FreeBSD

BSD stands for Berkeley Software Distribution and is an operating system. Most of its common variations are considered to be Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS). This resource is similar to its counterpart Linux and one should explore things like Basic commands in Linux and Directories in Linux. Most work for the BSDs also. FreeBSD is what we'll be looking at primarily but we will also cover NetBSD, OpenBSD and others.

Getting FreeBSD

Getting FreeBSD is easy. This course is based on the FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE which came from here. If you are new to installing operating systems, you might consider getting only the 7.2-RELEASE-i386-livefs.iso to look at a Live CD version. PC-BSD and FreeSBIE are also available. You can also learn FreeBSD if you have an Amazon AWS account, as there is free version available on AWS Marketplace, and probably some other cloud hosting providers offers too FreeBSD installations.

see also Creating a bootable disk

Learning BSD

We chose FreeBSD for the i386 family. Look again at the Getting FreeBSD page to see if it matches your test machine. If you don't have a test machine, there are many BSD servers online where you can get a shell account.

Basic Commands

• CPU Information: sysctl hw.model hw.machine hw.ncpu

[email protected]# sysctl hw.model hw.machine hw.ncpu
hw.model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1230 V2 @ 3.30GHz
hw.machine: amd64
hw.ncpu: 8

• Memory installed: sysctl hw.physmem

Package Management Packages:

• List installed packages: pkg info
• Install a package pkg install package_name
• Delete a package pkg delete package_name

Installing FreeBSD

Our CD set:

• 7.x-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.iso
• 7.x-RELEASE-i386-disc1.iso
• 7.x-RELEASE-i386-disc2.iso
• 7.x-RELEASE-i386-disc3.iso
• 7.x-RELEASE-i386-docs.iso

Our Hardware: Our test machine will be a Dell PowerEdge 2400 server with one i386 class Pentium IV (even though there is a socket for a second).

This course is under construction... see the talk page 03:00, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Updating FreeBSD

FreeBSD updates can be done using freebsd-update command.

Managing Service

Services are managed using service command and the start, stop, and restart options.

Personalize command prompt

You can personalize your command prompt by editing ~/.cshrr file. Change set prompt line to your desire value, for example: set prompt="%{\033[46m%}[$HOSTTYPE]`uname -r`%B[%.2]%b"

See also

• FreeBSD