Chapter 2. Installing FreeBSD and Adding Software
In the tradition of the first UNIX systems, FreeBSD offers a text-based installation facility that includes a utility called sysinstall. The installer is aimed at professionals, who are more interested in power and flexibility than fancy graphical screens and hand-holding. After initialization you can run sysinstall again, to add more software packages and configure some network settings.
Despite its simplicity, the installer offers many of the same powerful features that you can find in more refined Linux and UNIX installers. It can configure your hard disks and install from different local media (CD, DVD, or hard disk) or remote servers (FTP, HTTP or NFS servers). It also leads you through the initial configuration of users, mice, network services, and other important start-up features.
After installation, FreeBSD offers tools such as pkg_info, pkg_add, pkg_delete, and pkg_check to add and otherwise work with software packages in FreeBSD. You can also run the sysinstall utility again to install more packages after your initial FreeBSD install. To install packages from source code, FreeBSD offers the ports collection, along with tools such as portsnap and portupgrade.
This chapter highlights critical issues you need to know during the initial FreeBSD installation. It also provides detailed examples of commands just mentioned ...
Get BSD Unix® Toolbox: 1000+ Commands for FreeBSD®, OpenBSD, and NetBSD® now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
