA devices in your computer then FreeBSD's driver for that device will need to be configured with the IRQ and port address that you have set the card to. This is why carrying out an inventory of your hardware (see ) can be so useful. Unfortunately, the default IRQs and memory ports used by some drivers clash. This is because some ISA devices are shipped with IRQs or memory ports that clash. The defaults in FreeBSD's drivers are deliberately set to mirror the manufacturer's defaults, so that, out of the box, as many devices as possible will work. This is almost never an issue when running FreeBSD day-to-day. Your computer will not normally contain two pieces of hardware that clash, because then one of them would not work (irrespective of the operating system you are using). It becomes an issue when you are installing FreeBSD for the first time because the kernel used to carry out the install has to contain as many drivers as possible, so that as many different hardware configurations can be supported as possible. This means that some of those drivers will have conflicting configurations. The devices are probed in a strict order, and if you own a device that is probed late in the process, but that an earlier probe conflicted with, then your hardware might not function, or be probed correctly when you install FreeBSD. Because of this, the first thing you have the opportunity to do when installing FreeBSD is look at the list of drivers that are configured in to the kernel, and either disable some of them, if you do not own that device, or confirm (and alter) the driver's configuration if you do own the device but the defaults are wrong. That probably sounds much more complicated than it actually is. shows the first kernel configuration menu. We recommend that you choose the Start kernel configuration in full-screen visual mode option, as it presents the easiest interface for the new user.
Kernel Configuration Menu
The kernel configuration screen () is then divided in to four sections. A collapsible list of all the drivers that are currently marked as active, subdivided in to groups such as Storage, and Network. Each driver is shown as a description, its two three letter driver name, and the IRQ and memory port used by that driver. In addition, if an active driver conflicts with another active driver then CONF is shown next to the driver name. This section also shows the total number of conflicting drivers that are currently active. Drivers that have been marked inactive. They remain in the kernel, but they will not probe for their device when the kernel starts. These are subdivided in to groups in the same way as the active driver list. More detail about the currently selected driver, including its IRQ and memory port address. Information about the keystrokes that are valid at this point in time.
The Kernel Device Configuration Visual Interface
At this point there will always be conflicts listed. Do not worry about this, it is to be expected; all the drivers are enabled, and as has already been explained, some of them will conflict with one another. You now have to work through the list of drivers, resolving the conflicts. Resolving Driver Conflicts Press X. This will completely expand the list of drivers, so you can see all of them. You will need to use the arrow keys to scroll back and forth through the active driver list. shows the result of pressing X.
Expanded Driver List
Disable all the drivers for devices that you do not have. To disable a driver, highlight it with the arrow keys and press Del. The driver will be moved to the Inactive Drivers list. If you inadvertently disable a device that you need then press Tab to switch to the Inactive Drivers list, select the driver that you disabled, and press Enter to move it back to the active list. Do not disable sc0. This controls the screen, and you will need this unless you are installing over a serial cable. Only disable atkbd0 if you are using a USB keyboard. If you have a normal keyboard then you must keep atkbd0. If there are no conflicts listed then you can skip this step. Otherwise, the remaining conflicts need to be examined. If they do not have the indication of an "allowed conflict" in the message area, then either the IRQ/address for device probe will need to be changed, or the IRQ/address on the hardware will need to be changed. To change the driver's configuration for IRQ and IO port address, select the device and press Enter. The cursor will move to the third section of the screen, and you can change the values. You should enter the values for IRQ and port address that you discovered when you made your hardware inventory. Press Q to finish editing the device's configuration and return to the active driver list. If you are not sure what these figures should be then you can try using -1. Some FreeBSD drivers can safely probe the hardware to discover what the correct value should be, and a value of -1 configures them to do this. The procedure for changing the address on the hardware varies from device to device. For some devices you may need to physically remove the card from your computer and adjust jumper settings or DIP switches. Other cards may have come with a DOS floppy that contains the programs used to reconfigure the card. In any case, you should refer to the documentation that came with the device. This will obviously entail restarting your computer, so you will need to boot back in to the FreeBSD installation routine when you have reconfigured the card. When all the conflicts have been resolved the screen will look similar to .
Driver Configuration With No Conflicts
As you can see, the active driver list is now much smaller, with only drivers for the hardware that actually exists being listed. You can now save these changes, and move on to the next step of the install. Press Q to quit the device configuration interface. This message will appear. Save these parameters before exiting? ([Y]es/[N]o/[C]ancel) Answer Y to save the parameters and the probing will start. After displaying the probe results in white on black text Sysinstall will start, and display its main menu ().
Sysinstall Main Menu
Reviewing the Device Probe Results The last few hundred lines that have been displayed on screen are stored, and can be reviewed. To review the buffer, press Scroll Lock. This turns on scrolling in the display. You can then use the arrow keys, or PageUp and PageDown to view the results. Press Scroll Lock again to stop scrolling, Do this now, to review the text that scrolled off the screen when the kernel was carrying out the device probes. You will see text similar to , although the precise text will differ depending on the devices that you have in your computer.
Typical Device Probe Results avail memory = 58880000 (57500K bytes) Preloaded elf kernel "kernel" at 0xc065d000. md1: Malloc disk npx0: <math processor> on motherboard npx0: INT 16 interface pcib0: <Host to PCI bridge> on motherboard pci0: <PCI bus> on pcib0 pcib1: <VIA 82C598MVP (Apollo MVP3) PCI-PCI (AGP bridge> at device 1.0 on pci0 pci1: <PCI bus> on pcib1 pci1: <Matrox MGA G200 AGP graphics accelerator> at 0.0 irq 11 isab0: <VIA 82C586 PCI-ISA bridge> at device 7.0 on pci0 isa0: <ISA bus> on isab0 atapci0: <VIA 82C586 ATA33 controller> port 0xe000-0xe00f at device 7.1 on pci0 ata0: at 0x1f0 irq 14 on atapci0 uhci0: <VIA 83C572 USB controller> port 0xe400-0xe41f irq 10 at device 7.2 on pci0 usb0: <VIA 83C572 USB controller> on uhci0 usb0: USB revision 1.0 uhub0: VIA UHCI root hub, class 9/0, rev 1.00/1.00, addr 1 uhub0: 2 ports with 2 removable, self powered chip1: <VIA 82C586B ACPI interface> at device 7.3 on pci0 fdc0: <NEC 72065B or clone> at port 0x3f0-0x3f5,0x3f7 irq6 drq2 on isa0 fdc0: FIFO enabled, 8 bytes threshold fd0: <1440-KB 3.5" drive> on fdc0 drive 0 atkbdc0: <keyboard controller (i8042)> at port 0x60-0x6f on isa0 atkbd0: <AT Keyboard> flags 0x1 irq 1 on atkbdc0 kbd0 at atkbd0 psm0: <PS/2 Mouse> irq 12 on atkbdc0 psm0: model Generic PS/2 mouse, device ID 0 vga0: <Generic ISA VGA> at port 0x3c0-0c3df iomem 0xa0000-0xbffff on isa0 sc0: <System console> at flags 0x100 on isa0 sc0: VGA <16 virtual consoles, flags-0x300> sio0 at port 0x3f8-0x3ff irq 4 flags 0x10 on isa0 sio0: type 16550A sio1: at port 0x2f8-0x2ff irq3 on isa0 sio1: type 16550A ppc0: <Parallel port> at port 0x378-0x37f irq 7 on isa0 ppc0: SMC-like chipset (ECP/EPP/PS2/NIBBLE) in COMPATIBLE mode ppc0: FIFO with 16/16/15 bytes threshold ppi0: <Parallel I/O> on ppbus0 plip0: <PLIP network interface> on ppbus0 ad0: 8063MB <IBM-DHEA-38451> [16383/16/63] at ata0-master using UDMA33 acd0: CDROM <DELTA OTC-H101/ST3 F/W by OIPD> at ata0-slave using PIO4 Mounting root from ufs:/dev/md0c /stand/sysinstall running as init on vty0
Check the probe results carefully to make sure that FreeBSD found all the devices you expected. If a device was not found then it will be listed as missing. If the device's driver required configuring with the IRQ and port address then you should check that you entered them correctly. If you need to make changes to the UserConfig device probing, its easy to exit the sysinstall program and start over again. Its also a good way to become more familiar with the process.
Select Sysinstall Exit
Use the arrow keys to select Exit Install from the Main Install Screen menu. The following message will display: User Confirmation Requested Are you sure you wish to exit? The system will reboot (be sure to remove any floppies from the drives). [ Yes ] No The install program will start again if the CDROM is left in the drive and [Yes] is selected. If you are booting from floppies it will be necessary to remove the mfs.root floppy and replace it with kern.flp before rebooting. Introducing Sysinstall Sysinstall is the installation application provided by the FreeBSD Project. It is text based, and is divided in to a number of menus and screens that you can use to configure and control the installation process. The Sysinstall menu system is controlled by the arrow keys, Enter, Space. and other keys. A detailed description of these keys, and what they do, is contained in sysinstall's usage information. To review this information, ensure that the Usage entry is highlighted and that the [Select] button is selected, as shown in , then press Enter. The instructions for using the menu system will be displayed. After reviewing them, press Enter to return to the Main Menu.
Selecting Usage From Sysinstall Main Menu
Selecting The Documentation Menu From the Main Menu, select Doc with the arrow keys and press Enter.
Selecting Documentation Menu
This will display the Documentation Menu.
Sysinstall Documentation Menu
It is important to read the documents provided. To view a document, select it with the arrow keys and press Enter. When finished reading a document, pressing Enter will return to the Documentation Menu. To return to the Main Installation Menu, select Exit with the arrow keys and press Enter. Selecting The Keymap Menu To change the keyboard mapping, use the arrow keys to select Keymap from the menu and press Enter
Sysinstall Main Menu
A different keyboard mapping may be chosen by selecting the menu item using up/down arrow keys and pressing Space. Pressing Space again will unselect the item. When finished, choose the [ OK ] using the arrow keys and press Enter. Only a partial list is shown in this screen representation. Selecting [Cancel] will use the default keymap and return to the Main Install Menu.
Sysinstall Keymap Menu
Installation Options Screen Select Options and press Enter
Sysinstall Main Menu
Sysinstall Options
The default values are usually fine for most users and do not need to be changed. The description of the selected item will appear at the bottom of the screen highlighted in blue. Notice that one of the options is Use Defaults to reset all values to startup defaults. Press F1 to read the help screen about the various options. Pressing Q will return to the Main Install menu. Begin A Standard Installation The Standard installation is the option recommended for those new to Unix or FreeBSD. Use the arrow keys to select Standard and then press Enter to start the installation.
Begin Standard Installation
Installation Destination Disk Naming IDE SCSI RAID flash memory Physical drives come in two main flavors, IDE, or SCSI; but there are also drives backed by RAID controllers, flash memory, and so forth. Since these behave quite differently, they have their own drivers and devices. Physical Disk Naming Conventions Drive type Drive device name IDE hard drives ad in 4.0-RELEASE, wd before 4.0-RELEASE. IDE CDROM drives acd from 4.0-RELEASE, wcd before 4.0-RELEASE. SCSI hard drives and USB Mass storage devices da from 3.0-RELEASE, sd before 3.0-RELEASE. SCSI CDROM drives cd Assorted non-standard CDROM drives mcd for Mitsumi CD-ROM, scd for Sony CD-ROM, matcd for Matsushita/Panasonic CD-ROM Floppy drives fd SCSI tape drives sa from 3.0-RELEASE, st before 3.0-RELEASE. IDE tape drives ast from 4.0-RELEASE, wst before 4.0-RELEASE. Flash drives fla for DiskOnChip Flash device from 3.3-RELEASE. RAID drives myxd for Mylex, and amrd for AMI MegaRAID, idad for Compaq Smart RAID. from 4.0-RELEASE. id between 3.2-RELEASE and 4.0-RELEASE.
All the drives attached through a specific driver are numbered starting at 0. So the first IDE drive would be ad0. You seldom need to use these devices. Slices and Partitions slices partitions dangerously dedicated Physical disks usually contain slices, unless they are dangerously dedicated. Slice numbers follow the device name, prefixed with an s, starting at 1. So da0s1 is the first slice on the first SCSI drive. There can only be four physical slices on a disk, but you can have logical slices inside physical slices of the appropriate type. These extended slices are numbered starting at 5, so ad0s5 is the first extended slice on a disk. These devices are used by file systems that expect to occupy a slice. Slices, dangerously dedicated physical drives, and other drives contain partitions, which are represented as letters from a to h. This letter is appended to the device name, so da0a is the a partition on the first da drive, which is dangerously dedicated. ad1s3e is the fifth partition in the third slice of the second IDE disk drive. The boot code expects partition a to be the root partition. Partition b is normally reserved for swap partitions, and c is an unused partition the size of the entire slice or drive. This is explained in . BIOS Drive Numbering Before you install and configure FreeBSD on your system, there is an important subject that you should be aware of, especially if you have multiple hard drives. DOS Microsoft Windows In a PC running a BIOS-dependent operating system such as MS-DOS or Microsoft Windows, the BIOS is able to abstract the normal disk drive order, and the operating system goes along with the change. This allows the user to boot from a disk drive other than the so-called primary master. This is especially convenient for some users who have found that the simplest and cheapest way to keep a system backup is to buy an identical second hard drive, and perform routine copies of the first drive to the second drive using Ghost or XCOPY . Then, if the first drive fails, or is attacked by a virus, or is scribbled upon by an operating system defect, he can easily recover by instructing the BIOS to logically swap the drives. It is like switching the cables on the drives, but without having to open the case. SCSI BIOS More expensive systems with SCSI controllers often include BIOS extensions which allow the SCSI drives to be re-ordered in a similar fashion for up to seven drives. A user who is accustomed to taking advantage of these features may become surprised when the results with FreeBSD are not as expected. FreeBSD does not use the BIOS, and does not know the logical BIOS drive mapping. This can lead to very perplexing situations, especially when drives are physically identical in geometry, and have also been made as data clones of one another. When using FreeBSD, always restore the BIOS to natural drive numbering before installing FreeBSD, and then leave it that way. If you need to switch drives around, then do so, but do it the hard way, and open the case and move the jumpers and cables. An Illustration from the Files of Bill and Fred's Exceptional Adventures: Bill breaks-down an older Wintel box to make another FreeBSD box for Fred. Bill installs a single SCSI drive as SCSI unit zero and installs FreeBSD on it. Fred begins using the system, but after several days notices that the older SCSI drive is reporting numerous soft errors and reports this fact to Bill. After several more days, Bill decides it is time to address the situation, so he grabs an identical SCSI drive from the disk drive archive in the back room. An initial surface scan indicates that this drive is functioning well, so Bill installs this drive as SCSI unit four and makes an image copy from drive zero to drive four. Now that the new drive is installed and functioning nicely, Bill decides that it is a good idea to start using it, so he uses features in the SCSI BIOS to re-order the disk drives so that the system boots from SCSI unit four. FreeBSD boots and runs just fine. Fred continues his work for several days, and soon Bill and Fred decide that it is time for a new adventure -- time to upgrade to a newer version of FreeBSD. Bill removes SCSI unit zero because it was a bit flaky and replaces it with another identical disk drive from the archive. Bill then installs the new version of FreeBSD onto the new SCSI unit zero using Fred's magic Internet FTP floppies. The installation goes well. Fred uses the new version of FreeBSD for a few days, and certifies that it is good enough for use in the engineering department...it is time to copy all of his work from the old version. So Fred mounts SCSI unit four (the latest copy of the older FreeBSD version). Fred is dismayed to find that none of his precious work is present on SCSI unit four. Where did the data go? When Bill made an image copy of the original SCSI unit zero onto SCSI unit four, unit four became the new clone, When Bill re-ordered the SCSI BIOS so that he could boot from SCSI unit four, he was only fooling himself. FreeBSD was still running on SCSI unit zero. Making this kind of BIOS change will cause some or all of the Boot and Loader code to be fetched from the selected BIOS drive, but when the FreeBSD kernel drivers take-over, the BIOS drive numbering will be ignored, and FreeBSD will transition back to normal drive numbering. In the illustration at hand, the system continued to operate on the original SCSI unit zero, and all of Fred's data was there, not on SCSI unit four. The fact that the system appeared to be running on SCSI unit four was simply an artifact of human expectations. We are delighted to mention that no data bytes were killed or harmed in any way by our discovery of this phenomenon. The older SCSI unit zero was retrieved from the bone pile, and all of Fred's work was returned to him, (and now Bill knows that he can count as high as zero). Although SCSI drives were used in this illustration, the concepts apply equally to IDE drives. Allocating Disk Space Your first task is to allocate disk space for FreeBSD, and label that space so that Sysinstall can prepare it. In order to do this you need to know how FreeBSD expects to find information on the disk. Disk Organization The smallest unit of organization that FreeBSD uses to find files is the filename. Filenames are case-sensitive, which means that readme.txt and README.TXT are two separate files. FreeBSD does not use the extension (.txt) of a file to determine whether the file is program, or a document, or some other form of data. Files are stored in directories. A directory may contain no files, or it may contain many hundreds of files. A directory can also contain other directories, allowing you to build up a hierarchy of directories within one another. This makes it much easier to organize your data. Files and directories are referenced by giving the file or directory name, followed by a forward slash, /, followed by any other directory names that are necessary. If you have directory foo, which contains directory bar, which contains the file readme.txt, then the full name, or path to the file is foo/bar/readme.txt. Directories and files are stored in a filesystem. Each filesystem contains exactly one directory at the very top level, called the root directory for that filesystem. This root directory can then contain other directories. So far this is probably similar to any other operating system you may have used. There are a few differences; for example, DOS uses \ to separate file and directory names, while MacOS uses :. FreeBSD does not use drive letters, or other drive names in the path. You would not write c:/foo/bar/readme.txt on FreeBSD. Instead, one filesystem is designated the root filesystem. The root filesystem's root directory is referred to as /. Every other filesystem is then mounted under the root filesystem. No matter how many disks you have on your FreeBSD system, every directory appears to be part of the same disk. Suppose you have three filesystems, called A, B, and C. Each filesystem has one root directory, which contains two other directories, called A1, A2 (and likewise B1, B2 and C1, C2). Call A the root filesystem. If you used the ls command to view the contents of this directory you would see two subdirectories, A1 and A2. The directory tree looks like this. / | +--- A1 | `--- A2 A filesystem must be mounted on to a directory in another filesystem. So now suppose that you mount filesystem B on to the directory A1. The root directory of B replaces A1, and the directories in B appear accordingly. / | +--- A1 | | | +--- B1 | | | `--- B2 | `--- A2 Any files that are in the B1 or B2 directories can be reached with the path /A1/B1 or /A1/B2 as necessary. Any files that were in /A1 have been temporarily hidden. They will reappear if B is unmounted from A. If B had been mounted on A2 then the diagram would look like this; / | +--- A1 | `--- A2 | +--- B1 | `--- B2 and the paths would be /A2/B1 and /A2/B2 respectively. Filesystems can be mounted on top of one another. Continuing the last example, the C filesystem could be mounted on top of the B1 directory in the B filesystem, leading to this arrangement. / | +--- A1 | `--- A2 | +--- B1 | | | +--- C1 | | | `--- C2 | `--- B2 Or C could be mounted directly on to the A filesystem, under the A1 directory. / | +--- A1 | | | +--- C1 | | | `--- C2 | `--- A2 | +--- B1 | `--- B2 If you are familiar with DOS, this is similar, although not identical, to the join command. This is not normally something you need to concern yourself with. Typically you create filesystems when installing FreeBSD and decide where to mount them, and then never change them unless you add a new disk. It is entirely possible to have one large root filesystem, and not need to create any others. There are some drawbacks to this approach, and one advantage. Benefits of multiple filesystems Different filesystems can have different mount options. For example, with careful planning, the root filesystem can be mounted read-only, making it impossible for you to inadvertently delete or edit a critical file. FreeBSD automatically optimizes the layout of files on a filesystem, depending on how the filesystem is being used. So a filesystem that contains many small files that are written frequently will have a different optimization to one that contains fewer, larger files. By having one big filesystem this optimization breaks down. FreeBSD's filesystems are very robust should you lose power. However, a power loss at a critical point could still damage the structure of the filesystem. By splitting your data over multiple filesystems it is more likely that the system will still come up, making it easier for you to restore from backup as necessary. Benefit of a single filesystem Filesystems are a fixed size. If you create a filesystem when you install FreeBSD and give it a specific size, you may later discover that you need to make the partition bigger. This is not easily accomplished without backing up, recreating the filesystems with the size, and then restoring. FreeBSD 5.0 will feature a new command, growfs, which will make it possible to increase the size of a filesystem on the fly, removing this limitation. Filesystems are contained in partitions. This does not have the same meaning as the earlier usage of the term partition in this chapter, because of FreeBSD's Unix heritage. Each partition is identified by a letter, a through to h. Each partition can only contain one filesystem, which means that filesystems are often described by either their typical mount point on the root filesystem, or the letter of the partition they are contained in. FreeBSD also uses disk space for swap space. Swap space provides FreeBSD with virtual memory. This allows your computer to behave as though it has much more memory than it actually does. When FreeBSD runs out of memory it moves some of the data that is not currently being used to the swap space, and moves it back in (moving something else out) when it needs it. Some partitions have certain conventions associated with them. Partition Convention a Normally contains the root filesystem b Normally contains swap space c Normally the same size as the enclosing slice. This allows utilities that need to work on the entire slice (for example, a bad block scanner) to work on the c partition. You would not normally create a filesystem on this partition. d Partition d used to have a special meaning associated with it, although that is now gone. To this day, some tools may operate oddly if told to work on partition d, so Sysinstall will not normally create partition d. Each partition-that-contains-a-filesystem is stored in what FreeBSD calls a slice. Slice is FreeBSD's term for what were earlier called partitions, and again, this is because of FreeBSD's Unix background. Slices are numbered, starting at 1, through to 4. Finally, each disk on the system is identified. A disk name starts with a code that indicates the type of disk, and then a number, indicating which disk it is. Unlike slices, disk numbering starts at 0. Common codes that you will see are listed in . When referring to a partition FreeBSD requires that you also name the slice and disk that contains the partition, and when referring to a slice you should also refer to the disk name. Do this by listing the disk name, s, the slice number, and then the partition letter. Examples are shown in . shows a conceptual model of the disk layout that should help make things clearer. In order to install FreeBSD you must first configure the disk slices, then create partitions within the slice you will use for FreeBSD, and then create a filesystem (or swap space) in each partition, and decide where that filesystem will be mounted. Disk Device Codes Code Meaning ad ATAPI (IDE) disk da SCSI direct access disk acd ATAPI (IDE) CDROM cd SCSI CDROM fd Floppy disk
Sample Disk, Slice, and Partition Names Name Meaning ad0s1a The first partition (a) on the first slice (s1) on the first IDE disk (ad0). da1s2e The fifth partition (e) on the second slice (s2) on the second SCSI disk (da1). Conceptual Model of a Disk This diagram shows FreeBSD's view of the first IDE disk attached to the system. Assume that the disk is 4GB in size, and contains two 2GB slices (DOS partitions). The first slice contains a DOS disk, C:, and the second slice contains a FreeBSD installation. The FreeBSD installation has three partitions, and a swap partition. The three partitions will each hold a filesystem. Partition a will be used for the root filesystem, e for the /var directory hierarchy, and f for the /usr directory hierarchy. .-----------------. --. | | | | DOS / Windows | | : : > First slice, ad0s1 : : | | | | :=================: ==: --. | | | Partition a, mounted as / | | | > referred to as ad0s2a | | | | | :-----------------: ==: | | | | Partition b, used as swap | | | > referred to as ad0s2b | | | | | :-----------------: ==: | Partition c, no | | | Partition e, used as /var > filesystem, all | | > referred to as ad0s2e | of FreeBSD slice, | | | | ad0s2c :-----------------: ==: | | | | | : : | Partition f, used as /usr | : : > referred to as ad0s2f | : : | | | | | | | | --' | `-----------------' --' Creating Slices using FDisk No changes you make at this point will be written to the disk. If you think you have made a mistake and want to start again you can use the menus to exit Sysinstall and try again. If you get confused and can not see how to exit you can always turn your computer off. After choosing to begin a standard installation in Sysinstall you will be shown this message. Message In the next menu, you will need to set up a DOS-style ("fdisk") partitioning scheme for your hard disk. If you simply wish to devote all disk space to FreeBSD (overwriting anything else that might be on the disk(s) selected) then use the (A)ll command to select the default partitioning scheme followed by a (Quit. If you wish to allocate only free space to FreeBSD, move to a partition marked "unused" and use the (C)reate command. [ OK ] [ Press enter to continue ] Press Enter as instructed. You will then be shown a list of all the hard drives that the kernel found when it carried out the device probes. shows an example from a system with two IDE disks. They have been called ad0 and ad2.
Select Drive for FDisk
You might be wondering why ad1 is not listed here. Why has it been missed? Consider what would happen if you had two IDE hard disks, one as the master on the first IDE controller, and one as the master on the second IDE controller. If FreeBSD numbered these as it found them, as ad0 and ad1 then everything would work. But if you then added a third disk, as the slave device on the first IDE controller, it would now be ad1, and the previous ad1 would become ad2. Because device names (such as ad1s1a) are used to find filesystems, you may suddenly discover that some of your filesystems no longer appear correctly, and you would need to change your FreeBSD configuration. To work around this, the kernel can be configured to name IDE disks based on where they are, and not the order in which they were found. With this scheme the master disk on the second IDE controller will always be ad2, even if there are no ad0 or ad1 devices. This configuration is the default for the FreeBSD kernel, which is why this display shows ad0 and ad2. The machine on which this screenshot was taken had IDE disks on both master channels of the IDE controllers, and no disks on the slave channels. Pay close attention when selecting the disk as they may be in a different order than you might expect. Double check yourself before proceeding. You should select the disk on which you want to install FreeBSD, and then press OK. FDisk will start, with a display similar to that shown in . The FDisk display is broken in to three sections. The first section, covering the first two lines of the display, shows details about the currently selected disk, including its FreeBSD name, the disk geometry, and the total size of the disk. The second section shows the slices that are currently on the disk, where they start and end, how large they are, the name FreeBSD gives them, and their description and sub-type. This example shows two small unused slices, which are artifacts of disk layout schemes on the PC. It also shows one large FAT slice, which almost certainly appears as C: in DOS / Windows, and an extended slice, which may contain other drive letters for DOS / Windows. The third section shows the commands that are available in FDisk.
Typical Fdisk Partitions Before Editing
What you do now will depend on how you want to slice up your disk. If you want to use FreeBSD for the entire disk (which will delete all the other data on this disk when you confirm that you want Sysinstall to continue later in the installation process) then you can press A, which corresponds to the Use Entire Disk option. The existing slices will be removed, and replaced with a small area flagged as unused (again, an artifact of PC disk layout), and then one large slice for FreeBSD. If you do this then you should then select the newly created FreeBSD slice using the arrow keys, and press S to mark the slice as being bootable. The screen will then look very similar to . Note the A in the Flags column, which indicates that this slice is active, and will be booted from. If you will be deleting an existing slice to make space for FreeBSD then you should select the slice using the arrow keys, and then press D. You can then press C, and be prompted for size of slice you want to create. Enter the appropriate figure and press Enter. If you have already made space for FreeBSD (perhaps by using a tool such as Partition Magic) then you can press C to create a new slice. Again, you will be prompted for the size of slice you would like to create.
Fdisk Partition Using Entire Disk
When finished, press Q. Your changes will be saved in Sysinstall, but will not yet be written to disk. Install a Boot Manager You now have the option to install a boot manager. In general, you should choose to install the FreeBSD boot manager if: You have more than one drive, and have installed FreeBSD on to a drive other than the first one. You have installed FreeBSD alongside another operating system on the same disk, and you want to choose whether to start FreeBSD or the other operating system when you start the computer. Make your choice, and then select [OK] and press Enter.
Sysinstall Boot Manager Menu
The help screen, reached by pressing F1, discusses the problems that can be encountered when trying to share the hard disk between operating systems. Creating Slices on Another Drive If there is more than one drive, it will return to the Select Drives screen after the boot manager selection. If you wish to install FreeBSD on to more than one disk than you can select another disk here, and repeat the slice process using FDisk,
Exit Select Drive
The Tab key toggles between the last drive selected, [ OK ], and [ Cancel ]. Press the Tab once to toggle to the [ OK ], then press Enter to continue with the installation. Creating Partitions using <application>Disklabel</application> You must now create some partitions inside each slice that you have just created. Remember that each partition is lettered, from a through to h, and that partitions b, c, and d have conventional meanings that you should adhere to. Certain applications can benefit from particular partition schemes, especially if you are laying out partitions across more than one disk. However, for this, your first FreeBSD installation, you do not need to give too much thought to how you partition the disk. It is more important that you install FreeBSD and start learning how to use it. You can always re-install FreeBSD to change your partition scheme when you are more familiar with the operating system. This scheme features four partitions—one for swap space, and three for filesystems. Partition Layout for First Disk Partition Filesystem Size Description a / 64MB This is the root file system. Every other filesystem will be mounted somewhere under this one. 64MB is a reasonable size for this filesystem. You will not be storing too much data on it, as a regular FreeBSD install will put about 40MB of data here. The remaining space is for temporary data, and also leaves expansion space if future versions of FreeBSD need more space in / b N/A 2-3 x RAM The system's swap space is kept on this partition. Choosing the right amount of swap space can be a bit of an art. A good rule of thumb is that you should have two or three times the amount of RAM as swap space. So if you have 64MB of RAM then you should have between 128MB and 196MB of swap. You should also have at least 64MB of swap, so if you have less than 32MB of RAM in your computer then set the swap amount to 64MB.If you have more than one disk then you can put swap space on each disk. FreeBSD will then use each disk for swap, which effectively speeds up the act of swapping. In this case, calculate the total amount of swap you need (e.g., 128MB), and then divide this by the number of disks you have (e.g., two disks) to give the amount of swap you should put on each disk, in this example, 64MB of swap per disk. e /var 50MB The /var directory contains variable length files; log files, and other administrative files. Many of these files are read-from or written-to extensively during FreeBSD's day-to-day running. Putting these files on another filesystem allows FreeBSD to optimise the access of these files without affecting other files in other directories that do not have the same access pattern. f /usr Rest of disk All your other files will typically be stored in /usr, and its subdirectories.
If you will be installing FreeBSD on to more than one disk then you must also create partitions in the other slices that you configured. The easiest way to do this is to create two partitions on each disk, one for the swap space, and one for a filesystem. Partition Layout for Subsequent Disks Partition Filesystem Size Description b N/A See description As already discussed, you can split swap space across each disk. Even though the a partition is free, convention dictates that swap space stays on the b partition. e /diskn Rest of disk The rest of the disk is taken up with one big partition. This could easily be put on the a partition, instead of the e partition. However, convention says that the a partition on a slice is reserved for the filesystem that will be the root (/) filesystem. You do not have to follow this convention, but Sysinstall does, so following it yourself makes the installation slightly cleaner. You can choose to mount this filesystem anywhere; this example suggests that you mount them as directories /diskn, where n is a number that changes for each disk. But you can use another scheme if you prefer.
Having chosen your partition layout you can now create it using Sysinstall. You will see this message. Message Now, you need to create BSD partitions inside of the fdisk partition(s) just created. If you have a reasonable amount of disk space (200MB or more) and don't have any special requirements, simply use the (A)uto command to allocate space automatically. If you have more specific needs or just don't care for the layout chosen by (A)uto, press F1 for more information on manual layout. [ OK ] Press Enter to start the FreeBSD partition editor, called Disklabel. shows the display when you first start Disklabel. The display is divided in to three sections. The first few lines show the name of the disk you are currently working on, and the slice that contains the partitions you are creating (at this point Disklabel calls this the Partition name rather than slice name). This display also shows the amount of free space within the slice; that is, space that was set aside in the slice, but that has not yet been assigned to a partition. The middle of the display shows the partitions that have been created, the name of the filesystem that each partition contains, their size, and some options pertaining to the creation of the filesystem. The bottom third of the screen shows the keystrokes that are valid in Disklabel.
Sysinstall Disklabel Editor
Disklabel can automatically create partitions for you, and assign them default sizes. Try this now, by Pressing A. You will see a display similar to that shown in . Depending on the size of the disk you are using the defaults may or may not be appropriate. This does not matter, as you do not have to accept the defaults.
Sysinstall Disklabel Editor With Auto Defaults
To delete the suggested partitions, and replace them with your own, use the arrow keys to select the first partition, and press D to delete it. Repeat this to delete all the suggested partitions. To create the first partition (a, mounted as /), make sure the disk information at the top of the screen is selected, and press C. A dialog box will appear prompting you for the size of the new partition (as shown in ). You can enter the size as the number of disk blocks you want to use, or, more usefully, as a number followed by either M for megabytes, G for gigabytes, or C for cylinders.
Free Space For Root Partition
The default size shown will create a partition that takes up the rest of the slice. If you are using the partition sizes described earlier then delete the existing figure using Backspace, and then type in 64M, as shown in . Then press OK.
Edit Root Partition Size
Having chosen the partition's size you will then asked whether this partition will contain a filesystem or swap space. The dialog box is shown in . This first partition will contain a filesystem, so check that FS is selected and then press Enter.
Choose The Root Partition Type
Finally, because you are creating a filesystem, you must tell Disklabel where the filesystem is to be mounted. The dialog box is shown in . The root filesystem's mount point is /, so type /, and then press Enter.
Choose The Root Mount Point
The display will then update to show you the newly created partition. You should repeat this procedure for the other partitions. When you create the swap partition you will not be prompted for the filesystem mount point, as swap partitions are never mounted. When you create the final partition, /usr, you can leave the suggested size as is, to use the rest of the slice. Your final FreeBSD DiskLabel Editor screen will appear similar to , although your values chosen may be different. Press Q to finish.
Sysinstall Disklabel Editor
Choosing What To Install Select The Distribution Set Deciding which distribution set to install will depend largely on the intended use of the system and the amount of disk space available. The predefined options range from installing the smallest possible configuration to everything. Those who are new to Unix and/or FreeBSD should almost certainly select one of these canned options. Customizing a distribution set is typically for the more experienced user. Press F1 for more information on the distribution set options and what they contain. When finished reviewing the help, pressing Enter will return to the Select Distributions Menu. If a graphical user interface is desired then a distribution set that is preceded by an X should be chosen. The configuration of XFree86 and selection of a default desktop is part of the post-installation steps. The default XFree86 version installed is the 3.x branch. You should check to see whether your video card is supported at the XFree86 web site. If it is only supported under the 4.x branch, then you will need to install and configure XFree86 4.x after installation. Select a distribution without X and refer to for more information. If compiling a custom kernel is anticipated, select an option which includes the source code. For more information on why a custom kernel should be built or how to build a custom kernel see . Obviously, the most versatile system is one that includes everything. If there is adequate disk space, select All as shown in by using the arrow keys and press Enter. If there is a concern about disk space consider using an option that is more suitable for the situation. Other distributions can be added after installation.
Choose Distributions
Installing The Ports Collection After selecting the desired distribution, an opportunity to install the FreeBSD Ports Collection is presented. The ports collection is an easy and convenient way to install software. The ports collection does not contain the source code necessary to compile the software. It is a collection of files which automates the downloading, compiling and installation. discusses how to use the ports collection. The installation program does not check to see if you have adequate space. Select this option only if you have adequate hard disk space. User Confirmation Requested Would you like to install the FreeBSD ports collection? This will give you ready access to over &os.numports; ported software packages, at a cost of around 100MB of disk space when "clean" and possibly much more than that if a lot of the distribution tarballs are loaded (unless you have the extra CDs from a FreeBSD CD/DVD distribution available and can mount it on /cdrom, in which case this is far less of a problem). The ports collection is a very valuable resource and well worth having on your /usr partition, so it is advisable to say Yes to this option. For more information on the ports collection & the latest ports, visit: http://www.freebsd.org/ports [ Yes ] No Select [ Yes ] with the arrow keys to install the ports collection or [ No ] to skip this option. Press Enter to continue. The Choose Distributions menu will redisplay.
Confirm Distributions
If satisfied with the options, select Exit with the arrow keys, ensure that [ OK ] is highlighted, and press Enter to continue. Choosing Your Installation Media If Installing from a CDROM, use the arrow keys to highlight Install from a FreeBSD CDROM. Ensure that [ OK ] is highlighted, then press Enter to proceed with the installation. For other methods of installation, select the appropriate option and follow the instructions. Press F1 to display the Online Help for installation media. Press Enter to return to the media selection menu.
Choose Installation Media
FTP Installation Modes installation network FTP There are three FTP installation modes you can choose from: active FTP, passive FTP, or via a HTTP proxy. FTP Active, Install from an FTP server This option will make all FTP transfers use Active mode. This will not work through firewalls, but will often work with older FTP servers that do not support passive mode. If your connection hangs with passive mode (the default), try active! FTP Passive, Install from an FTP server through a firewall FTP Passive mode This option instructs FreeBSD to use Passive mode for all FTP operations. This allows the user to pass through firewalls that do not allow incoming connections on random port addresses. FTP via a HTTP proxy, Install from an FTP server through a http proxy FTP via a HTTP proxy This option instructs FreeBSD to use the HTTP protocol (like a web browser) to connect to a proxy for all FTP operations. The proxy will translate the requests and send them to the FTP server. This allows the user to pass through firewalls that do not allow FTP at all, but offer a HTTP proxy. In this case, you have to specify the proxy in addition to the FTP server. For a proxy FTP server, you should usually give the name of the server you really want as a part of the username, after an @ sign. The proxy server then fakes the real server. For example, assuming you want to install from ftp.FreeBSD.org, using the proxy FTP server foo.bar.com, listening on port 1024. In this case, you go to the options menu, set the FTP username to ftp@ftp.FreeBSD.org, and the password to your email address. As your installation media, you specify FTP (or passive FTP, if the proxy supports it), and the URL ftp://foo.bar.com:1234/pub/FreeBSD. Since /pub/FreeBSD from ftp.FreeBSD.org is proxied under foo.bar.com, you are able to install from that machine (which will fetch the files from ftp.FreeBSD.org as your installation requests them. Committing to the Installation The installation can now proceed if desired. This is also the last chance for aborting the installation to prevent changes to the hard drive. User Confirmation Requested Last Chance! Are you SURE you want to continue the installation? If you're running this on a disk with data you wish to save then WE STRONGLY ENCOURAGE YOU TO MAKE PROPER BACKUPS before proceeding! We can take no responsibility for lost disk contents! [ Yes ] No Select [ Yes ] and press Enter to proceed. The installation time will vary according to the distribution chosen and installation media used. There will be a series of messages displayed indicating the status. The installation is complete when the following message is displayed: Message Congratulations! You now have FreeBSD installed on your system. We will now move on to the final configuration questions. For any option you do not wish to configure, simply select No. If you wish to re-enter this utility after the system is up, you may do so by typing: /stand/sysinstall . [ OK ] [ Press enter to continue ] Press Enter to proceed with post-installation configurations. Selecting [ No ] and pressing Enter will abort the installation so no changes will be made to your system. The following message will appear : Message Installation complete with some errors. You may wish to scroll through the debugging messages on VTY1 with the scroll-lock feature. You can also choose "No" at the next prompt and go back into the installation menus to try and retry whichever operations have failed. [ OK ] This message is generated because nothing was installed. Pressing Enter will return to the Main Installation Menu to exit the installation. Post-installation Configuration of various options follows the successful installation. An option can be configured by re-entering the configuration options before booting the new FreeBSD system or after installation using /stand/sysinstall and selecting Configure. Network Device Configuration If you previously configured PPP for an FTP install, this screen will not display and can be configured later as described above. For detailed information on Local Area Networks and configuring FreeBSD as a gateway/router refer to the tutorial PPP- Pendantic PPP Primer. User Confirmation Requested Would you like to configure Ethernet or SLIP/PPP network devices? [ Yes ] No To configure a network device, select [ Yes ] and press Enter. Otherwise, select [ No ] to continue.
Selecting An Ethernet Device
Select the interface to be configured with the arrow keys and press Enter. User Confirmation Requested Do you want to try IPv6 configuration of the interface? Yes [ No ] In this private local area network the current Internet type protocol (IPv4) was sufficient and [ No ] was selected with the arrow keys and Enter pressed. If you want to try the new Internet protocol (IPv6), choose [ Yes ] and press Enter. It will take several seconds for scanning RA servers. User Confirmation Requested Do you want to try DHCP configuration of the interface? Yes [ No ] If DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) is not required select [ No ] with the arrow keys and press Enter. Selecting [ Yes ] will execute dhclient, and if successful, will fill in the network configuration information automatically. Refer to for more information. The following Network Configuration screen shows the configuration of the Ethernet device for a system that will act as the gateway for a Local Area Network.
Set Network Configuration For ed0
Use Tab to select the information fields and fill in appropriate information: Host The fully-qualified hostname, e.g. k6-2.weeble.com in this case. Domain The name of the domain that your machine is in, e.g. weeble.com for this case. IPv4 Gateway IP address of host forwarding packets to non-local destinations. Fill this in only if the machine is a node on the network. Leave this field blank if the machine is the gateway to the Internet for the network. Name server IP address of your local DNS server. There is no local DNS server on this private local area network so the IP address of the provider's DNS server (208.163.10.2) was used. IPv4 address The IP address to be used for this interface was (192.168.0.1). Netmask The address block being used for this local area network is a Class C block (192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255). The default netmask is for a Class C network (255.255.255.0). Extra options to ifconfig Any interface-specific options to ifconfig you would like to add. There were none in this case. Use Tab to select [ OK ] when finished and press Enter. User Confirmation Requested Would you like to Bring Up the ed0 interface right now? [ Yes ] No Choosing [ Yes ] and pressing Enter will bring the machine up on the network and be ready for use after leaving leaving the installation. Configure Internet Services User Confirmation Requested Do you want to configure inetd and the network services that it provides? Yes [ No ] If [ No ] is selected, various services such telnetd will not be enabled. This means that remote users will not be able to telnet into this machine. Local users will be still be able to access remote machines with telnet. These services can be enabled after installation by editing /etc/inetd.conf with your favorite text editor. See for more information. Select [ Yes ] if you wish to configure these services during install. An additional confirmation will display. User Confirmation Requested The Internet Super Server (inetd) allows a number of simple Internet services to be enabled, including finger, ftp and telnetd. Enabling these services may increase risk of security problems by increasing the exposure of your system. With this in mind, do you wish to enable inetd? [ Yes ] No Select [ Yes ] to continue. User Confirmation Requested inetd(8) relies on its configuration file, /etc/inetd.conf, to determine which of its Internet services will be available. The default FreeBSD inetd.conf(5) leaves all services disabled by default, so they must be specifically enabled in the configuration file before they will function, even once inetd(8) is enabled. Note that services for IPv6 must be seperately enabled from IPv4 services. Select [Yes] now to invoke an editor on /etc/inetd.conf, or [No] to use the current settings. [ Yes ] No Selecting [ Yes ] will allow adding services by deleting the # at the beginning of a line.
Editing <filename>inetd.conf</filename>
After adding the desired services, pressing Esc will display a menu which will allow exiting and saving the changes. Configure Gateway User Confirmation Requested Do you want this machine to function as a network gateway? [ Yes ] No If the machine will be acting as the gateway for a local area network and forwarding packets between other machines then select [ Yes ] and press Enter. If the machine is a node on a network then select [ No ] and press Enter to continue. Anonymous FTP User Confirmation Requested Do you want to have anonymous FTP access to this machine? Yes [ No ] Deny Anonymous FTP Selecting the default [ No ] and pressing Enter will still allow users who have accounts with passwords to use FTP to access the machine. Allow Anonymous FTP Anyone can access your machine if you elect to allow anonymous FTP connections. The security implications should be considered before enabling this option. For more information about security see . To allow anonymous FTP, use the arrow keys to select [ Yes ] and press Enter. The following screens (or similar) will display :
Default Anonymous FTP Configuration
Pressing F1 will display the help : This screen allows you to configure the anonymous FTP user. The following configuration values are editable: UID: The user ID you wish to assign to the anonymous FTP user. All files uploaded will be owned by this ID. Group: Which group you wish the anonymous FTP user to be in. Comment: String describing this user in /etc/passwd FTP Root Directory: Where files available for anonymous FTP will be kept. Upload subdirectory: Where files uploaded by anonymous FTP users will go. The ftp root directory will be put in /var by default. If you do not have enough room there for the anticipated FTP needs, the /usr directory could be used by setting the FTP Root Directory to /usr/ftp. When you are satisfied with the values, press Enter to continue. User Confirmation Requested Create a welcome message file for anonymous FTP users? [ Yes ] No If you select [ Yes ] and press Enter, an editor will automatically start allowing you to edit the message.
Edit The FTP Welcome Message
This is a text editor called ee. Use the instructions to change the message or change the message later using a text editor of your choice. Note the file name/location at the bottom. Press Esc and a pop-up menu will default to a) leave editor. Press Enter to exit and continue. Configure Network File Services Network File Services (NFS) allows sharing of files across a network. A machine can be configured as a server, a client, or both. Refer to for a more information. NFS Server User Confirmation Requested Do you want to configure this machine as an NFS server? Yes [ No ] If there is no need for a Network File System server or client, select [ No ] and press Enter. If [ Yes ] is chosen, a message will pop-up indicating that the exports file must be created. Message Operating as an NFS server means that you must first configure an /etc/exports file to indicate which hosts are allowed certain kinds of access to your local file systems. Press [Enter] now to invoke an editor on /etc/exports [ OK ] Press Enter to continue. A text editor will start allowing the exports file to be created and edited.
Editing the Exports File
Use the instructions to add the actual exported filesystems now or later using a text editor of your choice. Note the filename/location at the bottom of the editor screen. Press Esc and a pop-up menu will default to a) leave editor. Press Enter to exit and continue. NFS Client User Confirmation Requested Do you want to configure this machine as an NFS client? Yes [ No ] With the arrow keys, select [ Yes ] or [ No ] as appropriate and press Enter. Security Profile A security profile is a set of configuration options that attempts to achieve the desired ratio of security to convenience by enabling and disabling certain programs and other settings. More information about security profiles can be found in the FreeBSD FAQ. User Confirmation Requested Do you want to select a default security profile for this host (select No for "medium" security)? [ Yes ] No Selecting [ No ] and pressing Enter will set the security profile to medium. Selecting [ Yes ] and pressing Enter will allow selecting a different security profile.
Security Profile Options
Press F1 to display the help. Press Enter to return to selection menu. Use the arrow keys to choose Medium unless your are sure that another level is required for your needs. With [ OK ] highlighted, press Enter. An appropriate confirmation message will display depending on which security setting was chosen. Message Moderate security settings have been selected. Sendmail and SSHd have been enabled, securelevels are disabled, and NFS server setting have been left intact. PLEASE NOTE that this still does not save you from having to properly secure your system in other ways or exercise due diligence in your administration, this simply picks a standard set of out-of-box defaults to start with. To change any of these settings later, edit /etc/rc.conf [OK] Message Extreme security settings have been selected. Sendmail, SSHd, and NFS services have been disabled, and securelevels have been enabled. PLEASE NOTE that this still does not save you from having to properly secure your system in other ways or exercise due diligence in your administration, this simply picks a more secure set of out-of-box defaults to start with. To change any of these settings later, edit /etc/rc.conf [OK] Press Enter to continue with the post-installation configuration. System Console Settings There are several options available to customize the system console. User Confirmation Requested Would you like to customize your system console settings? [ Yes ] No To view and configure the options, select [ Yes ] and press Enter.
System Console Configuration Options
A commonly used option is the screensaver. Use the arrow keys to select Saver and then press Enter.
Screensaver Options
Select the desired screen saver using the arrow keys and then press Enter. The System Console Configuration menu will redisplay. The default time interval is 300 seconds. To change the time interval, select Saver again. At the Screensaver Options menu, select Timeout using the arrow keys and press Enter. A pop-up menu will appear :
Screensaver Timeout
The value can be changed, then select [ OK ] and press Enter to return to the System Console Configuration menu.
System Console Configuration Exit
Selecting Exit and pressing Enter will continue with the post-installation configurations. Setting The Time Zone Setting the timezone for your machine will allow it to automatically correct for any regional time changes and perform other timezone related functions properly. The example shown is for a machine located in the Eastern time zone of the United States. Your selections will vary according to your geographical location. User Confirmation Requested Would you like to set this machine's time zone now? [ Yes ] No Select [ Yes ] and press Enter to set the time zone. User Confirmation Requested Is this machine's CMOS clock set to UTC? If it is set to local time or you don't know, please choose NO here! Yes [ No ] Select [ Yes ] or [ No ] according to how the machine's clock is configured and press Enter.
Select Your Region
The appropriate region is selected using the arrow keys and then press Enter.
Select Your Country
Select the appropriate country using the arrow keys and press Enter.
Select Your Timezone
The appropriate time zone is selected using the arrow keys and pressing Enter. Confirmation Does the abbreviation 'EDT' look reasonable? [ Yes ] No Confirm the abbreviation for the time zone is correct. If it looks okay, press Enter to continue with the post-installation configuration. Linux Compatibility User Confirmation Requested Would you like to enable Linux binary compatibility? [ Yes ] No Selecting [ Yes ] and pressing Enter will allow running Linux software on FreeBSD. The install will proceed to add the appropriate packages for Linux compatibility. If installing by FTP, the machine will need to be connected to the Internet. Sometimes a remote ftp site will not have all the distributions like the Linux binary compatibility. This can be installed later if necessary. Mouse Settings This option will allow you to cut and past text in the console and user programs with a 3-button mouse. If using a 2-button mouse, refer to manual page, &man.moused.8;, after installation for details on emulating the 3-button style. This example depicts a non-USB mouse. User Confirmation Requested Does this system have a non-USB mouse attached to it? [ Yes ] No Select [ Yes ] for a non-USB mouse or [ No ] for a USB mouse and press Enter.
Select Mouse Protocol Type
Use the arrow keys to select Type and press Enter
Set Mouse Protocol
The mouse used in this example is a PS/2 type, so the default Auto was appropriate. To change protocol, use the arrow keys to select another option. Ensure that [ OK ] is highlighted and press Enter to exit this menu.
Configure Mouse Port
Use the arrow keys to select Port and press Enter.
Setting The Mouse Port
This system had a PS/2 mouse, so the default PS/2 was appropriate. To change the port, use the arrow keys and then press Enter.
Enable The Mouse Daemon
Last, the mouse daemon is enabled and tested.
Test The Mouse Daemon
The cursor moved around the screen so the mouse daemon is running: Select [ Yes ] to return to the previous menu then select Exit with the arrow keys and press Enter to return to continue with the post-installation configuration. Configure X-Server - In order to use a graphical user interface such as KDE, GNOME, + In order to use a graphical user interface such as + KDE, GNOME, or others, the X server will need to be configured. To see whether your video card is supported, check the XFree86 web site. If your video card is only supported under XFree86 4.x, refer to for installation and configuration. User Confirmation Requested Would you like to configure your X server at this time? [ Yes ] No It is necessary to know your monitor specifications and video card information. Equipment damage can occur if settings are incorrect. If you do not have this information, select [ No ] and perform the configuration after installation when you have the information using /stand/sysinstall, selecting Configure and then XFree86. If you have graphics card and monitor information, select [ Yes ] and press Enter to proceed with configuring the X server.
Select Configuration Method Menu
There are several ways to configure the X server. XF86Setup is fully graphical and probably the easiest. Use the arrow keys to select the XF86Setup and press Enter. Message You have configured and been running the mouse daemon. Choose "/dev/sysmouse" as the mouse port and "SysMouse" or "MouseSystems" as the mouse protocol in the X configuration utility. [ OK ] [ Press enter to continue ] The indicates that the mouse daemon previously configured has been detected. Press Enter to continue. Press [Enter] to switch to graphics mode. This may take a while... [ OK ] Press Enter to switch to the graphics mode and continue. It will not try to switch to the graphics mode until Enter is pressed. The screen will go black and then shortly a screen with a large X in the center will appear. Be patient and wait. After a few more moments, the XF86Setup introduction will display. Read all instructions carefully. Press Enter to continue. <application>XF86Setup</application> Overview There are several areas of configuration to be completed. The configuration choices you make will depend on the hardware in the system so only a general overview can be given here. Along the top of the configuration tool there are buttons indicating the areas to be configured. You should be able to use the mouse if it was previously configured and select each item by clicking on it. Review each area and make appropriate selections for your system. <guimenuitem>Mouse</guimenuitem> The mouse is the first item to be configured. If you previously configured your mouse, the mouse daemon will already be running and should indicate SysMouse automatically for the mouse protocol. If you are use a two button mouse, you should also select Emulate3Buttons. There are other settings that can be tweaked if necessary. After completing your selections, click on the Apply and check the mouse actions are working properly. If further adjustment is needed, make them and recheck the operation by clicking on Apply again. When finished, move on to the next item. <guimenuitem>Keyboard</guimenuitem> Select the appropriate keyboard model. The default keyboard is Generic 101-key PC. Select the language layout for your keyboard. The default layout is U.S. English. If you are not using a U.S. keyboard, you may need to additionally select a variant. There are other options under Group Shift/Lock behavior and Control Key Position that can be selected if desired. Generally the default settings are fine. After completing the keyboard configuration, click on Apply and move on to the next item. <guimenuitem>Card</guimenuitem> Click on Read README file for additional help in configuring your video card. Select the appropriate video card from the list using the scrollbar. Clicking on your card will show as Card selected: above the list box. Next, the Detailed Setup was selected just to check details. Typically, if your video card was in the list, no changes will be needed here. When finished, move on to the next item. <guimenuitem>Monitor</guimenuitem> There are two ways to proceed. One method requires that you enter the horizontal and vertical sweep capabilities of your monitor in the text boxes. Choosing one of the monitor options listed that the monitor is the other method. After selecting a listed option, the horizontal and vertical sweep rates that will be used will display. Compare those to your monitor specifications. The monitor must be capable of using those ranges. Do not exceed the ratings of your monitor. Damage could occur. If you have doubts select ABORT and get the information. The remainder of the installation process will be unaffected and configuring the X-Server can be done later using /stand/sysinstall. When finished, move on to the next item. <guimenuitem>Mode</guimenuitem> Select the video mode(s) that you want to use. You can select more than one option. Typically, useful ranges are 640x480, 800x600, and 1024x768 but those are a function of video card capability, monitor size, and eye comfort. Next, select the default color depth you want to use. Your choices are 8bpp, 16bpp, 24bpp, and 32bpp. Select the highest color depth that your video card will support. When finished, move on to the next item. <guimenuitem>Other</guimenuitem> There default settings are reasonable values so you probably won't need to change anything here. The default setting which allows the server to be killed with the hotkey sequence CtrlAlt Backspace should be left on. This can be executed if something is wrong with the server settings and prevent hardware damage. The default setting that allows video mode switching will permit changing of the mode while running X with the hotkey sequence Alt+ or Alt- . Testing the Server Verify all the settings once again and select Done and the following message will display : If you've finished configuring everything press the Okay button to start the X server using the configuration you've selected. If you still wish to configure some things, press one of the buttons at the top and then press "Done" again, when you've finished. After selecting Okay, some messages will briefly appear advising to wait and attempting to start the x-server. This process takes a few moments, so be patient. The screen will go blank for a short period of time and then a screen will appear with the message Congratulations, you've got a running server! If nothing appears or is distorted, kill the x-server using Ctrl Alt Backspace and adjust the settings or revisit them after installation. Running <command>xvidtune</command> The display can be adjusted for height, width, or centering by using xvidtune. There are warnings that improper settings can damage your equipment. Heed them. If in doubt, do not do it. Instead, use the monitor controls to adjust the display for x-windows. There may be some display differences when switching back to text mode, but it is better than damaging equipment. The xvidtune can be ran later using /stand/sysinstall. Read the xvidtune before making any adjustments. Saving Configuration When you are satisfied, the configuration can now be saved. Select Save the configuration and Exit The configuration file will be saved to /etc/XF86Config. Once the configuration is done, the installation program will need to create a link to the server : Do you want to create an 'X' link to the SVGA server? (the link will be created in the directory: /usr/X11R6/bin) Okay? [ Yes ] No Select [ Yes ] and press Enter to create the link. Link created successfully. [ OK ] Press Enter to continue configuration. Select Default X Desktop There are a variety of window managers available. They range from very basic environments to full desktop environments with a large suite of software. Some require only minimal disk space and low memory while others with more features require much more. The best way to determine which is most suitable for you is to try a few different ones. Those are available from the ports collection or as packages and can be added after installation. You can select one of the popular desktops to be installed and configured as the default desktop. This will allow you to start it right after installation.
Select Default Desktop
Use the arrow keys to select a desktop and press Enter. Installation of the selected desktop will proceed. Install Packages The packages are pre-compiled binaries and are a convenient way to install software. Installation of one package is shown for purposes of illustration. Additional packages can also be added at this time if desired. After installation /stand/sysinstall can be used to add additional packages. User Confirmation Requested The FreeBSD package collection is a collection of hundreds of ready-to-run applications, from text editors to games to WEB servers and more. Would you like to browse the collection now? [ Yes ] No Selecting [ Yes ] and pressing Enter will be followed by the Package Selection screens:
Select Package Category
All packages available will be displayed if All is selected or you can select a particular category. Highlight your selection with the arrow keys and press Enter. A menu will display showing all the packages available for the selection made.
Select Packages
The bash shell is shown selected. Select as many as desired by highlighting the package and pressing the Space. A short description of each package will appear in the lower left corner of the screen. Pressing the Tab key will toggle between the last selected package, [ OK ], and [ Cancel ]. When you have finished marking the packages for installation, press Tab once to toggle to the [ OK ] and press Enter to return to the Package Selection menu. The left and right arrow keys will also toggle between [ OK ] and [ Cancel ]. This method can also be used to select [ OK ] and press Enter to return to the Package Selection menu.
Install Packages
Use the arrow keys to select [ Install ] and press Enter. You will then need to confirm that you want to install the packages.
Confirm Package Installation
Selecting [ OK ] and pressing Enter will start the package installation. Installing messages will appear until completed. Make note if there are any error messages. The final configuration continues after packages are installed. Add User/Groups You should add at least one user during the installation so that you can use the system without being logged in as root. The root partition is generally small and running applications as root can quickly fill it. A bigger danger is noted below : User Confirmation Requested Would you like to add any initial user accounts to the system? Adding at least one account for yourself at this stage is suggested since working as the "root" user is dangerous (it is easy to do things which adversely affect the entire system). [ Yes ] No Select [ Yes ] and press Enter to continue with adding a user.
Select Add User
Select Add User with the arrow keys and press Enter.
Add User Information
The following descriptions will appear in the lower part of the screen as the items are selected with Tab to assist with entering the required information. Login ID The login name of the new user (mandatory) UID The numerical ID for this user (leave blank for automatic choice) Group The login group name for this user (leave blank for automatic choice) Password The password for this user (enter this field with care!) Full name The user's full name (comment) Member groups The groups this user belongs to (i.e. gets access rights for) Home directory The user's home directory (leave blank for default) Login shell The user's login shell (leave blank for default). (/bin/sh) The login shell was changed from /bin/sh to /usr/local/bin/bash to use the bash shell that was previously installed as a package. Do not try to use a shell that does not exist or you will not be able to login. The user was also added to the group "wheel" to be able to become a superuser with root privileges. When you are satisfied, press [ OK ] and the User and Group Management menu will redisplay.
Exit User and Group Management
Groups could also be added at this time if specific needs are known. Otherwise, this may be accessed through using /stand/sysinstall after installation is completed. When you are finished adding users, select Exit with the arrow keys and press Enter to continue the installation. Set Root Password Message Now you must set the system manager's password. This is the password you'll use to log in as "root". [ OK ] [ Press enter to continue ] Press Enter to set the root password. The password will need to be typed in twice correctly. Needless to say, make sure you have a way of finding the password if you forget. Changing local password for root. New password : Retype new password : The installation will continue after the password is successfully entered. Exiting Install If you need to configure additional network devices or to do any other configurations, you can do it at this point or after installation with /stand/sysinstall. User Confirmation Requested Visit the general configuration menu for a chance to set any last options? Yes [ No ] Selecting [ No ] with the arrow keys and pressing Enter returns to the Main Installation Menu
Exit Install
Select [X Exit Install] with the arrow keys and press Enter. You will be asked to confirm exiting the installation : User Confirmation Requested Are you sure you wish to exit? The system will reboot (be sure to remove any floppies from the drives). [ Yes ] No Select [ Yes ] and remove floppy if booting from floppy. The CDROM drive is locked until the machine starts to reboot. The CDROM drive is then unlocked and can be removed from drive (quickly). The system will reboot so watch for any error messages that may appear. FreeBSD Bootup FreeBSD Bootup on the i386 If everything went well, you will see messages scroll off the screen and you will arrive at a login prompt. You can view the content of the messages by pressing Scroll-Lock and using PgUp and PgDn. Pressing Scroll-Lock again will return to the prompt. The entire message may not display (buffer limitation) but it can be viewed from the command line after logging in by typing dmesg at the prompt. Login using the username/password you set during installation (rpratt, in this example). Avoid logging in as root except when necessary. Typical boot messages : Copyright (c) 1992-2001 The FreeBSD Project. Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993, 1994 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. FreeBSD 4.3-RELEASE #0: Sat Apr 21 10:54:49 GMT 2001 jkh@narf.osd.bsdi.com:/usr/src/sys/compile/GENERIC Timecounter "i8254" frequency 1193182 Hz CPU: AMD-K6(tm) 3D processor (300.68-MHz 586-class CPU) Origin = "AuthenticAMD" Id = 0x580 Stepping = 0 Features=0x8001bf<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,MCE,CX8,MMX> AMD Features=0x80000800<SYSCALL,3DNow!> real memory = 268435456 (262144K bytes) config> di sn0 config> di lnc0 config> di le0 config> di ie0 config> di fe0 config> di cs0 config> di bt0 config> di ata1 config> di aic0 config> di aha0 config> di adv0 config> q avail memory = 256983040 (250960K bytes) Preloaded elf kernel "kernel" at 0xc044d000. Preloaded userconfig_script "/boot/kernel.conf" at 0xc044d09c. md0: Malloc disk npx0: <math processor> on motherboard npx0: INT 16 interface pcib0: <Host to PCI bridge> on motherboard pci0: <PCI bus> on pcib0 pcib1: <VIA 82C598MVP (Apollo MVP3) PCI-PCI (AGP) bridge> at device 1.0 on pci0 pci1: <PCI bus> on pcib1 pci1: <Matrox MGA G200 AGP graphics accelerator> at 0.0 irq 11 isab0: <VIA 82C586 PCI-ISA bridge> at device 7.0 on pci0 isa0: <ISA bus> on isab0 atapci0: <VIA 82C586 ATA33 controller> port 0xe000-0xe00f at device 7.1 on pci0 ata0: at 0x1f0 irq 14 on atapci0 ata1: at 0x170 irq 15 on atapci0 uhci0: <VIA 83C572 USB controller> port 0xe400-0xe41f irq 10 at device 7.2 on pci0 usb0: <VIA 83C572 USB controller> on uhci0 usb0: USB revision 1.0 uhub0: VIA UHCI root hub, class 9/0, rev 1.00/1.00, addr 1 uhub0: 2 ports with 2 removable, self powered chip1: <VIA 82C586B ACPI interface> at device 7.3 on pci0 ed0: <NE2000 PCI Ethernet (RealTek 8029)> port 0xe800-0xe81f irq 9 at device 10.0 on pci0 ed0: address 52:54:05:de:73:1b, type NE2000 (16 bit) isa0: too many dependant configs (8) isa0: unexpected small tag 14 fdc0: <NEC 72065B or clone> at port 0x3f0-0x3f5,0x3f7 irq 6 drq 2 on isa0 fdc0: FIFO enabled, 8 bytes threshold fd0: <1440-KB 3.5" drive> on fdc0 drive 0 atkbdc0: <keyboard controller (i8042)> at port 0x60-0x6f on isa0 atkbd0: <AT Keyboard> flags 0x1 irq 1 on atkbdc0 kbd0 at atkbd0 psm0: <PS/2 Mouse> irq 12 on atkbdc0 psm0: model Generic PS/2 mouse, device ID 0 vga0: <Generic ISA VGA> at port 0x3c0-0x3df iomem 0xa0000-0xbffff on isa0 sc0: <System console> at flags 0x1 on isa0 sc0: VGA <16 virtual consoles, flags=0x300> sio0 at port 0x3f8-0x3ff irq 4 flags 0x10 on isa0 sio0: type 16550A sio1 at port 0x2f8-0x2ff irq 3 on isa0 sio1: type 16550A ppc0: <Parallel port> at port 0x378-0x37f irq 7 on isa0 ppc0: SMC-like chipset (ECP/EPP/PS2/NIBBLE) in COMPATIBLE mode ppc0: FIFO with 16/16/15 bytes threshold ppi0: <Parallel I/O> on ppbus0 lpt0: <Printer> on ppbus0 lpt0: Interrupt-driven port plip0: <PLIP network interface> on ppbus0 ad0: 8063MB <IBM-DHEA-38451> [16383/16/63] at ata0-master using UDMA33 ad2: 8063MB <IBM-DHEA-38451> [16383/16/63] at ata1-master using UDMA33 acd0: CDROM <DELTA OTC-H101/ST3 F/W by OIPD> at ata0-slave using PIO4 Mounting root from ufs:/dev/ad0s1a swapon: adding /dev/ad0s1b as swap device Automatic boot in progress... /dev/ad0s1a: FILESYSTEM CLEAN; SKIPPING CHECKS /dev/ad0s1a: clean, 70119 free (655 frags, 8683 blocks, 0.7% fragmentation) /dev/ad0s1f: FILESYSTEM CLEAN; SKIPPING CHECKS /dev/ad0s1f: clean, 6976313 free (51774 frags, 829297 blocks, 0.7% fragmentation) /dev/ad0s1e: filesystem CLEAN; SKIPPING CHECKS /dev/ad0s1e: clean, 97952 free (9 frags, 12381 blocks, 0.0% fragmentation) Doing initial network setup: hostname. lo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 16384 inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x8 inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128 inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000 Additional routing options: tcp extensions=NO IP gateway=YES TCP keepalive=YES routing daemons:. additional daemons: syslogd. Doing additional network setup: portmap. Starting final network daemons: creating ssh RSA host key Generating RSA keys: Key generation complete. Your identification has been saved in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_key. Your public key has been saved in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_key.pub. The key fingerprint is: 2d:02:37:d2:0e:68:93:8f:9c:46:de:92:f4:be:60:0a root@k6-2.weeble.com creating ssh DSA host key Generating DSA parameter and key. Your identification has been saved in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key. Your public key has been saved in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key.pub. The key fingerprint is: 38:af:d2:1f:63:14:00:d8:83:fd:dd:4b:97:1c:43:6d root@k6-2.weeble.com. setting ELF ldconfig path: /usr/lib /usr/lib/compat /usr/X11R6/lib /usr/local/lib setting a.out ldconfig path: /usr/lib/aout /usr/lib/compat/aout /usr/X11R6/lib/aout starting standard daemons: inetd cron sendmail sshd usbd. Initial rc.i386 initialization: linux. rc.i386 configuring syscons: blank_time screensaver moused. Additional ABI support: linux. Local package initilization:. Additional TCP options:. login: rpratt Password: Generating the RSA and DSA keys may take some time on slower machines. This happens only on the initial boot-up of a new installation. Subsequent boots will be faster. If the X server has been configured and a Default Desktop chosen, it can be started by typing startx at the command line. Bootup of FreeBSD on the Alpha Alpha Once the install procedure has finished, you will be able to start FreeBSD by typing something like this to the SRM prompt: >>>BOOT DKC0 This instructs the firmware to boot the specified disk. To make FreeBSD boot automatically in the future, use these commands: >>> SET BOOT_OSFLAGS A >>> SET BOOT_FILE '' >>> SET BOOTDEF_DEV DKC0 >>> SET AUTO_ACTION BOOT The boot messages will be similar (but not identical) to those produced by FreeBSD booting on the i386. FreeBSD Shutdown It is important to properly shutdown the operating system. Do not just turn off power. First, become a superuser by typing su at the command line and entering the root password. This will work only if the user is a member of the group wheel. Otherwise, login as root and use shutdown -h now. The operating system has halted. Please press any key to reboot. It is safe to turn off the power after the shutdown command has been issued and the message "Please press any key to reboot" appears. If any key is pressed instead of turning off the power switch, the system will reboot. Supported Hardware hardware FreeBSD currently runs on a wide variety of ISA, VLB, EISA, and PCI bus-based PCs with Intel, AMD, Cyrix, or NexGen x86 processors, as well as a number of machines based on the Compaq Alpha processor. Support for generic IDE or ESDI drive configurations, various SCSI controllers, PCMCIA cards, USB devices, and network and serial cards is also provided. FreeBSD also supports IBM's microchannel (MCA) bus. A list of supported hardware is provided with each FreeBSD release in the FreeBSD Hardware Notes. This document can usually be found in a file named HARDWARE.TXT, in the top-level directory of a CDROM or FTP distribution or in sysinstall's documentation menu. It lists, for a given architecture, what hardware devices are known to be supported by each release of FreeBSD. Troubleshooting installation troubleshooting The following section covers basic installation troubleshooting, such as common problems people have reported. There are also a few questions and answers for people wishing to dual-boot FreeBSD with MS-DOS. What to Do If Something Goes Wrong... Due to various limitations of the PC architecture, it is impossible for probing to be 100% reliable, however, there are a few things you can do if it fails. Check the Hardware Notes document for your version of FreeBSD to make sure your hardware is supported. If your hardware is supported and you still experience lock-ups or other problems, reset your computer, and when the visual kernel configuration option is given, choose it. This will allow you to go through your hardware and supply information to the system about it. The kernel on the boot disks is configured assuming that most hardware devices are in their factory default configuration in terms of IRQs, IO addresses, and DMA channels. If your hardware has been reconfigured, you will most likely need to use the configuration editor to tell FreeBSD where to find things. It is also possible that a probe for a device not present will cause a later probe for another device that is present to fail. In that case, the probes for the conflicting driver(s) should be disabled. Do not disable any drivers you will need during the installation, such as your screen (sc0). If the installation wedges or fails mysteriously after leaving the configuration editor, you have probably removed or changed something you should not have. Reboot and try again. In configuration mode, you can: List the device drivers installed in the kernel. Change device drivers for hardware that is not present in your system. Change IRQs, DRQs, and IO port addresses used by a device driver. After adjusting the kernel to match your hardware configuration, type Q to boot with the new settings. Once the installation has completed, any changes you made in the configuration mode will be permanent so you do not have to reconfigure every time you boot. It is still highly likely that you will eventually want to build a custom kernel. MS-DOS User's Questions and Answers DOS Many users wish to install FreeBSD on PCs inhabited by MS-DOS. Here are some commonly asked questions about installing FreeBSD on such systems. Help, I have no space! Do I need to delete everything first? If your machine is already running MS-DOS and has little or no free space available for the FreeBSD installation, all hope is not lost! You may find the FIPS utility, provided in the tools directory on the FreeBSD CDROM or various FreeBSD FTP sites to be quite useful. FIPS FIPS allows you to split an existing MS-DOS partition into two pieces, preserving the original partition and allowing you to install onto the second free piece. You first defragment your MS-DOS partition using the Windows DEFRAG utility (go into Explorer, right-click on the hard drive, and choose to defrag your hard drive), or Norton Disk Tools. You then must run FIPS. It will prompt you for the rest of the information it needs. Afterwards, you can reboot and install FreeBSD on the new free slice. See the Distributions menu for an estimate of how much free space you will need for the kind of installation you want. Partition Magic There is also a very useful product from PowerQuest called Partition Magic. This application has far more functionality than FIPS, and is highly recommended if you plan to often add/remove operating systems (like me). However, it does cost money, and if you plan to install FreeBSD once and then leave it there, FIPS will probably be fine for you. Can I use compressed MS-DOS filesystems from FreeBSD? No. If you are using a utility such as Stacker(tm) or DoubleSpace(tm), FreeBSD will only be able to use whatever portion of the filesystem you leave uncompressed. The rest of the filesystem will show up as one large file (the stacked/double spaced file!). Do not remove that file or you will probably regret it greatly! It is probably better to create another uncompressed primary MS-DOS partition and use this for communications between MS-DOS and FreeBSD. Can I mount my extended MS-DOS partition? partitions slices Yes. DOS extended partitions are mapped in at the end of the other slices in FreeBSD, e.g., your D: drive might be /dev/da0s5, your E: drive, /dev/da0s6, and so on. This example assumes, of course, that your extended partition is on SCSI drive 0. For IDE drives, substitute ad for da appropriately if installing 4.0-RELEASE or later, and substitute wd for da if you are installing a version of FreeBSD prior to 4.0. You otherwise mount extended partitions exactly like you would any other DOS drive, for example: &prompt.root; mount -t msdos /dev/ad0s5 /dos_d Alpha User's Questions and Answers Alpha This section answers some commonly asked questions about installing FreeBSD on Alpha systems. Can I boot from the ARC or Alpha BIOS Console? ARC Alpha BIOS SRM No. &os;, like Compaq Tru64 and VMS, will only boot from the SRM console. Help, I have no space! Do I need to delete everything first? Unfortunately, yes. Can I mount my Compaq Tru64 or VMS filesystems? No, not at this time. Valentino Vaschetto Contributed by Advanced Installation Guide This section describes how to install FreeBSD in exceptional cases. Installing FreeBSD on a System without a Monitor or Keyboard installation headless (serial console) serial console This type of installation is called a "headless install", because the machine that you are trying to install FreeBSD on either does not have a monitor attached to it, or does not even have a VGA output. How is this possible you ask? Using a serial console. A serial console is basically using another machine to act as the main display and keyboard for a system. To do this, just follow these steps: Fetch the Right Boot Floppy Images First you will need to get the right disk images so that you can boot into the install program. The secret with using a serial console is that you tell the boot loader to send I/O through a serial port instead of displaying console output to the VGA device and trying to read input from a local keyboard. Enough of that now, let's get back to getting these disk images. You will need to get kern.flp and mfsroot.flp from the floppies directory. Write the Image Files to the Floppy Disks. The image files, such as kern.flp, are not regular files that you copy to the disk. Instead, they are images of the complete contents of the disk. This means that you can not use commands like DOS' copy to write the files. Instead, you must use specific tools to write the images directly to the disk. fdimage If you are creating the floppies on a computer running DOS then we provide a tool to do this called fdimage. If you are using the floppies from the CDROM, and your CDROM is the E: drive then you would run this: E:\> tools\fdimage floppies\kern.flp A: Repeat this command for each .flp file, replacing the floppy disk each time. Adjust the command line as necessary, depending on where you have placed the .flp files. If you do not have the CDROM then fdimage can be downloaded from the tools directory on the FreeBSD FTP site. If you are writing the floppies on a Unix system (such as another FreeBSD system) you can use the &man.dd.1; command to write the image files directly to disk. On FreeBSD you would run: &prompt.root; dd if=kern.flp of=/dev/fd0 On FreeBSD /dev/fd0 refers to the first floppy disk (the A: drive). /dev/fd1 would be the B: drive, and so on. Other Unix variants might have different names for the floppy disk devices, and you will need to check the documentation for the system as necessary. Enabling the Boot Floppies to Boot into a Serial Console Do not try to mount the floppy if it is write-protected mount If you were to boot into the floppies that you just made, FreeBSD would boot into its normal install mode. We want FreeBSD to boot into a serial console for our install. To do this, you have to mount the kern.flp floppy onto your FreeBSD system using the &man.mount.8; command. &prompt.root; mount /dev/fd0 /mnt Now that you have the floppy mounted, you must change into the floppy directory &prompt.root; cd /mnt Here is where you must set the floppy to boot into a serial console. You have to make a file called boot.config containing "/boot/loader -h". All this does is pass a flag to the bootloader to boot into a serial console. &prompt.root; echo "/boot/loader -h" > boot.config Now that you have your floppy configured correctly, you must unmount the floppy using the &man.umount.8; command &prompt.root; cd / &prompt.root; umount /mnt Now you can remove the floppy from the floppy drive Connecting Your Null Modem Cable null-modem cable You now need to connect a null modem cable between the two machines. Just connect the cable to the serial ports of the 2 machines. A normal serial cable will not work here, you need a null modem cable because it has some of the wires inside crossed over. Booting Up for the Install It is now time to go ahead and start the install. Put the kern.flp floppy in the floppy drive of the machine you are doing the headless install on, and power on the machine. Connecting to Your Headless Machine cu Now you have to connect to that machine with &man.cu.1;: &prompt.root; cu -l /dev/cuaa0 That's it! You should be able to control the headless machine through your cu session now. It will ask you to put in the mfsroot.flp, and then it will come up with a selection of what kind of terminal to use. Just select the FreeBSD color console and proceed with your install! Preparing Your Own Installation Media - To prevent repetiton, FreeBSD disk in this context + To prevent repetition, FreeBSD disk in this context means a FreeBSD CDROM or DVD that you have purchased, or produced yourself. There may be some situations in which you need to create your own FreeBSD installation media and/or source. This might be physical media, such as a tape, or a source that Sysinstall can use to retrieve the files, such as a local FTP site, or an MS-DOS partition. For example; You have many machines connected to your local network, and one FreeBSD disk. You want to create a local FTP site using the contents of the FreeBSD disk, and then have your machines use this local FTP site instead of needing to connect to the Internet. You have a FreeBSD disk, FreeBSD does not recognize your CD/DVD drive, but DOS/Windows does. You want to copy the FreeBSD installations files to a DOS partition on the same computer, and then install FreeBSD using those files. The computer you want to install on does not have a CD/DVD drive, or a network card, but you can connect a Laplink-style serial or parallel cable to a computer that does. You want to create a tape that can be used to install FreeBSD. Creating a Local FTP Site with a FreeBSD Disk installation network FTP FreeBSD disks are laid out in the same way as the FTP site. This makes it very easy for you to create a local FTP site that can be used by other machines on your network when installing FreeBSD. On the FreeBSD computer that will host the FTP site, ensure that the CDROM is in the drive, and mounted on /cdrom. &prompt.root; mount /cdrom Create an account for anonymous FTP in /etc/passwd. Do this by editing /etc/passwd using &man.vipw.8; and adding this line. ftp:*:99:99::0:0:FTP:/cdrom:/nonexistent Ensure that the FTP service is enabled in /etc/inetd.conf. Anyone with network connectivity to your machine can now chose a media type of FTP and type in ftp://your machine after picking Other in the FTP sites menu during the install. This approach is OK for a machine that is on your local network, and that is protected by your firewall. Offering up FTP services to other machines over the Internet (and not your local network) exposes your computer to the attention of crackers and other undesirables. We strongly recommend that you follow good security practices if you do this. Creating Installation Floppies installation floppies If you must install from floppy disk (which we suggest you do not do), either due to unsupported hardware or simply because you insist on doing things the hard way, you must first prepare some floppies for the installation. At a minimum, you will need as many 1.44MB or 1.2MB floppies as it takes to hold all the files in the bin (binary distribution) directory. If you are preparing the floppies from DOS, then they MUST be formatted using the MS-DOS FORMAT command. If you are using Windows, use Explorer to format the disks (right-click on the A: drive, and select "Format". Do not trust factory pre-formatted floppies. Format them again yourself, just to be sure. Many problems reported by our users in the past have resulted from the use of improperly formatted media, which is why we are making a point of it now. If you are creating the floppies on another FreeBSD machine, a format is still not a bad idea, though you do not need to put a DOS filesystem on each floppy. You can use the disklabel and newfs commands to put a UFS filesystem on them instead, as the following sequence of commands (for a 3.5" 1.44MB floppy) illustrates: &prompt.root; fdformat -f 1440 fd0.1440 &prompt.root; disklabel -w -r fd0.1440 floppy3 &prompt.root; newfs -t 2 -u 18 -l 1 -i 65536 /dev/fd0 Use fd0.1200 and floppy5 for 5.25" 1.2MB disks. Then you can mount and write to them like any other filesystem. After you have formatted the floppies, you will need to copy the files to them. The distribution files are split into chunks conveniently sized so that 5 of them will fit on a conventional 1.44MB floppy. Go through all your floppies, packing as many files as will fit on each one, until you have all of the distributions you want packed up in this fashion. Each distribution should go into a subdirectory on the floppy, e.g.: a:\bin\bin.aa, a:\bin\bin.ab, and so on. Once you come to the Media screen during the install process, select Floppy and you will be prompted for the rest. Installing from an MS-DOS Partition installation from MS-DOS To prepare for an installation from an MS-DOS partition, copy the files from the distribution into a directory on that partition. For example, c:\freebsd. The directory structure of the CDROM or FTP site must be partially reproduced within this directory, so we suggest using the DOS xcopy command if you are copying it from a CD. For example, to prepare for a minimal installation of FreeBSD: C:\> md c:\freebsd C:\> xcopy e:\bin c:\freebsd\bin\ /s C:\> xcopy e:\manpages c:\freebsd\manpages\ /s Assuming that C: is where you have free space and E: is where your CDROM is mounted. If you do not have a CDROM drive, you can download the distribution from ftp.FreeBSD.org. Each distribution is in its own directory; for example, the bin distribution can be found in the &rel.current;/bin directory. For as many distributions you wish to install from an MS-DOS partition (and you have the free space for), install each one under c:\freebsd — the BIN distribution is the only one required for a minimum installation. Creating an Installation Tape installation from QIC/SCSI Tape Installing from tape is probably the easiest method, short of an online FTP install or CDROM install. The installation program expects the files to be simply tarred onto the tape. After getting all of the distribution files you are interested in, simply tar them onto the tape; &prompt.root; cd /freebsd/distdir &prompt.root; tar cvf /dev/rwt0 dist1 ... dist2 When you go to do the installation, you should also make sure that you leave enough room in some temporary directory (which you will be allowed to choose) to accommodate the full contents of the tape you have created. Due to the non-random access nature of tapes, this method of installation requires quite a bit of temporary storage. You should expect to require as much temporary storage as you have stuff written on tape. When starting the installation, the tape must be in the drive before booting from the boot floppy. The installation probe may otherwise fail to find it. Before Installing over a Network installation network serial (SLIP or PPP) installation network parallel (PLIP) installation network Ethernet There are three types of network installations you can do. Serial port (SLIP or PPP), Parallel port (PLIP (laplink cable)), or Ethernet (a standard Ethernet controller (includes some PCMCIA)). The SLIP support is rather primitive, and limited primarily to hard-wired links, such as a serial cable running between a laptop computer and another computer. The link should be hard-wired as the SLIP installation does not currently offer a dialing capability; that facility is provided with the PPP utility, which should be used in preference to SLIP whenever possible. If you are using a modem, then PPP is almost certainly your only choice. Make sure that you have your service provider's information handy as you will need to know it fairly early in the installation process. If you use PAP or CHAP to connect your ISP (in other words, if you can connect to the ISP in Windows without using a script), then all you will need to do is type in dial at the ppp prompt. Otherwise, you will need to know how to dial your ISP using the AT commands specific to your modem, as the PPP dialer provides only a very simple terminal emulator. Please refer to the user-ppp handbook and FAQ entries for further information. If you have problems, logging can be directed to the screen using the command set log local .... If a hard-wired connection to another FreeBSD (2.0-R or later) machine is available, you might also consider installing over a laplink parallel port cable. The data rate over the parallel port is much higher than what is typically possible over a serial line (up to 50kbytes/sec), thus resulting in a quicker installation. Finally, for the fastest possible network installation, an Ethernet adapter is always a good choice! FreeBSD supports most common PC Ethernet cards; a table of supported cards (and their required settings) is provided in the Hardware Notes for each release of FreeBSD. If you are using one of the supported PCMCIA Ethernet cards, also be sure that it is plugged in before the laptop is powered on! FreeBSD does not, unfortunately, currently support hot insertion of PCMCIA cards during installation. You will also need to know your IP address on the network, the netmask value for your address class, and the name of your machine. If you are installing over a PPP connection and do not have a static IP, fear not, the IP address can be dynamically assigned by your ISP. Your system administrator can tell you which values to use for your particular network setup. If you will be referring to other hosts by name rather than IP address, you will also need a name server and possibly the address of a gateway (if you are using PPP, it is your provider's IP address) to use in talking to it. If you want to install by FTP via a HTTP proxy (see below), you will also need the proxy's address. If you do not know the answers to all or most of these questions, then you should really probably talk to your system administrator or ISP before trying this type of installation. Before Installing via NFS installation network NFS The NFS installation is fairly straight-forward. Simply copy the FreeBSD distribution files you want onto a server somewhere and then point the NFS media selection at it. If this server supports only privileged port (as is generally the default for Sun workstations), you will need to set this option in the Options menu before installation can proceed. If you have a poor quality Ethernet card which suffers from very slow transfer rates, you may also wish to toggle the appropriate Options flag. In order for NFS installation to work, the server must support subdir mounts, e.g., if your FreeBSD 3.4 distribution directory lives on:ziggy:/usr/archive/stuff/FreeBSD, then ziggy will have to allow the direct mounting of /usr/archive/stuff/FreeBSD, not just /usr or /usr/archive/stuff. In FreeBSD's /etc/exports file, this is controlled by the . Other NFS servers may have different conventions. If you are getting permission denied messages from the server, then it is likely that you do not have this enabled properly. diff --git a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/multimedia/chapter.sgml b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/multimedia/chapter.sgml index fac0de747a..28eda1ac0c 100644 --- a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/multimedia/chapter.sgml +++ b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/multimedia/chapter.sgml @@ -1,577 +1,579 @@ Moses Moore Contributed by Sound Synopsis FreeBSD supports a wide variety of sound cards, allowing you to enjoy high fidelity output from your computer. This includes the ability to record and playback audio in the MPEG Audio Layer 3 (MP3), WAV, and Ogg Vorbis formats as well as many other formats. The FreeBSD Ports Collection also contains applications allowing you to edit your recorded audio, add sound effects, and control attached MIDI devices. After reading this chapter you will know: How to locate your sound card. How to configure your system so that your sound card is recognized. Methods to test that your card is working using sample applications. How to troubleshoot your sound setup. How to playback and encode MP3s. How to rip CD audio tracks into data files. Before reading this chapter you should: Know how to configure and install a new kernel (). Locating the Correct Device PCI ISA sound cards Before you begin, you should know the model of the card you have, the chip it uses, and whether it is a PCI or ISA card. FreeBSD supports a wide variety of both PCI and ISA cards. If you do not see your card in the following list, check the &man.pcm.4; manual page. This is not a complete list; however, it does list some of the most common cards. Crystal 4237, 4236, 4232, 4231 Yamaha OPL-SAx OPTi931 Ensoniq AudioPCI 1370/1371 ESS Solo-1/1E NeoMagic 256AV/ZX Sound Blaster Pro, 16, 32, AWE64, AWE128, Live Creative ViBRA16 Advanced Asound 100, 110, and Logic ALS120 ES 1868, 1869, 1879, 1888 Gravis UltraSound Aureal Vortex 1 or 2 kernel configuration The driver you use in your kernel depends on the kind of card you have. The sections below provide more information and what you will need to add to your kernel configuration. Creative, Advance, and ESS Sound Cards If you have one of the above cards, you will need to add: device pcm to your kernel configuration file. If you have a PnP ISA card, you will also need to add: device sbc For a non-PnP ISA card, add: device pcm device sbc0 at isa? port0x220 irq 5 drq 1 flags 0x15 to your kernel configuration file. The settings shown above are the defaults. You may need to change the IRQ or the other settings to match your card. See the &man.sbc.4; manual page for more information. The Sound Blaster Live is not supported under FreeBSD 4.0 without a patch, which this section will not cover. It is recommended that you update to the latest -STABLE before trying to use this card. Gravis UltraSound Cards For a PnP ISA card, you will need to add: device pcm device gusc to your kernel configuration file. If you have a non-PnP ISA card, you will need to add: device pcm device gus0 at isa? port 0x220 irq 5 drq 1 flags 0x13 to your kernel configuration file. You may need to change the IRQ or the other settings to match your card. See the &man.gusc.4; manual page for more information. Crystal Sound Cards For Crystal cards, you will need to add: device pcm device csa to your kernel configuration file. Generic Support For PnP ISA or PCI cards, you will need to add: device pcm to your kernel configuration file. If you have a non-PnP ISA sound card that does not have a bridge driver, you will need to add: device pcm0 at isa? irq 10 drq 1 flags 0x0 to your kernel configuration file. You may need to change the IRQ or the other settings to match your card. Onboard Sound Some systems with built-in motherboard sound devices may require the following option in your kernel configuration: options PNPBIOS Recompiling the Kernel After adding the driver(s) you need to your kernel configuration file, you will need to recompile your kernel. Please see of the handbook for more information. Creating and Testing the Device Nodes device nodes After you reboot, log in and run dmesg | grep pcm as shown below: &prompt.root; dmesg | grep pcm pcm0: <SB16 DSP 4.11> on sbc0 The output from your system may look different. If no pcm devices show up, something went wrong earlier. If that happens, go through your kernel configuration file again and make sure you chose the correct device. Consult the troubleshooting section for additional options. If the previous command returned pcm0, you will have to run the following as root: &prompt.root; cd /dev &prompt.root; sh MAKEDEV snd0 If the command returned pcm1, follow the same steps as shown above, replacing snd0 with snd1. The above commands will not create a /dev/snd device! MAKEDEV will create a group of device nodes, including: Device Description /dev/audio SPARC-compatible audio device /dev/dsp Digitized voice device /dev/dspW Like /dev/dsp, but 16 bits per sample /dev/midi Raw midi access device /dev/mixer Control port mixer device /dev/music Level 2 sequencer interface /dev/sequencer Sequencer device /dev/pss Programmable device interface If all goes well, you should now have a functioning sound card. If you do not, read the next section. Common Problems device node I get an unsupported subdevice XX error! One or more of the device nodes was not created correctly. Repeat the steps above. I/O port I get a sb_dspwr(XX) timed out error! The I/O port is not set correctly. IRQ I get a bad irq XX error! The IRQ is set incorrectly. Make sure that the set IRQ and the sound IRQ are the same. I get a xxx: gus pcm not attached, out of memory error. What causes that? If this happens, it is because there is not enough available memory to use the device. Chern Lee Contributed by MP3 Audio MP3 (MPEG Layer 3 Audio) accomplishes near CD-quality sound, leaving no reason to let your FreeBSD workstation fall short of its offerings. MP3 Players By far, the most popular XFree86 MP3 player is - XMMS (X Multimedia System). Winamp + XMMS (X Multimedia System). + WinAmp skins can be used with XMMS since the - GUI is almost identical to that of Nullsoft Winamp's. + GUI is almost identical to that of Nullsoft + Winamp's. XMMS also has native plug-in support. XMMS can be installed from the audio/xmms port or package. XMMS' interface is intuitive, with a playlist, graphic equalizer, and more. Those familiar with WinAmp will find XMMS simple to use. The audio/mpg123 port is an alternative, command-line MP3 player. mpg123 can be run by specifying the sound device and the MP3 file on the command line, as shown below: &prompt.root; mpg123 -a /dev/dsp1.0 Foobar-GreatestHits.mp3 High Performance MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 Audio Player for Layer 1, 2 and 3. Version 0.59r (1999/Jun/15). Written and copyrights by Michael Hipp. Uses code from various people. See 'README' for more! THIS SOFTWARE COMES WITH ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY! USE AT YOUR OWN RISK! Playing MPEG stream from BT - Foobar-GreastHits.mp3 ... MPEG 1.0 layer III, 128 kbit/s, 44100 Hz joint-stereo /dev/dsp1.0 should be replaced with the dsp device entry on your system. Ripping CD Audio Tracks Before encoding a CD or CD track to MP3, the audio data on the CD must be ripped onto the hard drive. This is done by copying the raw CDDA (CD Digital Audio) data to WAV files. The cdda2wav tool, which is a part of the sysutils/cdrtools suite, is used for ripping audio information of CDs and the information associated with it. With the audio CD in the drive, the following command can be issued (as root) to rip an entire CD into individual (per track) WAV files: &prompt.root; cdda2wav -D 0,1,0 -B The indicates the SCSI device 0,1,0, which corresponds to the output of cdrecord -scanbus. To rip individual tracks, make use of the option as shown: &prompt.root; cdda2wav -D 0,1,0 -t 7 This example rips track seven of the audio CDROM. To rip a range of tracks, for example, track one to seven, specify a range: &prompt.root; cdda2wav -D 0,1,0 -t 1+7 cdda2wav only supports SCSI CDROM drives. For IDE drives, try out audio/cdd or some of the various other utilities in the audio ports collection. Encoding MP3s Nowadays, the mp3 encoder of choice is lame. Lame can be found at audio/lame in the ports tree. Using the ripped WAV files, the following command will convert audio01.wav to audio01.mp3: &prompt.root; lame -h -b 128 \ --tt "Foo Song Title" \ --ta "FooBar Artist" \ --tl "FooBar Album" \ --ty "2001" \ --tc "Ripped and encoded by Foo" \ --tg "Genre" \ audio01.wav audio01.mp3 128 kbits seems to be the standard MP3 bitrate in use. Many enjoy the higher quality 160, or 192. The higher the bitrate, the more disk space the resulting MP3 will consume--but the quality will be higher. The option turns on the higher quality but a little slower mode. The options beginning with indicate ID3 tags, which usually contain song information, to be embedded within the MP3 file. Additional encoding options can be found by consulting the lame man page. Decoding MP3s In order to burn an audio CD from MP3s, they must be converted to a non-compressed WAV format. Both XMMS and mpg123 support the output of MP3 to an uncompressed file format. Writing to Disk in XMMS: Launch XMMS. Right-click on the window to bring up the XMMS menu. Select Preference under Options. Change the Output Plugin to Disk Writer Plugin. Press Configure. Enter (or choose browse) a directory to write the uncompressed files to. Load the MP3 file into XMMS as usual, with volume at 100% and EQ settings turned off. Press Play — XMMS will appear as if it is playing the MP3, but no music will be heard. It is actually playing the MP3 to a file. Be sure to set the default Output Plugin back to what it was before in order to listen to MP3s again. Writing to stdout in mpg123: Run mpg123 -s audio01.mp3 > audio01.pcm XMMS writes a file in the WAV format, while mpg123 converts the MP3 into raw PCM audio data. Both of these formats can be used with cdrecord or burncd to create audio CDROMs. Read for more information on using a CD burner in FreeBSD. diff --git a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/sound/chapter.sgml b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/sound/chapter.sgml index fac0de747a..28eda1ac0c 100644 --- a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/sound/chapter.sgml +++ b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/sound/chapter.sgml @@ -1,577 +1,579 @@ Moses Moore Contributed by Sound Synopsis FreeBSD supports a wide variety of sound cards, allowing you to enjoy high fidelity output from your computer. This includes the ability to record and playback audio in the MPEG Audio Layer 3 (MP3), WAV, and Ogg Vorbis formats as well as many other formats. The FreeBSD Ports Collection also contains applications allowing you to edit your recorded audio, add sound effects, and control attached MIDI devices. After reading this chapter you will know: How to locate your sound card. How to configure your system so that your sound card is recognized. Methods to test that your card is working using sample applications. How to troubleshoot your sound setup. How to playback and encode MP3s. How to rip CD audio tracks into data files. Before reading this chapter you should: Know how to configure and install a new kernel (). Locating the Correct Device PCI ISA sound cards Before you begin, you should know the model of the card you have, the chip it uses, and whether it is a PCI or ISA card. FreeBSD supports a wide variety of both PCI and ISA cards. If you do not see your card in the following list, check the &man.pcm.4; manual page. This is not a complete list; however, it does list some of the most common cards. Crystal 4237, 4236, 4232, 4231 Yamaha OPL-SAx OPTi931 Ensoniq AudioPCI 1370/1371 ESS Solo-1/1E NeoMagic 256AV/ZX Sound Blaster Pro, 16, 32, AWE64, AWE128, Live Creative ViBRA16 Advanced Asound 100, 110, and Logic ALS120 ES 1868, 1869, 1879, 1888 Gravis UltraSound Aureal Vortex 1 or 2 kernel configuration The driver you use in your kernel depends on the kind of card you have. The sections below provide more information and what you will need to add to your kernel configuration. Creative, Advance, and ESS Sound Cards If you have one of the above cards, you will need to add: device pcm to your kernel configuration file. If you have a PnP ISA card, you will also need to add: device sbc For a non-PnP ISA card, add: device pcm device sbc0 at isa? port0x220 irq 5 drq 1 flags 0x15 to your kernel configuration file. The settings shown above are the defaults. You may need to change the IRQ or the other settings to match your card. See the &man.sbc.4; manual page for more information. The Sound Blaster Live is not supported under FreeBSD 4.0 without a patch, which this section will not cover. It is recommended that you update to the latest -STABLE before trying to use this card. Gravis UltraSound Cards For a PnP ISA card, you will need to add: device pcm device gusc to your kernel configuration file. If you have a non-PnP ISA card, you will need to add: device pcm device gus0 at isa? port 0x220 irq 5 drq 1 flags 0x13 to your kernel configuration file. You may need to change the IRQ or the other settings to match your card. See the &man.gusc.4; manual page for more information. Crystal Sound Cards For Crystal cards, you will need to add: device pcm device csa to your kernel configuration file. Generic Support For PnP ISA or PCI cards, you will need to add: device pcm to your kernel configuration file. If you have a non-PnP ISA sound card that does not have a bridge driver, you will need to add: device pcm0 at isa? irq 10 drq 1 flags 0x0 to your kernel configuration file. You may need to change the IRQ or the other settings to match your card. Onboard Sound Some systems with built-in motherboard sound devices may require the following option in your kernel configuration: options PNPBIOS Recompiling the Kernel After adding the driver(s) you need to your kernel configuration file, you will need to recompile your kernel. Please see of the handbook for more information. Creating and Testing the Device Nodes device nodes After you reboot, log in and run dmesg | grep pcm as shown below: &prompt.root; dmesg | grep pcm pcm0: <SB16 DSP 4.11> on sbc0 The output from your system may look different. If no pcm devices show up, something went wrong earlier. If that happens, go through your kernel configuration file again and make sure you chose the correct device. Consult the troubleshooting section for additional options. If the previous command returned pcm0, you will have to run the following as root: &prompt.root; cd /dev &prompt.root; sh MAKEDEV snd0 If the command returned pcm1, follow the same steps as shown above, replacing snd0 with snd1. The above commands will not create a /dev/snd device! MAKEDEV will create a group of device nodes, including: Device Description /dev/audio SPARC-compatible audio device /dev/dsp Digitized voice device /dev/dspW Like /dev/dsp, but 16 bits per sample /dev/midi Raw midi access device /dev/mixer Control port mixer device /dev/music Level 2 sequencer interface /dev/sequencer Sequencer device /dev/pss Programmable device interface If all goes well, you should now have a functioning sound card. If you do not, read the next section. Common Problems device node I get an unsupported subdevice XX error! One or more of the device nodes was not created correctly. Repeat the steps above. I/O port I get a sb_dspwr(XX) timed out error! The I/O port is not set correctly. IRQ I get a bad irq XX error! The IRQ is set incorrectly. Make sure that the set IRQ and the sound IRQ are the same. I get a xxx: gus pcm not attached, out of memory error. What causes that? If this happens, it is because there is not enough available memory to use the device. Chern Lee Contributed by MP3 Audio MP3 (MPEG Layer 3 Audio) accomplishes near CD-quality sound, leaving no reason to let your FreeBSD workstation fall short of its offerings. MP3 Players By far, the most popular XFree86 MP3 player is - XMMS (X Multimedia System). Winamp + XMMS (X Multimedia System). + WinAmp skins can be used with XMMS since the - GUI is almost identical to that of Nullsoft Winamp's. + GUI is almost identical to that of Nullsoft + Winamp's. XMMS also has native plug-in support. XMMS can be installed from the audio/xmms port or package. XMMS' interface is intuitive, with a playlist, graphic equalizer, and more. Those familiar with WinAmp will find XMMS simple to use. The audio/mpg123 port is an alternative, command-line MP3 player. mpg123 can be run by specifying the sound device and the MP3 file on the command line, as shown below: &prompt.root; mpg123 -a /dev/dsp1.0 Foobar-GreatestHits.mp3 High Performance MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 Audio Player for Layer 1, 2 and 3. Version 0.59r (1999/Jun/15). Written and copyrights by Michael Hipp. Uses code from various people. See 'README' for more! THIS SOFTWARE COMES WITH ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY! USE AT YOUR OWN RISK! Playing MPEG stream from BT - Foobar-GreastHits.mp3 ... MPEG 1.0 layer III, 128 kbit/s, 44100 Hz joint-stereo /dev/dsp1.0 should be replaced with the dsp device entry on your system. Ripping CD Audio Tracks Before encoding a CD or CD track to MP3, the audio data on the CD must be ripped onto the hard drive. This is done by copying the raw CDDA (CD Digital Audio) data to WAV files. The cdda2wav tool, which is a part of the sysutils/cdrtools suite, is used for ripping audio information of CDs and the information associated with it. With the audio CD in the drive, the following command can be issued (as root) to rip an entire CD into individual (per track) WAV files: &prompt.root; cdda2wav -D 0,1,0 -B The indicates the SCSI device 0,1,0, which corresponds to the output of cdrecord -scanbus. To rip individual tracks, make use of the option as shown: &prompt.root; cdda2wav -D 0,1,0 -t 7 This example rips track seven of the audio CDROM. To rip a range of tracks, for example, track one to seven, specify a range: &prompt.root; cdda2wav -D 0,1,0 -t 1+7 cdda2wav only supports SCSI CDROM drives. For IDE drives, try out audio/cdd or some of the various other utilities in the audio ports collection. Encoding MP3s Nowadays, the mp3 encoder of choice is lame. Lame can be found at audio/lame in the ports tree. Using the ripped WAV files, the following command will convert audio01.wav to audio01.mp3: &prompt.root; lame -h -b 128 \ --tt "Foo Song Title" \ --ta "FooBar Artist" \ --tl "FooBar Album" \ --ty "2001" \ --tc "Ripped and encoded by Foo" \ --tg "Genre" \ audio01.wav audio01.mp3 128 kbits seems to be the standard MP3 bitrate in use. Many enjoy the higher quality 160, or 192. The higher the bitrate, the more disk space the resulting MP3 will consume--but the quality will be higher. The option turns on the higher quality but a little slower mode. The options beginning with indicate ID3 tags, which usually contain song information, to be embedded within the MP3 file. Additional encoding options can be found by consulting the lame man page. Decoding MP3s In order to burn an audio CD from MP3s, they must be converted to a non-compressed WAV format. Both XMMS and mpg123 support the output of MP3 to an uncompressed file format. Writing to Disk in XMMS: Launch XMMS. Right-click on the window to bring up the XMMS menu. Select Preference under Options. Change the Output Plugin to Disk Writer Plugin. Press Configure. Enter (or choose browse) a directory to write the uncompressed files to. Load the MP3 file into XMMS as usual, with volume at 100% and EQ settings turned off. Press Play — XMMS will appear as if it is playing the MP3, but no music will be heard. It is actually playing the MP3 to a file. Be sure to set the default Output Plugin back to what it was before in order to listen to MP3s again. Writing to stdout in mpg123: Run mpg123 -s audio01.mp3 > audio01.pcm XMMS writes a file in the WAV format, while mpg123 converts the MP3 into raw PCM audio data. Both of these formats can be used with cdrecord or burncd to create audio CDROMs. Read for more information on using a CD burner in FreeBSD. diff --git a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x11/chapter.sgml b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x11/chapter.sgml index 112d2dcaeb..7b1ea9b988 100644 --- a/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x11/chapter.sgml +++ b/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x11/chapter.sgml @@ -1,1480 +1,1480 @@ The X Window System Synopsis FreeBSD uses XFree86 to provide users with a powerful graphical user interface. XFree86 is a open-source implementation of the X Window System. This chapter will cover installation and configuration of XFree86 on your FreeBSD system. For more information on X11 and to see whether your video card is supported, check the XFree86 web site. After reading this chapter you will know: The various components of the X window system, and how they interoperate. How to install and configure XFree86. How to install and use different window managers. How to use TrueType fonts in XFree86. How to setup your system for graphical logins (XDM). Before reading this chapter you should: Know how to install additional third-party software (). Understanding X If you are familiar with using windowing systems that ship with other operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows, or MacOS, then you may find your first introduction to X to be something of a culture shock. Today, as Unix desktop environments such as KDE and GNOME become more prevalent it is less necessary to understand all the behind-the-scenes interaction between the various X components, or what those components actually are. However, one of X's strengths is its underlying design, which lends a great deal of flexibility, and makes it possible to do things with X that are impossible with other, more rigid, systems. Why X? X is not the first window system written for Unix, but it is the most popular. X's original development team had worked on another window system before writing X. That system's name was W (for Window, obviously). X is just the next letter in the Roman alphabet. X can be referred to variously as X, X Window System, X11, and other terms. X Windows is to be avoided wherever possible; see &man.X.1; for more information. The X Client/Server Model X was designed from the beginning to be network-centric, and adopts a client-server model. In the X model, the X server runs on the computer that has the keyboard, monitor, and mouse attached. The server is responsible for managing the display, handling input from the keyboard and mouse, and so on. Each X application (such as XTerm, or Netscape) is a client. A client sends messages to the server such as Please draw a window at these coordinates, and the server sends back messages such as The user just clicked on your OK button. If you are using FreeBSD in a home or small office environment where you only have one computer then you will be running the X server and the X clients on the same computer. However, if you have many machines running FreeBSD it is perfectly possible to run the X server on the computer by your desk (which might be quite a low specification machine) and run your X applications (the clients) on the powerful expensive server that serves your office. In this scenario the communication between the X client and server takes place over the network. This confuses a lot of people, because the X terminology is exactly backward to what they expect. They expect the X server to be the big powerful machine down the hall, and the X client to be the machine on their desk. As long as you remember that the X server is the machine with the monitor and keyboard, and the X clients are the programs that display the windows you will not get confused. There is an interesting side-effect to this design. There is nothing in the protocol that forces the client and server machines to be running the same operating system, or even to be running on the same type of computer. It is perfectly feasible to run an X server on Microsoft Windows or Apple's MacOS, and there are various free and commercial applications available that do exactly that. The X server that ships with FreeBSD is called XFree86, and is available for free, under a license very similar to the FreeBSD license. Commercial X servers for FreeBSD are also available, should you want one. The Window Manager The X design philosophy is much like the Unix design philosophy, tools, not policy. By this we mean that X (and Unix) does not try to dictate to the end user how they should accomplish whatever task they are trying to solve. Instead, they aim to provide the user tools to do the job, and it is the user's responsibility to decide how to use those tools. This philosophy extends to X not dictating what windows should look like on screen, how you move them around with your mouse, what keystrokes you should use to move between windows (i.e., Alt Tab , if you are familiar with Windows), what the title bars on each window should look like, whether or not they have close buttons on them, and so on. Instead, X delegates this responsibility to an application called the Window Manager. There are dozens of window managers available for X; AfterStep, Enlightenment, ctwm, ftwm, sawfish, twm, WindowMaker and more. Each of these window managers provides a different look and feel; some of them support virtual desktops some of them allow you to completely customize the keystrokes you can use to manage your desktop; some have a Start button, or similar device; some are themeable, allowing you to completely change the look-and-feel of your desktop by applying a new theme. These window managers, and many more, are available in the x11-wm category of the Ports Collection. In addition, the KDE and GNOME desktop environments both have their own window managers which integrate tightly with the desktop, although both of them allow you to replace the default window manager with your own choice. Each window manager also has a different configuration mechanism; some expect you to write a configuration file by hand; others feature GUI tools for carrying most of the configuration tasks; at least one (sawfish) has a configuration file written in a dialect of the Lisp language, which is very powerful (if you are in to that sort of thing). As you can imagine, this flexibility comes with a price. It can be very difficult for documents such as this one to guide you through choosing and configuring a window manager because the available choice is so wide. Focus Policy Another feature the window manager is responsible for is the mouse focus policy. Each windowing system, be it X, Microsoft Windows, or some other has an abstraction called the focus, and at any one time only one window can have the focus. The window that has the focus is the window that will receive all your key presses and mouse clicks. You are probably familiar with a focus policy commonly called click-to-focus. This means that you must click on the window you want to have the focus. The window may then come to the top of the stack, and all your key presses will now be directed to this window, even if you move the mouse outside the window. To give the focus to another window you must first click in it. X does not support any particular focus policy. Instead, the window manager controls which window has the focus at any one time. Different window managers will support different focus methods. All of them support click to focus, and the majority of them support several others. The two other most popular focus policies are: focus-follows-mouse With this policy, the window that is under the mouse pointer is the window that has the focus. This may not necessarily be the window that is on top of all the other windows. You can change the focus by pointing at another window, there is no need to click in it as well. After getting used to this policy it can be very disorientating going back to another system that uses click-to-focus. sloppy-focus This policy is a small extension to focus-follows-mouse. With focus-follows-mouse, if you move the mouse over the background (or desktop, also called the root window) then no window has the focus, and your key presses go nowhere. If you use sloppy-focus and move the mouse pointer on the root window then the last window that had the focus will keep it. Your window manager will almost certainly support other policies, and variations on these two, so make sure you read the documentation it is supplied with. Widgets The X approach of providing tools and not policy extends to the widgets that you see on screen in each application. Widget is a GUI term for all the items in the user interface that you can click on and manipulate in some way; buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons, icons, lists, and so on. Microsoft Windows Developer documentation calls these things controls. Microsoft Windows and Apple's MacOS both have a very rigid widget policy. Application developers are supposed to ensure that their applications share a common look and feel. X was designed long before either of these windowing systems, when research into GUI systems was in its infancy, and it was felt that it would not be sensible to mandate a particular graphical style, or set of widgets that have to be adhered to. If you examine the evolution of the Windows or MacOS GUI over the past ten years you will see many examples of how the interfaces have been altered over time to reflect new thinking in the art of Human/Computer Interaction. The upshot of this is that you can not expect X applications to have a common look and feel. There are several popular widget sets (and variations), including the original Athena widget set (developed at MIT), Motif (on which the widget set in Microsoft Windows was modeled, all bevelled edges and three shades of grey), OpenLook, and others. Most newer X applications today will use a modern-looking widget set, probably either Qt, used by KDE, or GTK, used by the GNOME project. In this respect we are beginning to see a convergence in look-and-feel on the Unix desktop, which certainly makes things easier for the novice user. However, the sudden rise in popularity of theming, allows users to confuse the issue once more by dramatically altering the look and feel of desktop widgets. Installing XFree86 Before installing XFree86 you must decide which version to run. XFree86 3.X is a maintenance branch of XFree86 development. It is very stable, and it supports a huge number of graphics cards. However, no new development is happening there. XFree86 4.X is a complete redesign of the system with many new features such as better support for fonts and anti-aliasing. Unfortunately this new architecture requires that the video drivers be rewritten, and some of the older cards that were supported in 3.X are not yet supported in 4.X. If your card is supported, then by all means run 4.X. The FreeBSD setup program offers users the opportunity to install and configure XFree86 3.3.6 during installation (covered in ). If you would like to run XFree86 4.X, then you should wait until after the base FreeBSD system is installed and then install XFree86. For example, to build and install XFree86 4.X from the ports collection : &prompt.root; cd /usr/ports/x11/XFree86-4 &prompt.root; make all install clean Alternatively, XFree86 4.X can be installed from a binary package with the pkg_add tool or directly from the FreeBSD binaries provided on the XFree86 web site. The rest of this chapter will explain how to configure XFree86 for your hardware, and how to setup a productive desktop environment. Christopher Shumway Contributed by XFree86 Configuration XFree86 4.X XFree86 Before You Start Before the user is to start configuration of XFree86 4.X, the the following information will need to be known about the target system: Monitor specifications Video Adapter chipset Video Adapter memory horizontal scan rate vertical scan rate The specifications for the target system's monitor are used by XFree86 to determine the resolution and refresh rate to run at. These specifications can usually be obtained from the documentation that came with the target system's monitor or from the manufacturer's website. There are two ranges of numbers that are needed, the horizontal scan rate and the vertical synchronization rate. The video adapter's chipset defines what driver module XFree86 uses to talk to the graphics hardware. With most chipsets, this can be automatically determined, but it is still useful to know in case the automatic detection does not work correctly. Video memory on the graphic adapter determines the resolution and color depth the target system can run at. This is important to know so the user knows the limitations of the target system. Configuring XFree86 4.X Configuration of XFree86 4.X is a multi-step process. The first step is to build an initial configuration file with the option to XFree86. As the super user, simply run: &prompt.root; XFree86 -configure This will generate a skeleton XFree86 configuration file in the current working directory called XF86Config.new. The XFree86 program will attempt to probe the graphics hardware on the system and will write a configuration file to load the proper drivers for the detected hardware on the target system. The next step is to test the existing configuration to verify that XFree86 can work with the graphics hardware on the target system. To preform this task, the user needs to run: &prompt.root; XFree86 -xf86config XF86Config.new If the user is presented with a black and grey grid and an X mouse cursor, then the configuration was successful. To exit the test, just press Ctrl Alt Backspace simultaneously. XFree86 4 Tuning Next, the user needs to tune the XF86Config.new configuration file to their personal taste. Open up the file in a text editor such as &man.emacs.1; or &man.ee.1;. The first thing the user will want to do is add the frequencies for the target system's monitor. These are usually expressed as a horizontal and vertical synchronization rate. These values are added to the XF86Config.new file under the "Monitor" section as such: Section "Monitor" Identifier "Monitor0" VendorName "Monitor Vendor" ModelName "Monitor Model" Horizsync 30-107 VertRefresh 48-120 EndSection The Horizsync and VertRefresh keywords may not exist in the user's configuration file. If they do not, they need to be added, with the correct horizontal synchronization rate placed after the Horizsync keyword and the vertical synchronization rate after the VertRefresh keyword. In the example above the target monitor's rates where entered. XF86Config While the XF86Config.new configuration file is still open in an editor, next the user needs to select what the default resolution and color depth is desired. This is defined in the Screen section. Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen0" Device "Card0" Monitor "Monitor0" DefaultColorDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Depth 24 Modes "1024x768" EndSubSection EndSection The DefaultColorDepth keyword describes the color depth the user wishes to run at by default. This can be overridden with the -bpp command line switch to XFree86 1. The Modes keyword describes the resolution the user wishes to run at for the given color depth. In the example above, the default color depth is twenty four bits per pixel. At this color depth, the accepted resolution is one thousand twenty four pixels by seven hundred and sixty eight pixels. If a user wants to run at a resolution of one thousand twenty four pixels by seven hundred sixty eight pixels at twenty four bits per pixel, then the user needs to add the DefaultColorDepth keyword with the value of twenty four, and add to the "Display" subsection with the desired Depth the Modes keyword with the resolution the user wishes to run at. Note that only VESA standard modes are supported as defined by the target system's graphics hardware. Finally, the user can write out the configuration file and test it using the test mode given above. If all is well, then the configuration file needs to be installed in a common location where XFree86 1 can source it in the future. This is typically /etc/X11/XF86Config or /usr/X11R6/etc/X11/XF86Config. &prompt.root; cp XF86Config.new /etc/X11/XF86Config Once the configuration file has been placed in a common location, XFree86 can then be used through &man.xdm.1;. In order to use startx 1 the user will have to install the X11/wrapper port. Advanced Configuration Topics Configuration with Intel i810 Graphics Chipsets Intel i810 graphic chipset Configuration with Intel i810 integrated chipsets requires the agpgart AGP programming interface for XFree86 to be able to drive the card. To enable the agpgart programming interface, the agp.ko kernel loadable module needs to be loaded into the kernel with &man.kldload.8;. This can be done automatically with the &man.loader.8;. Simply add this line to /boot/loader.conf to have the loader load agp.ko at boot time: agp_load="YES" Next, a device node needs to be created for the programming interface. To create the AGP device node, run &man.MAKEDEV.8; in the /dev directory as such: &prompt.root; cd /dev &prompt.root; sh MAKEDEV agpgart This will allow the user to configure the graphics hardware as any other graphics board. Murray Stokely Contributed by Using Fonts in XFree86 Type1 Fonts The default fonts that ship with XFree86 are less than ideal for typical desktop publishing applications. Large presentation fonts show up jagged and unprofessional looking and small fonts in Netscape are almost completely unintelligible. However, there are several free, high quality Type1 (PostScript) fonts available which can be readily used with XFree86, either version 3.X or version 4.X. For instance, the URW font collection (x11-fonts/urwfonts) includes high quality versions of standard type1 fonts (Times Roman, Helvetica, Palatino and others). The Freefont collection (x11-fonts/freefont) includes many more fonts, but most of them are intended for use in graphics software such as the Gimp, and are not complete enough to serve as screen fonts. In addition, XFree86 can be configured to use TrueType fonts with a minimum of effort: see the section on TrueType fonts later. To install the above Type1 font collections from the ports collection you can run the following commands. &prompt.root; cd /usr/ports/x11-fonts/urwfonts &prompt.root; make install clean And likewise with the freefont or other collections. To tell the X server that these fonts exist, you can add an appropriate line to your XF86Config file (in /etc/ for XFree86 version 3, or in /etc/X11/ for version 4), which reads: FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/URW/" Alternatively, at the command line in your X session you can write: &prompt.user; xset fp+ /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/URW &prompt.user; xset fp rehash This will work but will be lost when you log out from this session, unless you add it to your startup file (~/.xinitrc for a normal startx session, or ~/.xsession when logging in through a graphical login manager like XDM). A third way is to use the new XftConfig file: see the section on anti-aliasing, later. TrueType Fonts XFree86 4.0 has built in support for rendering TrueType fonts. There are two different modules that can enable this functionality. The "freetype" module is used in this example because it is more consistent with the other font rendering back-ends. To enable the freetype module just add the following line to the module section of your /etc/X11/XF86Config file. Load "freetype" For XFree86 3.3.X you will need to run a separate TrueType font server. Xfstt is commonly used for this purpose. To install x11-servers/Xfstt on your FreeBSD system simply install the port from /usr/ports/x11-servers/Xfstt You should now make a directory for your TrueType fonts (For example, /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType) and copy all of your TrueType fonts into this directory. Keep in mind that you cannot take TrueType fonts directly from a Macintosh; they must be in Unix/DOS/Windows format for use by XFree86. Once you have copied the files into this directory you need to use ttmkfdir to create a fonts.dir file so that the X font renderer knows that you have installed these new files. ttmkfdir is available from the FreeBSD Ports Collection as x11-fonts/ttmkfdir. &prompt.root; cd /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType &prompt.root; ttmkfdir > fonts.dir Now you need to add your TrueType directory to your fonts path. This is just the same as described above for Type1 fonts, that is, use &prompt.user; xset fp+ /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType &prompt.user; xset fp rehash or add a line to the XF86Config file. That's it. Now Netscape, Gimp, StarOffice, and all of your other X applications should now recognize your installed TrueType fonts. Extremely small fonts (as with text in a high resolution display on a web page) and extremely large fonts (within StarOffice) will look much better now. Anti-Aliasing Your Fonts Starting with version 4.0.2, XFree86 supports anti-aliased fonts. Currently, most software has not been updated to take advantage of this new functionality. However, Qt (the toolkit for the KDE desktop) does; so if you are running XFree86 4.0.2 (or higher), Qt 2.3 (or higher) and KDE, all your KDE/Qt applications can be made to use anti-aliased fonts. To configure anti-aliasing, you need to create (or edit, if it already exists) the file /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/XftConfig. Several advanced things can be done with this file; this section describes only the simplest possibilities. First, you need to tell the X server about the fonts which you want anti-aliased. For each font directory, add a line similar to this: dir "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/Type1" And likewise for the other font directories (URW, truetype, etc) containing fonts you would like anti-aliased. Anti-aliasing makes sense only for scalable fonts (basically, Type1 and TrueType) so do not include bitmap font directories here. The directories which you included here can now be commented out of your XF86Config file. Next, you may not want to anti-alias normal-sized text. (Antialiasing makes borders slightly fuzzy, which makes very small text more readable and removes "staircases" from large text, but can cause eyestrain if applied to normal text.) To exclude point sizes between 9 and 13 from anti-aliasing, include these lines: match any size > 8 any size < 14 edit antialias = false; You may also find that the spacing for some monospaced fonts gets messed up when you turn on anti-aliasing. This seems to be an issue with KDE, in particular. One possible fix for this is to force the spacing for such fonts to be 100: add the following lines: match any family == "fixed" edit family =+ "mono"; match any family == "console" edit family =+ "mono"; (this aliases the other common names for fixed fonts as "mono"), and then add: match any family == "mono" edit spacing = 100; Supposing you want to use the Lucidux fonts whenever monospaced fonts are required (these look nice, and do not seem to suffer from the spacing problem), you could replace that last line with these: match any family == "mono" edit family += "LuciduxMono"; match any family == "Lucidux Mono" edit family += "LuciduxMono"; match any family == "LuciduxMono" edit family =+ "Lucidux Mono"; (the last lines alias different equivalent family names). Finally, you want to allow users to add commands to this file, via their personal .xftconfig files. To do this, add a last line: includeif "~/.xftconfig" One last point: if you are using an LCD screen, you may want to enable sub-pixel sampling. This basically treats the (horizontally separated) red, green and blue components separately to improve the horizontal resolution; the results can be dramatic. To enable this, add the line somewhere in your XftConfig file match edit rgba=rgb; (depending on what sort of display you have, you may need to change that last word from ``rgb'' to ``bgr'', ``vrgb'' or ``vbgr'': experiment and see which works best.) That's all; anti-aliasing should be enabled the next time you start the X server. However, note that your programs must know how to take advantage of it. At the present time, the toolkit Qt does, so the entire KDE environment can use anti-aliased fonts (see on KDE for details); there are patches for gtk+ to do the same, so if compiled against such a patched gtk+, the GNOME environment and Mozilla can also use anti-aliased fonts. In fact, there is now a library called gdkxft (in the ports) which allows one to use antialiased fonts without recompiling: see for details. Anti-aliasing is still new to FreeBSD and XFree86; configuring it should get easier with time, and it will soon be supported by many more applications. Seth Kingsley Contributed by The X Display Manager Overview The X Display Manager (XDM) is an optional part of the X Window System that is used for login session management. This is useful for several types of situations, including minimal X Terminals, desktops, and large network display servers. Since the X Window System is network and protocol independent, there are a wide variety of possible configurations for running X clients and servers on different machines connected by a network. XDM provides a graphical interface for choosing which display server to connect to, and entering authorization information such as a login and password combination. You may think of XDM as providing the same functionality to the user as the &man.getty.8; utility (see for details). That is, it performs system logins to the display being connected to and then runs a session manager on behalf of the user (usually an X window manager). XDM then waits for this program to exit, signaling that the user is done and should be logged out of the display. At this point, XDM can display the login and display chooser screens for the next user to login. Using XDM The XDM daemon program is located in /usr/X11R6/bin/xdm. You can run this program at any time as root and it will start managing the X display on the local machine. If you want XDM to run in the background every time the machine boots up, a convenient way to do this is by adding an entry to /etc/ttys. For more information about the format and usage of this file, see . There is a line in the default /etc/ttys file for running the XDM daemon on a virtual terminal: ttyv8 "/usr/X11R6/bin/xdm -nodaemon" xterm off secure By default this entry is disabled, and in order to enable it you will need to change field 5 from off to on and then restart &man.init.8; using the directions in . The first field, the name of the terminal this program will manage, is ttyv8. This means that XDM will start running on the 9th virtual terminal. Configuring XDM The XDM configuration directory is located in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xdm. In this directory you will see several files used to change the behavior and appearance of XDM. Typically you will find these files: File Description Xaccess Client authorization ruleset. Xresources Default X resource values. Xservers List of remote and local displays to manage. Xsession Default session script for logins. Xsetup_* Script to launch applications before the login interface. xdm-config Global configuration for all displays running on this machine. xdm-errors Errors generated by the server program. xdm-pid The process ID of the currently running XDM. Also in this directory are a few scripts and programs used to setup the desktop when XDM is running. In the next few sections I will briefly describe the purpose of each of these files. The exact syntax and usage of all of these files is described in &man.xdm.1; The default configuration is a simple rectangular login window with the hostname of the machine displayed at the top in a large font and Login: and Password: prompts below. This is a good starting point if you are planning to design your own look and feel for the XDM screens. Xaccess The protocol for connecting to XDM controlled displays is called the X Display Manager Connection Protocol (XDMCP). This file is basically just a ruleset for controlling XDMCP connections from remote machines. By default, it allows any client to connect, but you will see this will not matter because the default xdm-config file does not listen for remote connections. Xresources This is an application-defaults file for the display chooser and the login screens. This is where you can customize the appearance of the login program. The format is identical to the app-defaults file described in the XFree86 documentation. Xservers This is a list of the remote displays the chooser should provide as choices. Xsession This is the default session script for XDM to run after a user has logged in. Normally each user will have a customized session script in ~/.xsessionrc that overrides this script. Xsetup_* These files contain scripts that will be run automatically before displaying the chooser or login interfaces. There is a script for each display being used, named Xsetup_ followed by the local display number (for instance Xsetup_0). Typically these scripts will run one or two programs in the background such as xconsole. xdm-config This file contains settings in the form of app-defaults that are applicable to every display that this installation manages. xdm-errors This file contains the output of the X servers that XDM is trying to run. If a display that XDM is trying to start hangs for some reason, this is a good place to look for error messages. These messages are also written to the user's ~/.xsession-errors file on a per-session basis Running a Network Display Server In order for other clients to connect to your display server, you will need to edit the access control rules, and enable the connection listener. By default these are set to conservative values, which is a good decision security-wise. To get XDM to listen for connections first comment out a line in the xdm-config file: ! SECURITY: do not listen for XDMCP or Chooser requests ! Comment out this line if you want to manage X terminals with xdm DisplayManager.requestPort: 0 and then restart XDM. Remember that comments in app-defaults files begin with a ! character, not the usual #. After this, you may need to put more strict access controls in place. Look at the example entries in Xaccess file, and refer to the &man.xdm.1; manual page. Replacements for XDM Several replacements for the default XDM program exist. One of them, KDM (bundled with KDE) is described later in this chapter. KDM offers many visual improvements and cosmetic frills, as well as the functionality to allow users to choose their window manager of choice at login time. Valentino Vaschetto Contributed by Desktop Environments This section describes the different desktop environments available for X on FreeBSD. For our purposes a "desktop environment" will mean anything ranging from a simple window manager, to a complete suite of desktop applications such as KDE or GNOME. GNOME About GNOME GNOME is a user-friendly desktop environment that enables users to easily use and configure their computers. GNOME includes a panel (for starting applications and displaying status), a desktop (where data and applications can be placed), a set of standard desktop tools and applications, and a set of conventions that make it easy for applications to cooperate and be consistent with each other. Users of other operating systems or environments should feel right at home using the powerful graphics-driven environment that GNOME provides. Installing GNOME The easiest way to install GNOME is through the Desktop Configuration menu during the FreeBSD installation process as described in Chapter 2. If for some reason you didn't install a desktop environment at that time, then you can easily install one from the package or ports collections. To install the GNOME package from the network, simply type: &prompt.root; pkg_add -r gnome If you would rather build GNOME from source, then use the ports tree: &prompt.root; cd /usr/ports/x11/gnome &prompt.root; make install clean Once GNOME is installed, we must have the X server start GNOME instead of a default window manager. If you have already customized your .xinitrc file then you should simply replace the line that starts your current window manager with one that starts /usr/X11R6/bin/gnome-session instead. If you have not added anything special to your configuration file, then it is enough to simply type: &prompt.root; echo "/usr/X11R6/bin/gnome-session" > ~/.xinitrc That's it. Type startx and you will be in the GNOME desktop environment. If you are running a display manager like XDM, this will not work. Instead, you should create an executable .xsession file with the same command in it. To do this, edit your file (if you already have one) and replace the existing window manager command with /usr/X11R6/bin/gnome-session; or else, &prompt.root; echo "#!/bin/sh" > ~/.xsession &prompt.root; echo "/usr/X11R6/bin/gnome-session" >> ~/.xsession &prompt.root; chmod +x ~/.xsession Another option is to configure your display manager to allow choosing the window manager at login time; the section on KDE2 details explains how to do this for kdm, the display manager of KDE. Anti-aliased fonts with GNOME While anti-aliased fonts made their first appearance on XFree86 desktops in the KDE environment and are supported there in the standard installation, it is also possible to use them with gtk applications such as the GNOME environment. The most straightforward way is probably by using the libgdkxft library, in the x11/gdkxft port. After installing this port, read carefully the /usr/X11R6/share/doc/gdkxft/README file carefully. If you already have a working XftConfig file, all you really need to do is tell your gtk applications to look for their font-rendering functions in libgdkxft.so before looking in the standard place, libgdk.so. This is easily accomplished by setting an environment variable to point to the right place; with the Bourne shell (/bin/sh) or similar shells, type the command (to start The Gimp, say) &prompt.user; LD_PRELOAD=/usr/X11R6/lib/libgdkxft.so gimp and with csh and similar shells, type &prompt.user; setenv LD_PRELOAD /usr/X11R6/lib/libgdkxft.so &prompt.user; gimp It is a nuisance to do this all the time, so you can simply put the commands LD_PRELOAD=/usr/X11R6/lib/libgdkxft.so export LD_PRELOAD into your .xinitrc, .xsession or in the appropriate place(s) in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xdm/Xsession, depending on how you normally start X. However, this - short-cut may cause you problems if you want to run linux + short-cut may cause you problems if you want to run Linux gtk binaries. KDE2 About KDE2 KDE is an easy to use contemporary desktop environment. Some of the things that KDE brings to the user are: A beautiful contemporary desktop A desktop exhibiting complete network transparency An integrated help system allowing for convenient, consistent access to help on the use of the KDE desktop and its applications Consistent look and feel of all KDE applications Standardized menu and toolbars, keybindings, color-schemes, etc. Internationalization: KDE is available in more than 40 languages Centralized consisted dialog driven desktop configuration A great number of useful KDE applications KDE has an office application suite based on KDE's KParts technology consisting of a spread-sheet, a presentation application, an organizer, a news client and more. KDE also comes with a web browser called Konqeuror, which represents a solid competitor to other existing web browsers on Unix systems. More information on KDE can be found on the KDE website Installing KDE2 Just like with GNOME or any other desktop environment, the easiest way to install KDE is through the Desktop Configuration menu during the FreeBSD installation process as described in Chapter 2. If for some reason you didn't install a desktop environment at that time, then you can easily install one from the package or ports collections. To install the KDE2 package from the network, simply type: &prompt.root; pkg_add -r kde2 If you would rather build KDE from source, then use the ports tree: &prompt.root; cd /usr/ports/x11/kde2 &prompt.root; make install clean After you've installed KDE2, you must tell the X server to launch this application instead of the default window manager. This is accomplished by editing the .xinitrc file in your home directory : &prompt.root; echo "/usr/X11R6/bin/startkde" > ~/.xinitrc Now, whenever invoke X-Windows with startx, KDE2 will be your desktop. If you are using a display manager such as xdm, then configuration is slightly different. You must edit the .xsession file instead. Instructions for kdm are described later in this chapter. More Details on KDE2 Now that KDE2 is installed on your system, you will find that you can learn a lot from its help pages, or just by pointing and clicking at various menus. Windows or Mac users will feel quite at home. The best reference for KDE is the on-line documentation. KDE comes with its own web browser, Konqueror, dozens of useful applications, and extensive documentation. The remainder of this section discusses the technical items that are difficult to learn by random exploration. The KDE display manager If you are an administrator on a multi-user system, you may like to have a graphical login screen to welcome users. You can use xdm, as described earlier. However, KDE includes an alternative, KDM, which is designed to look more attractive and include more login-time options. In particular, users can easily choose (via a menu) which desktop environment (KDE2, GNOME, or something else) to run after logging on. If you are slightly adventurous and you want this added flexibility and visual appeal, read on. To begin with, run the KDE2 control panel, kcontrol, as root. It is generally considered unsafe to run your entire X environment as root. Instead, run your window manager as a normal user, open a terminal window (such as xterm or KDE's konsole, become root with su (you need to be in the wheel group in /etc/group for this), and then type kcontrol. Click on the icon on the left marked System, then on Login manager. On the right you will see various configurable options, which the KDE manual will explain in greater detail. Click on sessions on the right. Depending on what window managers or desktop environments you have currently installed, you can type their names in New type and add them. (These are just labels so far, not commands, so you can write KDE and GNOME rather than startkde or gnome-session.) Include a label failsafe. Play with the other menus as you like (those are mainly cosmetic and self-explanatory). When you are done, click on Apply at the bottom, and quit the control center. To make sure kdm understands what your above labels (KDE, GNOME etc) mean, you need to edit some more files: the same ones used by xdm. In KDE 2.2 this has changed: kdm now uses its own configuration files. Please see the KDE 2.2 documentation for details. In your terminal window, as root, edit the file /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xdm/Xsession. You will come across a section in the middle looking like this (by default): case $# in 1) case $1 in failsafe) exec xterm -geometry 80x24-0-0 ;; esac esac You will need to add a few lines to this section. Assuming the labels you gave earlier were KDE2 and GNOME, the following will do: case $# in 1) case $1 in KDE2) exec /usr/X11R6/bin/startkde ;; GNOME) exec /usr/X11R6/bin/gnome-session ;; failsafe) exec xterm -geometry 80x24-0-0 ;; esac esac To make sure your KDE choice of a login-time desktop background is also honored, you will need to add the following line to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xdm/Xsetup_0: /usr/X11R6/bin/kdmdesktop Now, you need only to make sure that kdm is listed in /etc/ttys to be started at the next bootup. To do this, simply follow the instructions from the previous section on xdm and replace references to the /usr/X11R6/bin/xdm program with /usr/local/bin/kdm. That's it. Your next login screen should have a pretty face and lots of menus. Anti-aliased Fonts Starting with version 4.0.2, XFree86 supports anti-aliasing via its "RENDER" extension, and starting with version 2.3, Qt (the toolkit used by KDE) supports this extension. Configuring this is described in on antialiasing X11 fonts. So if you are running up-to-date software, anti-aliasing is possible on your KDE2 desktop. Just go to your KDE2 menu, go to Preferences -> Look and Feel -> Style, and click on the checkbox "Use Anti-Aliasing for Fonts and Icons". That's all. If you are running a Qt application which is not part of KDE, you may need to set the environment variable QT_XFT to true before starting your program. XFCE About XFCE XFCE is a desktop environment based on the gtk+ toolkit used by GNOME, but is much more lightweight and meant for those who want a simple, efficient desktop which is nevertheless easy to use and configure. Visually, it looks very much like CDE, found on commercial Unix systems. Some of XFCE's features are: A simple, easy-to-handle desktop Fully configurable via mouse, with drag and drop, etc Main panel similar to CDE, with menus, applets and app launchers Integrated window manager, file manager, sound manager, GNOME compliance module, and other things Themeable (since it uses gtk+) Fast, light and efficient: ideal for older/slower machines or machines with memory limitations More information on XFCE can be found on the XFCE website. Installing XFCE A binary package for xfce exists (at the time of writing). To install, simply do this: &prompt.root; pkg_add -r xfce Alternatively, you may prefer to build from source. The ports tree comes to the rescue again: &prompt.root; cd /usr/ports/x11-wm/xfce &prompt.root; make install clean All necessary source packages (including dependencies) will be automagically fetched, built and installed, and the build areas cleaned up afterwards. Now you want to tell the X server to launch XFCE the next time you start X. Simply type this: &prompt.root; echo "/usr/X11R6/bin/startxfce" > ~/.xinitrc The next time you start X, XFCE will be your desktop. (Note, as before: if you are logging in via a display manager like xdm, you should either create an .xsession, as described in the section on GNOME, but with the /usr/X11R6/bin/startxfce command; or, configure your display manager to allow choosing a desktop at login time, as explained in the section on kdm.)