So, you would like to try out FreeBSD on your system? This section is a quick-start guide for what you need to do. FreeBSD can be installed from a variety of media including CD-ROM, floppy disk, magnetic tape, an MS-DOS partition, and if you have a network connection, via anonymous ftp or NFS. Regardless of the installation media you choose, you can get started by downloading the installation disk as described below. Booting your computer with disk will provide important information about compatibility between FreeBSD and your hardware which could dictate which installation options are possible. It can also provide early clues to compatibility problems that could prevent FreeBSD running on your system at all. If you plan on installing via anonymous FTP, then this installation disk is all you need to download. For more information on obtaining the FreeBSD distribution itself, please see in the Appendix. So, to get the show on the road, follow these steps: Review the section of this installation guide to be sure that your hardware is supported by FreeBSD. It may be helpful to make a list of any special cards you have installed, such as SCSI controllers, Ethernet adapters or sound cards. This list should include relevant configuration parameters such as interrupts (IRQ) and IO port addresses. Download the file to your hard drive, and be sure to tell your browser to save rather than display. Note: This disk image can be used for both 1.44 megabyte 3.5 inch floppy disks and 1.2 megabyte 5.25 inch floppy disks. Make the installation boot disk from the image file: If you are using MS-DOS download , then run it: C:\> rawrite The program will prompt you for the floppy drive containing the disk you want to write to (A: or B:) and the name of the file to put on disk (boot.flp). If you are using a UNIX system: % dd if=boot.flp of=disk_device where disk_device is the /dev entry for the floppy drive. On FreeBSD systems, this is /dev/fd0 for the A: drive and /dev/fd1 for the B: drive. With the installation disk in the A: drive, reboot your computer. You should get a boot prompt something like this: >> FreeBSD BOOT ... Use hd(1,a)/kernel to boot sd0 when wd0 is also installed. Usage: [[hd(1,a)]/kernel][-abcCdhrsv] Use ? for file list or press Enter for defaults Boot: If you do not type anything, FreeBSD will automatically boot with its default configuration after a delay of about five seconds. As FreeBSD boots, it probes your computer to determine what hardware is installed. The results of this probing is displayed on the screen. When the booting process is finished, The main FreeBSD installation menu will be displayed.

If something goes wrong...

Due to limitations of the PC architecture, it is impossible for probing to be 100 percent reliable. In the event that your hardware is incorrectly identified, or that the probing causes your computer to lock up, first check the section of this installation guide to be sure that your hardware is indeed supported by FreeBSD.

If your hardware is supported, reset the computer and when the Boot: prompt comes up, type -c. This puts FreeBSD into a configuration mode where you can supply hints about your hardware. The FreeBSD kernel on the installation disk 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 -c option at boot to tell FreeBSD where things are.

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.

In the configuration mode, you can: List the device drivers installed in the kernel. Disable device drivers for hardware not present in your system. Change the IRQ, DRQ, and IO port addresses used by a device driver.

While at the config> prompt, type help for more information on the available commands. After adjusting the kernel to match how you have your hardware configured, type quit at the config> prompt to continue booting with the new settings. After FreeBSD has been installed, changes made in the configuration mode will be permanent so you do not have to reconfigure every time you boot. Even so, it is likely that you will want to build a custom kernel to optimize the performance of your system. See for more information on creating custom kernels. Supported Configurations

FreeBSD currently runs on a wide variety of ISA, VLB, EISA and PCI bus based PC's, ranging from 386sx to Pentium class machines (though the 386sx is not recommended). Support for generic IDE or ESDI drive configurations, various SCSI controller, network and serial cards is also provided. A minimum of five megabytes of RAM is required to run FreeBSD. To run the X-window system, eight megabytes of RAM is the recommended minimum. Following is a list of all disk controllers and Ethernet cards currently known to work with FreeBSD. Other configurations may very well work, and we have simply not received any indication of this. Disk Controllers

WD1003 (any generic MFM/RLL) WD1007 (any generic IDE/ESDI) IDE ATA Adaptec 152x series ISA SCSI controllers Adaptec 154x series ISA SCSI controllers Adaptec 174x series EISA SCSI controller in standard and enhanced mode. Adaptec 274x/284x/2940/3940 (Narrow/Wide/Twin) series EISA/VLB/PCI SCSI controllers Adaptec AIC-6360 based boards, which includes the AHA-152x and SoundBlaster SCSI cards. Note: You cannot boot from the SoundBlaster cards as they have no on-board BIOS, which is necessary for mapping the boot device into the system BIOS I/O vectors. They are perfectly usable for external tapes, CDROMs, etc, however. The same goes for any other AIC-6x60 based card without a boot ROM. Some systems DO have a boot ROM, which is generally indicated by some sort of message when the system is first powered up or reset. Check your system/board documentation for more details. Buslogic 545S & 545c Note: that Buslogic was formerly known as "Bustek". Buslogic 445S/445c VLB SCSI controller Buslogic 742A/747S/747c EISA SCSI controller. Buslogic 946c PCI SCSI controller Buslogic 956c PCI SCSI controller NCR 53C810/53C815/53C825/53C860/53C875 PCI SCSI controller. NCR5380/NCR53400 (``ProAudio Spectrum'') SCSI controller. DTC 3290 EISA SCSI controller in 1542 emulation mode. UltraStor 14F/24F/34F SCSI controllers. Seagate ST01/02 SCSI controllers. Future Domain 8xx/950 series SCSI controllers. WD7000 SCSI controllers. With all supported SCSI controllers, full support is provided for SCSI-I & SCSI-II peripherals, including Disks, tape drives (including DAT) and CD ROM drives. The following CD-ROM type systems are supported at this time: SoundBlaster SCSI and ProAudio Spectrum SCSI (cd) Mitsumi (all models) proprietary interface (mcd) Matsushita/Panasonic (Creative) CR-562/CR-563 proprietary interface (matcd) Sony proprietary interface (scd) ATAPI IDE interface (experimental and should be considered ALPHA quality!) (wcd) Ethernet cards

Allied-Telesis AT1700 and RE2000 cards SMC Elite 16 WD8013 Ethernet interface, and most other WD8003E, WD8003EBT, WD8003W, WD8013W, WD8003S, WD8003SBT and WD8013EBT based clones. SMC Elite Ultra is also supported. DEC EtherWORKS III NICs (DE203, DE204, and DE205) DEC EtherWORKS II NICs (DE200, DE201, DE202, and DE422) DEC DC21040/DC21041/DC21140 based NICs: ASUS PCI-L101-TB Accton ENI1203 Cogent EM960PCI Compex CPXPCI/32C D-Link DE-530 DEC DE435 Danpex EN-9400P3 JCIS Condor JC1260 Linksys EtherPCI Mylex LNP101 SMC EtherPower 10/100 (Model 9332) SMC EtherPower (Model 8432) Zynx ZX342 DEC FDDI (DEFPA/DEFEA) NICs Fujitsu FMV-181 and FMV-182 Intel EtherExpress Isolan AT 4141-0 (16 bit) Isolink 4110 (8 bit) Novell NE1000, NE2000, and NE2100 ethernet interface. 3Com 3C501 cards 3Com 3C503 Etherlink II 3Com 3c505 Etherlink/+ 3Com 3C507 Etherlink 16/TP 3Com 3C509, 3C579, 3C589 (PCMCIA) Etherlink III Toshiba ethernet cards PCMCIA ethernet cards from IBM and National Semiconductor are also supported.

Note: FreeBSD does not currently support PnP (plug-n-play) features present on some ethernet cards. If your card has PnP and is giving you problems, try disabling its PnP features. Miscellaneous devices

AST 4 port serial card using shared IRQ. ARNET 8 port serial card using shared IRQ. BOCA IOAT66 6 port serial card using shared IRQ. BOCA 2016 16 port serial card using shared IRQ. Cyclades Cyclom-y Serial Board. STB 4 port card using shared IRQ. SDL Communications Riscom/8 Serial Board. Adlib, SoundBlaster, SoundBlaster Pro, ProAudioSpectrum, Gravis UltraSound, Gravis UltraSound MAX and Roland MPU-401 sound cards. FreeBSD currently does not support IBM's microchannel (MCA) bus, but support is apparently close to materializing. Details will be posted as the situation develops. Preparing for the installation

There are a number of different methods by which FreeBSD can be installed. The following describes what preparation needs to be done for each type. Before installing from CDROM

If your CDROM is of an unsupported type, such as an IDE CDROM, then please skip to . There is not a lot of preparatory work that needs to be done to successfully install from one of Walnut Creek's FreeBSD CDROMs (other CDROM distributions may work as well, though we cannot say for certain as we have no hand or say in how they're created). You can either boot into the CD installation directly from DOS using Walnut Creek's supplied ``install.bat'' batch file or you can make a boot floppy with the ``makeflp.bat'' command [NOTE: If you're using an IDE CDROM, use the inst_ide.bat or atapiflp.bat batch files instead]. For the easiest interface of all (from DOS), type ``view''. This will bring up a DOS menu utility that leads you through all the available options. If you are creating the boot floppy from a UNIX machine, see for examples. of how to create the boot floppy. Once you have booted from DOS or floppy, you should then be able to select CDROM as the media type in the Media menu and load the entire distribution from CDROM. No other types of installation media should be required. After your system is fully installed and you have rebooted from the hard disk, you can mount the cdrom at any time by typing: mount /cdrom Before removing the CD again, also note that it's necessary to first type: umount /cdrom. Don't just remove it from the drive! Special note: Before invoking the installation, be sure that the CDROM is in the drive so that the install probe can find it. This is also true if you wish the CDROM to be added to the default system configuration automatically during the install (whether or not you actually use it as the installation media). Finally, if you would like people to be able to FTP install FreeBSD directly from the CDROM in your machine, you will find it quite easy. After the machine is fully installed, you simply need to add the following line to the password file (using the vipw command): ftp:*:99:99::0:0:FTP:/cdrom:/nonexistent Anyone with network connectivity to your machine (and permission to log into it) can now chose a Media type of FTP and type in: ftp://your machine after picking ``Other'' in the ftp sites menu. Before installing from Floppy

If you must install from floppy disks, either due to unsupported hardware or just because you enjoy doing things the hard way, you must first prepare some floppies for the install. The first floppy that you will need in addition to the boot.flp image is ``floppies/root.flp'', which is somewhat special in that it's not a DOS filesystem floppy at all, but rather a floppy "image" (it's actually a gzip'd cpio file). You can create this floppy in the same way that you created the boot floppy . Once this floppy is made, you can go on to make the distribution set floppies using ordinary DOS or UFS (if you're preparing the floppies on another FreeBSD machine) formatted diskettes. You will need, at minimum, as many 1.44MB or 1.2MB floppies as it takes to hold all files in the bin (binary distribution) directory. If you're preparing these floppies under DOS, then THESE floppies *must* be formatted using the MS-DOS FORMAT command. If you're using Windows, use the Windows File Manager format command. Do not trust Factory Preformatted floppies! Format them again yourself, just to make sure. Many problems reported by our users in the past have resulted from the use of improperly formatted media, which is why I'm taking such special care to mention it here! If you're creating the floppies from another FreeBSD machine, a format is still not a bad idea though you don't 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, like so: disklabel -w -r fd0 floppy3 (use floppy5 for 1.2MB disks) newfs /dev/rfd0 Then you can mount and write to them like any other file system. After you have DOS formatted the floppies, you will need to copy the files onto 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 got all 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 of the install, select ``Floppy'' and you will be prompted for the rest. Before installing from a MS-DOS partition

To prepare for installation from an MS-DOS partition, copy the files from the distribution into a directory called C:\FREEBSD. The directory tree structure of the CDROM must be partially reproduced within this directory so we suggest using the DOS xcopy command. For example, to prepare for a minimal installation of FreeBSD: C> MD C:\FREEBSD C> XCOPY /S E:\DISTS\BIN C:\FREEBSD\BIN\ C> XCOPY /S E:\FLOPPIES C:\FREEBSD\FLOPPIES\ assuming that C: is where you have free space and E: is where your CDROM is mounted. Note that you need the FLOPPIES directory because the root.flp image is needed during an MS-DOS installation. For as many `DISTS' you wish to install from MS-DOS (and you have free space for), install each one under C:\FREEBSD - the BIN dist is only the minimal requirement. If you have room on your MS-DOS partition for all the distributions, you could replace the last line above with: C> XCOPY /S E:\DISTS C:\FREEBSD\ which would copy all the subdirectories of E:\DISTS to C:\FREEBSD. Before installing from QIC/SCSI Tape

Installing from tape is probably the easiest method, short of an on-line install using FTP or a CDROM install. The installation program expects the files to be simply tar'ed onto the tape, so after getting all of the files for distribution you are interested in, simply tar them onto the tape with a command like: cd /freebsd/distdir tar cvf /dev/rwt0 (or /dev/rst0) dist1 .. dist2 Make sure that the `floppies/' directory is one of the ``dists'' given above, since the installation will look for `floppies/root.flp' on the tape. 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. Note: When going to do 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

You can do network installations over 3 types of communications links: Serial port SLIP or PPP Parallel port PLIP (laplink cable) Ethernet A standard ethernet controller (includes some PCMCIA). 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 soon in the installation process. You will need to know, at the minimum, your service provider's IP address and possibly your own (though you can also leave it blank and allow PPP to negotiate it with your ISP). You also need to know how to use the various ``AT commands'' to dial the ISP with your particular modem as the PPP dialer provides only a very simple terminal emulator. If a hard-wired connection to another FreeBSD (2.0R 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 50k/sec), thus resulting in a quicker installation. Finally, for the fastest possible network installation, an ethernet adaptor is always a good choice! FreeBSD supports most common PC ethernet cards, a table of supported cards (and their required settings) is provided in . 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. 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. 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 do not know the answers to all or most of these questions, then you should really probably talk to your system administrator first before trying this type of installation. Once you have a network link of some sort working, the installation can continue over NFS or FTP. Preparing for NFS installation

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'' access (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 2.1 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 ``-alldirs'' option. 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. Preparing for FTP Installation

FTP installation may be done from any mirror site containing a reasonably up-to-date version of FreeBSD 2.1. A full menu of reasonable choices from almost anywhere in the world is provided by the FTP site menu. If you are installing from some other FTP site not listed in this menu, or you are having troubles getting your name server configured properly, you can also specify your own URL by selecting the ``Other'' choice in that menu. A URL can also be a direct IP address, so the following would work in the absence of a name server: ftp://192.216.222.4/pub/FreeBSD/2.1.0-RELEASE There are two FTP installation modes you can use: FTP Active For 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 For all FTP transfers, use ``Passive'' mode. This allows the user to pass through firewalls that do not allow incoming connections on random port addresses. Note: Active and passive modes are not the same as a `proxy' connection, where a proxy ftp server is listening on a different port! In such instances, you should specify the URL as something like: ftp://foo.bar.com:1234/pub/FreeBSD Where ``1234'' is the port number of the proxy ftp server. Installing FreeBSD

Once you have taken note of the appropriate preinstallation steps, you should be able to install FreeBSD without any further trouble. Should this not be true, then you may wish to go back and re-read the relevant preparation section above for the installation media type you are trying to use, perhaps there is a helpful hint there that you missed the first time? If you are having hardware trouble, or FreeBSD refuses to boot at all, read the Hardware Guide provided on the boot floppy for a list of possible solutions. The FreeBSD boot floppy contains all the on-line documentation you should need to be able to navigate through an installation and if it does not then we would like to know what you found most confusing. Send your comments to . It is the objective of the FreeBSD installation program (sysinstall) to be self-documenting enough that painful ``step-by-step'' guides are no longer necessary. It may take us a little while to reach that objective, but that is the objective! Meanwhile, you may also find the following ``typical installation sequence'' to be helpful: Boot the boot floppy. After a boot sequence which can take anywhere from from 30 seconds to 3 minutes, depending on your hardware, you should be presented with a menu of initial choices. If the floppy does not boot at all, or the boot hangs at some stage, go read the Q&A section of the Hardware Guide for possible causes. Press F1. You should see some basic usage instructions on the menu system and general navigation. If you have not used this menu system before then PLEASE read this thoroughly! Select the Options item and set any special preferences you may have. Select a Custom or Express install, depending on whether or not you would like the installation to give you a high degree of control over each step of the installation or simply lead you through it, choosing reasonable defaults when possible. See details on both installation types below. The Configure menu choice allows you to further configure your FreeBSD installation by giving you menu-driven access to various system defaults. Some items, like networking, may be especially important if you did a CDROM/Tape/Floppy installation and have not yet configured your network interfaces (assuming you have any). Properly configuring such interfaces here will allow FreeBSD to come up on the network when you first reboot from the hard disk. Express installation

The express installation is not too much different than the Custom one except that it leads you through the required stages in the proper order and presents you with various helpful prompts along the way. The first step is the `Partition Editor', which allows you to chose how your drives will be used for FreeBSD. If you are dedicating an entire drive to FreeBSD, the `A' command is probably all you need to type here. Next, with the `Label Editor', you can specify how the space in any allocated FreeBSD partitions should be used by FreeBSD, or where to mount a non-FreeBSD partition (such as DOS). If you want the standard layout, simply type `A' here. Next, the `Distributions' menu allows you to specify which parts of FreeBSD you wish to load. A good choice is ``User'' for a small system or ``Developer'' for someone wanting a bit more out of FreeBSD. If none of the existing collections sound applicable, select Custom. Next, the `Media' menu allows you to specify what kind of media you wish to install from. If a desired media choice is found and configured automatically then this menu will simply return, otherwise you will be asked for additional details on the media device type. Finally, you will be prompted to commit all of these actions at once (nothing has been written to your disk so far, nor will it until you give the final confirmation). All new or changed partition information will be written out, file systems will be created and/or non-destructively labeled (depending on how you set their newfs flags in the Label Editor) and all selected distributions will be extracted. At this point, you are generally done with the sysinstall utility and can select the final `Quit'. If you are running it as an installer (e.g., before the system is all the way up) then the system will now reboot after you press return one last time. If you selected the boot manager option, you will see a small boot menu with an `F?' prompt. Press the function key for BSD (it will be shown) and you should boot up into FreeBSD off the hard disk. If this fails to happen for some reason, see the Q&A section of the Hardware Guide for possible clues! Custom installation

You can do anything you like in this menu without altering your system except for ``Commit'', which will perform any requests to alter your system you may have made. Some of the menu options will also have direct `Write' commands available for committing an operation immediately, but they should only be used if you are absolutely sure it is necessary. It is generally better to make your changes and then commit them all at once so that you are left with the option of changing your mind up to the very last minute. If you are confused at any point, the F1 key usually pulls up the right information for the screen you are in. MS-DOS user's Questions and Answers

Many FreeBSD 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 FreeBSD's installation, all is not lost! You may find the FIPS utility, provided in the tools directory on the FreeBSD CDROM or on the various FreeBSD ftp sites, to be quite useful. 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 DOS 6.xx DEFRAG utility or the Norton Disk tools, then 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 estimation of how much free space you will need for the kind of installation you want. 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/dblspaced file!). Do not remove that file! You will probably regret it greatly! It is probably better to create another uncompressed MS-DOS primary partition and use this for communications between MS-DOS and FreeBSD. Can I run MS-DOS binaries under FreeBSD? Not yet! We would like to add support for this someday, but are still lacking anyone to actually do the work. Ongoing work with Linux's DOSEMU utility may bring this much closer to being a reality sometime soon. Send mail to hackers@freebsd.org if you're interested in joining this effort! However, there is a nice application available in the called pcemu, that allows you to run many basic MS-DOS text-mode binaries by entirely emulating an 8088 CPU.