freebsd-dev/release/ABOUT.TXT
Jordan K. Hubbard 5d755bde76 Give this file a home also. No, I don't like it here either but
I don't want it in sysinstall/help, since that'll get it stuck on the
actual floppy, and I didn't fell like creating a doc/ subdirectory for
one file either.  Bah.
1996-12-14 22:45:42 +00:00

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This file attempts to describe what you're 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 are, obviously, documentation. 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 compatibility
distributions for older releases and are also distributed as single 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 ease of distribution on floppy (should such 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. The info.a* files are split, gzip'd
tar files, the contents of which could be viewed by doing:
cat info.a* | tar tvzf -
They are automatically concatenated and extracted during the installation
procedure, assuming that the info distribution was selected in the
distributions menu.
The info.inf file is also a necessary component and 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 a distribution
onto floppies, this file must occupy the first floppy of the set.
The info.mtree file is another non-essential file which is provided purely
for user reference. It contains the MD5 signatures of the *unpacked*
distribution and can be used later as fodder for the mtree(1) program
in verifying the permissions and checksums of the distribution against
whatever is installed on your system. 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'd like to install the
distribution *after* installation time, e.g. some time after the system
is already installed and working. To install the info distribution from
CDROM after your system was installed, for example, you'd do:
cd /cdrom/info
sh install.sh
And that's all there is to it! This also works for the other distributions,
including the compat* ones.
The floppies subdirectory contains the floppy installation images.
The floppies/README.TXT file should be referred to for more information
about them.
The packages and ports directories contain the FreeBSD packages and
ports collections, respectively. The packages may be installed using
the package menu in /stand/sysinstall (the utility which runs when you
first install FreeBSD) or individually with the pkg_add(1) command.
The ports tree should be copied to your hard disk or linked to with
the lndir command, which comes with the XFree86 distribution. More
information on it can 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 merely for user convenience.
Jordan