freebsd-dev/release/ABOUT.TXT

This file attempts to describe what you are seeing here.  Here is a typical
distribution tree:

HARDWARE.TXT    bin             dict            manpages        tools
INSTALL.TXT     compat1x        des		doc             packages
README.TXT      compat20        floppies        ports
RELNOTES.TXT    compat21        games           proflibs
XF8632          info            src

The *.TXT files obviously contain documentation (README.TXT being a good
start).  The XF8632 directory contains the XFree86 project's 3.2 release
and consists of a series of gzip'd tar files which contain each component
of the XFree86 distribution.

The compat1x, compat20 and compat21 directories contain distributions for
compatibility with older releases and are distributed as gzip'd tar files -
they can be installed during release time or later by running their
`install.sh' scripts.

The bin, dict, des, doc, games, info, manpages, proflibs, and src directories
contain the primary distribution components of FreeBSD itself and are split
into smaller files for easy packing onto floppies (should that be necessary).

A typical distribution (we'll use the info distribution as an example) looks
like this:

CHECKSUM.MD5    info.ab         info.ad         info.inf        install.sh
info.aa         info.ac         info.ae         info.mtree

The CHECKSUM.MD5 file contains MD5 signatures for each file, should
data corruption be suspected, and is purely for reference - it is not
used by the actual installation and does not need to be copied with the
rest of the distribution files.  The info.a* files are split, gzip'd
tar files, the contents of which can be viewed by doing:

	cat info.a* | tar tvzf -

During installation, they are automatically concatenated and extracted by
the installation procedure.

The info.inf file is also necessary since it is read by the installation
program in order to figure out how many pieces to look for when fetching and
concatenating the distribution.  When putting distributions onto floppies,
the .inf file MUST occupy the first floppy of each distribution set!

The info.mtree file is another non-essential file which is provided
for user reference.  It contains the MD5 signatures of the *unpacked*
distribution files and can be later used with the mtree(1) program
to verify the installation permissions and checksums against any possible
modifications to the file.  When used with the bin distribution, this can
be an excellent way of detecting trojan horse attacks on your system.

Finally, the install.sh file is for use by those who want to install the
distribution after installation time.  To install the info distribution from
CDROM after a system was installed, for example, you'd do:

		cd /cdrom/info
		sh install.sh

And that's all there is to it!  Each distribution contains its own
install.sh file for this.


The floppies subdirectory contains the floppy installation images and
the floppies/README.TXT file should be read for further information
on them.

The packages and ports directories contain the FreeBSD packages and
ports collections.   Packages may be installed from the packages directory
by running the /stand/sysinstall utility with the argument ``configPackages''
or by feeding the individual filenames to the pkg_add(1) command.

The ports tree should be copied or linked (with the ``lndir'' command)
to a directory on your hard disk.  lndir comes with the XFree86 distribution
and is recommended if you can live with mounting your CDROM whenever you wish
to use the ports collection.  More information on the ports collection may be
obtained from http://www.freebsd.org/ports or locally from
file:/usr/share/doc/handbook if you've installed the doc distribution.

Last of all, the tools directory contains various DOS tools for
discovering disk geometries, installing boot managers and the like.
It is purely optional and provided only for user convenience.