So, I am continuing my *BSD series, on my old Pentium 3…. cramping three operating systems on a 20 GB hard disk… well… not that much space, and in the partition for a *BSD OS, there are disk slices… so I have a ~ 6 GiB space that I must devide in slices again. There I made a little mistake earlier, not giving enough space to the root slice on NetBSD.

Well… today it’s the turn to FreeBSD to be installed. The installer in menu driven. First it offers a IBM style disk paritioning tool, and after that a slice editor. Since I had already created the IBM style partitions for all OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD beforehand using sysresccd, a linux live cd with rescue stuff like partition editors and so.

When I entered the slice editor, I already saw some configuration. Some slice sizes were defined, but not their mount points/file systems. These were different values then the auto configure values it gave me when I choose this option. I wonder where did these values come from? I am not sure.

After copying the files it asks some questions, to enable ssh server, ftp, nfs, and so on. After this it offers some options to install software from the ports collection. I have looked for my window manager xfce4, but it didn’t appear in the list of window managers. However I observed separate entries for gnome and kde in the list, not under the window managers. Anyways, I choose to install the X server and drivers. Please note it is still installing from the installation DVD, not from internet sources, so this might explain the small software list in that ports collection.

After copying the files, it offers the option to add users to the system. This is again menu driven, including the entering of the password. The setting of the root password is a normal passwd change password action.

Now the system is installed and booted, let’s install some software,
in the FreeBSD manual, it says the pkg_add program supports the -r
parameter where it automatically sets the correct ftp server. So I
don’t have to set it like I did on NetBSD and OpenBSD. I suppose I
should check if NetBSD and OpenBSD support this option too, but I
guess not as I haven’t seen it mentioned.

As referenced on the pkg_mgr site, the OpenBSD package tool, the
FreeBSD program sysinstall, which also did the installation of
the system is responsible for package management with a menu.

So far, FreeBSD…. rooting my android is the next topic.

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