INSTALLATION GUIDE FOR FreeBSD 2.0.5 This manual documents the process of installing FreeBSD on your machine. Please also see the hardware guide for hardware-specific installation instructions (how to configure your hardware, what sorts of things to watch out for, etc). If you're running DOS and want FreeBSD to interoperate with it, read the following section first! Otherwise, you may skip to the next section. +==========================================+ |1. DOS user's Question and Answer section | +==========================================+ 1.1 Help! I have no space! Do I need to delete everything first? If your machine is already running 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/ subdirectory on the FreeBSD CDROM or on the various FreeBSD ftp sites, to be quite useful. FIPS allows you to split an existing DOS partition into two pieces, preserving the original partition and allowing you to install onto the second free piece. You first "defrag" your 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'll need for the kind of installation you want. 1.2 Can I use compressed 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 DOS primary partition and use this for communications between DOS and FreeBSD. 1.3 Can I mount my DOS extended partitions? This feature isn't in FreeBSD 2.0.5 but should be in 2.1. We've laid all the groundwork for making this happen, now we just need to do the last 1% of the work involved. 1.4 Can I run DOS binaries under FreeBSD? Not yet! We'd like to add support for this someday, but are still lacking anyone to actually do the work.. +==================================+ |2. PREPARING FOR THE INSTALLATION | +==================================+ 2.1 Before installing from CDROM: If your CDROM is of an unsupported type, such as an IDE CDROM, then please skip to section 2.3: DOS Preparation. 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, but I can't say for sure as I have no hand or say in their creation). You can either boot into the CD installation directly from DOS using Walnut Creek's supplied "go" batch file or you can make a boot floppy by writing the supplied image (floppies/boot.flp) onto a floppy. Under DOS, a good utility for this is rawrite.exe, which may also be found in the tools/ subdirectory. Under UNIX, you may find that ``dd if=floppies/boot.flp of=/dev/rfd0'' or ``dd if=floppies/boot.flp of=/dev/floppy'' works well, depending on your hardware. Once you've booted one way or the other, you should be able to select CDROM as the media type when asked and load the entire distribution from CDROM. No other media will be required. After your system is fully installed and you have rebooted from the hard disk, you should find the CD mounted on the directory /cdrom. A utility called `lndir' comes with the XFree86 distribution which you may also find useful: It allows you to create "link tree" directories to things on Read-Only media like CDROM. One example might be something like this: mkdir /usr/ports lndir /cdrom/ports /usr/ports Which would allow you to then "cd /usr/ports; make" and get all the sources from the CD, but yet create all the intermediate files in /usr/ports, which is presumably on a more writable media! :-) 2.2 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 you'll need is ``floppies/root.flp'', which is somewhat special in that it's not a DOS filesystem floppy at all, but rather an "image" floppy (it's actually a gzip'd cpio file). You can use the rawrite.exe program to do this under DOS, or ``dd'' to do it on a UNIX Workstation (see notes in section 2.1 concerning the ``floppies/boot.flp'' image). Once this floppy is made, put it aside. You'll be asked for it later. You will also need, at minimum, as many 1.44MB or 1.2MB floppies as it takes to hold all files in the bin (binary distribution) directory. THESE floppies *must* be formatted using MS-DOS, using with the FORMAT command in MS-DOS or the File Manager format command in Microsoft Windows(tm). Factory preformatted floppies will also work well, provided that they haven't been previously used for something else. Many problems reported by our users in the past have turned out to be from the use of improperly formatted media, so we simply take special care to mention it here! After you've DOS formatted the floppies, you'll 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've got all the distributions you want packed up in this fashion. Select ``Floppy'' from the Media menu at installation time and you will be prompted for everything after that. 2.3 Before installing from a DOS partition: To prepare for installation from an MS-DOS partition, you should simply copy the files from the distribution into a directory with the same name as the distribution. For example, if you are preparing to install the bin distribution set, then make a directory on your C: drive named C:\FREEBSD\BIN and copy the files there. Copying the distributions into subdirectories of the FREEBSD directory allows the installation program to find the files automatically. 2.4 Before installing from QIC/SCSI Tape: Installing from tape is probably the easiest method, short of an on-line install using FTP or installing from a CDROM. The installation program expects the files to be simply tar'ed onto the tape, so after getting all of the files for distribution you're interested in, simply tar them onto the tape with a command like: cd /freebsd/distdir tar cvf /dev/rwt0 (or /dev/rst0) dist1 .. dist2 When you go to do the installation, you should make sure that you leave enough room in the /usr/tmp directory to accomdate the FULL contents of the tape you've 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! 2.5 Before installing over a network: You can do network installations over 3 types of communications links: Serial port: SLIP / 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 doesn't 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're using a modem, then PPP is almost certainly your only choice. Make sure that you have your service provider's information handy as you'll 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 is what's typically possible over a serial line (up to 50k/sec), thus resulting in a quicker installation. Finally, for the fastest possible 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) provided as part of the FreeBSD Hardware Guide - see the Documentation menu on the boot floppy. If you are using one of the supported PCMCIA ethernet cards, also be sure that it's 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 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'll also need a name server and possibly the address of a gateway (if you're using PPP, it's your provider's IP address) to use in talking to it. If you do not know the answers to all or 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. NFS installation is fairly straight-forward: Simply copy the FreeBSD distribution files you're interested onto a server somewhere and then point the NFS media selection at it. If this server supports only "privileged port" access, or you have a poor quality ethernet card which suffers from very slow transfer rates, you may wish to investigate the ``Ftp Options'' menu for special flags to set in these case. FTP installation may be done from any mirror site containing a reasonably up-to-date version of FreeBSD 2.0.5. A full menu of reasonable choices from almost anywhere in the world is provided in the FTP site menu. +============================+ |2. INSTALLING FREEBSD 2.0.5 | +============================+ Once you've done the appropriate preinstallation steps, you should install FreeBSD! /* XXX Put some more text in this section.. :-) XXX */