text:
Copyright © 1995-2015 The FreeBSD Documentation Project
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Welcome to FreeBSD! This handbook covers the installation
and day to day use of
FreeBSD 8.4-RELEASE,
FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE, and
FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE. This
manual is a work in progress and is the
work of many individuals. As such, some sections may become
dated and require updating. If you are interested in helping
out with this project, send email to the FreeBSD documentation project mailing list. The latest
version of this document is always available from the FreeBSD web site
(previous versions of this handbook can be obtained from
It may also be downloaded in a variety of formats and
compression options from the FreeBSD
FTP server or one of the numerous
mirror sites. If you would
prefer to have a hard copy of the handbook, you can purchase
one at the
Mall. You may also want to
search the
X and
root Password
pfctl Options
rmuser Interactive Account
chpass as
chpass as Regular
X and Later
X and Earlier
boot0 Screenshot
boot2 Screenshot
dump over
dump over
ssh with
ls and
to Make a Recursive Backup of the Current Directory
The FreeBSD newcomer will find that the first section of this book guides the user through the FreeBSD installation process and gently introduces the concepts and conventions that underpin UNIX®. Working through this section requires little more than the desire to explore, and the ability to take on board new concepts as they are introduced.
Once you have traveled this far, the second, far larger, section of the Handbook is a comprehensive reference to all manner of topics of interest to FreeBSD system administrators. Some of these chapters may recommend that you do some prior reading, and this is noted in the synopsis at the beginning of each chapter.
For a list of additional sources of information, please see Appendix B, Bibliography.
The current online version of the Handbook represents the cumulative effort of many hundreds of contributors over the past 10 years. The following are some of the significant changes since the two volume third edition was published in 2004:
Chapter 25, DTrace has been added with information about the powerful DTrace performance analysis tool.
Chapter 21, Other File Systems has been added with information about non-native file systems in FreeBSD, such as ZFS from Sun™.
Chapter 17, Security Event Auditing has been added to cover the new auditing capabilities in FreeBSD and explain its use.
Chapter 22, Virtualization has been added with information about installing FreeBSD on virtualization software.
Chapter 2, Installing FreeBSD 9.
X and
Later has been added to cover
installation of FreeBSD using the new installation utility,
The third edition was the culmination of over two years of work by the dedicated members of the FreeBSD Documentation Project. The printed edition grew to such a size that it was necessary to publish as two separate volumes. The following are the major changes in this new edition:
Chapter 12, Configuration and Tuning has been expanded with new
information about the ACPI power and resource management, the
cron system utility, and more kernel tuning
Chapter 14, Security has been expanded with new information about virtual private networks (VPNs), file system access control lists (ACLs), and security advisories.
Chapter 16, Mandatory Access Control is a new chapter with this edition. It explains what MAC is and how this mechanism can be used to secure a FreeBSD system.
Chapter 18, Storage has been expanded with new information about USB storage devices, file system snapshots, file system quotas, file and network backed filesystems, and encrypted disk partitions.
A troubleshooting section has been added to Chapter 27, PPP.
Chapter 28, Electronic Mail has been expanded with new information about using alternative transport agents, SMTP authentication, UUCP, fetchmail, procmail, and other advanced topics.
Chapter 29, Network Servers is all new with this edition. This chapter includes information about setting up the Apache HTTP Server, ftpd, and setting up a server for Microsoft® Windows® clients with Samba. Some sections from Chapter 31, Advanced Networking were moved here to improve the presentation.
Chapter 31, Advanced Networking has been expanded with new information about using Bluetooth® devices with FreeBSD, setting up wireless networks, and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networking.
A glossary has been added to provide a central location for the definitions of technical terms used throughout the book.
A number of aesthetic improvements have been made to the tables and figures throughout the book.
The second edition was the culmination of over two years of work by the dedicated members of the FreeBSD Documentation Project. The following were the major changes in this edition:
A complete Index has been added.
All ASCII figures have been replaced by graphical diagrams.
A standard synopsis has been added to each chapter to give a quick summary of what information the chapter contains, and what the reader is expected to know.
The content has been logically reorganized into three parts: "Getting Started", "System Administration", and "Appendices".
Chapter 3, Installing FreeBSD 8.
X was completely rewritten with
many screenshots to make it much easier for new users to
grasp the text.
Chapter 4, UNIX Basics has been expanded to contain additional information about processes, daemons, and signals.
Chapter 5, Installing Applications: Packages and Ports has been expanded to contain additional information about binary package management.
Chapter 6, The X Window System has been completely rewritten with an emphasis on using modern desktop technologies such as KDE and GNOME on XFree86™ 4.X.
Chapter 13, The FreeBSD Booting Process has been expanded.
Chapter 18, Storage has been written from what used to be two separate chapters on "Disks" and "Backups". We feel that the topics are easier to comprehend when presented as a single chapter. A section on RAID (both hardware and software) has also been added.
Chapter 26, Serial Communications has been completely reorganized and updated for FreeBSD 4.X/5.X.
Chapter 27, PPP has been substantially updated.
Many new sections have been added to Chapter 31, Advanced Networking.
Chapter 28, Electronic Mail has been expanded to include more information about configuring sendmail.
Chapter 11, Linux® Binary Compatibility has been expanded to include information about installing Oracle® and SAP® R/3®.
The following new topics are covered in this second edition:
This book is split into five logically distinct sections. The first section, Getting Started, covers the installation and basic usage of FreeBSD. It is expected that the reader will follow these chapters in sequence, possibly skipping chapters covering familiar topics. The second section, Common Tasks, covers some frequently used features of FreeBSD. This section, and all subsequent sections, can be read out of order. Each chapter begins with a succinct synopsis that describes what the chapter covers and what the reader is expected to already know. This is meant to allow the casual reader to skip around to find chapters of interest. The third section, System Administration, covers administration topics. The fourth section, Network Communication, covers networking and server topics. The fifth section contains appendices of reference information.
Introduces FreeBSD to a new user. It describes the history of the FreeBSD Project, its goals and development model.
X and
Walks a user through the entire installation process of
FreeBSD 9.
x and later using
Walks a user through the entire installation process of
FreeBSD 8.
x and earlier using
sysinstall. Some advanced
installation topics, such as installing through a serial
console, are also covered.
Covers the basic commands and functionality of the FreeBSD operating system. If you are familiar with Linux® or another flavor of UNIX® then you can probably skip this chapter.
Covers the installation of third-party software with both FreeBSD's innovative "Ports Collection" and standard binary packages.
Describes the X Window System in general and using X11 on FreeBSD in particular. Also describes common desktop environments such as KDE and GNOME.
Lists some common desktop applications, such as web browsers and productivity suites, and describes how to install them on FreeBSD.
Shows how to set up sound and video playback support for your system. Also describes some sample audio and video applications.
Explains why you might need to configure a new kernel and provides detailed instructions for configuring, building, and installing a custom kernel.
Describes managing printers on FreeBSD, including information about banner pages, printer accounting, and initial setup.
Describes the Linux® compatibility features of FreeBSD. Also provides detailed installation instructions for many popular Linux® applications such as Oracle® and Mathematica®.
Describes the parameters available for system administrators to tune a FreeBSD system for optimum performance. Also describes the various configuration files used in FreeBSD and where to find them.
Describes the FreeBSD boot process and explains how to control this process with configuration options.
Describes many different tools available to help keep your FreeBSD system secure, including Kerberos, IPsec and OpenSSH.
Describes the jails framework, and the improvements of jails over the traditional chroot support of FreeBSD.
Explains what Mandatory Access Control (MAC) is and how this mechanism can be used to secure a FreeBSD system.
Describes what FreeBSD Event Auditing is, how it can be installed, configured, and how audit trails can be inspected or monitored.
Describes how to manage storage media and filesystems with FreeBSD. This includes physical disks, RAID arrays, optical and tape media, memory-backed disks, and network filesystems.
Describes what the GEOM framework in FreeBSD is and how to configure various supported RAID levels.
Examines support of non-native file systems in FreeBSD, like the Z File System from Sun™.
Describes what virtualization systems offer, and how they can be used with FreeBSD.
Describes how to use FreeBSD in languages other than English. Covers both system and application level localization.
Explains the differences between FreeBSD-STABLE, FreeBSD-CURRENT, and FreeBSD releases. Describes which users would benefit from tracking a development system and outlines that process. Covers the methods users may take to update their system to the latest security release.
Describes how to configure and use the DTrace tool from Sun™ in FreeBSD. Dynamic tracing can help locate performance issues, by performing real time system analysis.
Explains how to connect terminals and modems to your FreeBSD system for both dial in and dial out connections.
Describes how to use PPP to connect to remote systems with FreeBSD.
Explains the different components of an email server and dives into simple configuration topics for the most popular mail server software: sendmail.
Provides detailed instructions and example configuration files to set up your FreeBSD machine as a network filesystem server, domain name server, network information system server, or time synchronization server.
Explains the philosophy behind software-based firewalls and provides detailed information about the configuration of the different firewalls available for FreeBSD.
Describes many networking topics, including sharing an Internet connection with other computers on your LAN, advanced routing topics, wireless networking, Bluetooth®, ATM, IPv6, and much more.
Lists different sources for obtaining FreeBSD media on CDROM or DVD as well as different sites on the Internet that allow you to download and install FreeBSD.
This book touches on many different subjects that may leave you hungry for a more detailed explanation. The bibliography lists many excellent books that are referenced in the text.
Describes the many forums available for FreeBSD users to post questions and engage in technical conversations about FreeBSD.
Lists the PGP fingerprints of several FreeBSD Developers.
To provide a consistent and easy to read text, several conventions are followed throughout the book.
An italic font is used for filenames, URLs, emphasized text, and the first usage of technical terms.
monospaced font is used for error
messages, commands, environment variables, names of ports,
hostnames, user names, group names, device names, variables,
and code fragments.
A bold font is used for applications, commands, and keys.
Keys are shown in bold to stand out from
other text. Key combinations that are meant to be typed
simultaneously are shown with `
+' between
the keys, such as:
Meaning the user should type the Ctrl, Alt, and Del keys at the same time.
Keys that are meant to be typed in sequence will be separated with commas, for example:
Ctrl+X, Ctrl+S
Would mean that the user is expected to type the Ctrl and X keys simultaneously and then to type the Ctrl and S keys simultaneously.
Examples starting with
indicate a MS-DOS® command. Unless otherwise noted, these
commands may be executed from a "Command Prompt"
window in a modern Microsoft® Windows®
tools\fdimage floppies\kern.flp A:
Examples starting with
# indicate a command that
must be invoked as the superuser in FreeBSD. You can login as
root to type the
command, or login as your normal account and use su(1) to
gain superuser privileges.
dd if=kern.flp of=/dev/fd0
Examples starting with
% indicate a command that
should be invoked from a normal user account. Unless otherwise
noted, C-shell syntax is used for setting environment variables
and other shell commands.
The book you are holding represents the efforts of many hundreds of people around the world. Whether they sent in fixes for typos, or submitted complete chapters, all the contributions have been useful.
Several companies have supported the development of this document by paying authors to work on it full-time, paying for publication, etc. In particular, BSDi (subsequently acquired by Wind River Systems) paid members of the FreeBSD Documentation Project to work on improving this book full time leading up to the publication of the first printed edition in March 2000 (ISBN 1-57176-241-8). Wind River Systems then paid several additional authors to make a number of improvements to the print-output infrastructure and to add additional chapters to the text. This work culminated in the publication of the second printed edition in November 2001 (ISBN 1-57176-303-1). In 2003-2004, FreeBSD Mall, Inc, paid several contributors to improve the Handbook in preparation for the third printed edition.
This part of the FreeBSD Handbook is for users and administrators who are new to FreeBSD. These chapters:
Introduce you to FreeBSD.
Guide you through the installation process.
Teach you UNIX® basics and fundamentals.
Show you how to install the wealth of third party applications available for FreeBSD.
Introduce you to X, the UNIX® windowing system, and detail how to configure a desktop environment that makes you more productive.
We have tried to keep the number of forward references in the text to a minimum so that you can read this section of the Handbook from front to back with the minimum page flipping required.
X and
Thank you for your interest in FreeBSD! The following chapter covers various aspects of the FreeBSD Project, such as its history, goals, development model, and so on.
After reading this chapter, you will know:
How FreeBSD relates to other computer operating systems.
The history of the FreeBSD Project.
The goals of the FreeBSD Project.
The basics of the FreeBSD open-source development model.
And of course: where the name "FreeBSD" comes from.
FreeBSD is a 4.4BSD-Lite based operating system for Intel (x86 and Itanium®), AMD64, Sun UltraSPARC® computers. Ports to other architectures are also underway. You can also read about the history of FreeBSD, or the current release. If you are interested in contributing something to the Project (code, hardware, funding), see the Contributing to FreeBSD article.
FreeBSD has many noteworthy features. Some of these are:
Preemptive multitasking with dynamic priority adjustment to ensure smooth and fair sharing of the computer between applications and users, even under the heaviest of loads.
Multi-user facilities which allow many people to use a FreeBSD system simultaneously for a variety of things. This means, for example, that system peripherals such as printers and tape drives are properly shared between all users on the system or the network and that individual resource limits can be placed on users or groups of users, protecting critical system resources from over-use.
Strong TCP/IP networking with support for industry standards such as SCTP, DHCP, NFS, NIS, PPP, SLIP, IPsec, and IPv6. This means that your FreeBSD machine can interoperate easily with other systems as well as act as an enterprise server, providing vital functions such as NFS (remote file access) and email services or putting your organization on the Internet with WWW, FTP, routing and firewall (security) services.
Memory protection ensures that applications (or users) cannot interfere with each other. One application crashing will not affect others in any way.
The industry standard X Window System (X11R7) can provide a graphical user interface (GUI) on any machine and comes with full sources.
Binary compatibility with many programs built for Linux, SCO, SVR4, BSDI and NetBSD.
Thousands of ready-to-run applications are available from the FreeBSD ports and packages collection. Why search the net when you can find it all right here?
Thousands of additional and easy-to-port applications are available on the Internet. FreeBSD is source code compatible with most popular commercial UNIX® systems and thus most applications require few, if any, changes to compile.
Demand paged virtual memory and "merged VM/buffer cache" design efficiently satisfies applications with large appetites for memory while still maintaining interactive response to other users.
A full complement of C and C++ development tools. Many additional languages for advanced research and development are also available in the ports and packages collection.
Source code for the entire system means you have the greatest degree of control over your environment. Why be locked into a proprietary solution at the mercy of your vendor when you can have a truly open system?
Extensive online documentation.
And many more!
FreeBSD is based on the 4.4BSD-Lite release from Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California at Berkeley, and carries on the distinguished tradition of BSD systems development. In addition to the fine work provided by CSRG, the FreeBSD Project has put in many thousands of hours in fine tuning the system for maximum performance and reliability in real-life load situations. FreeBSD offers performance and reliability on par with commercial offerings, combined with many cutting-edge features not available anywhere else.
The applications to which FreeBSD can be put are truly limited only by your own imagination. From software development to factory automation, inventory control to azimuth correction of remote satellite antennae; if it can be done with a commercial UNIX® product then it is more than likely that you can do it with FreeBSD too! FreeBSD also benefits significantly from literally thousands of high quality applications developed by research centers and universities around the world, often available at little to no cost. Commercial applications are also available and appearing in greater numbers every day.
Because the source code for FreeBSD itself is generally available, the system can also be customized to an almost unheard of degree for special applications or projects, and in ways not generally possible with operating systems from most major commercial vendors. Here is just a sampling of some of the applications in which people are currently using FreeBSD:
Internet Services: The robust TCP/IP networking built into FreeBSD makes it an ideal platform for a variety of Internet services such as:
Education: Are you a student of computer science or a related engineering field? There is no better way of learning about operating systems, computer architecture and networking than the hands on, under the hood experience that FreeBSD can provide. A number of freely available CAD, mathematical and graphic design packages also make it highly useful to those whose primary interest in a computer is to get other work done!
Research: With source code for the entire system available, FreeBSD is an excellent platform for research in operating systems as well as other branches of computer science. FreeBSD's freely available nature also makes it possible for remote groups to collaborate on ideas or shared development without having to worry about special licensing agreements or limitations on what may be discussed in open forums.
Networking: Need a new router? A name server (DNS)? A firewall to keep people out of your internal network? FreeBSD can easily turn that unused PC sitting in the corner into an advanced router with sophisticated packet-filtering capabilities.
Embedded: FreeBSD makes an excellent platform to build embedded systems upon. With support for the ARM®, MIPS® and PowerPC® platforms, coupled with a robust network stack, cutting edge features and the permissive BSD license FreeBSD makes an excellent foundation for building embedded routers, firewalls, and other devices.
Desktop: FreeBSD makes a fine choice for an inexpensive desktop solution using the freely available X11 server. FreeBSD offers a choice from many open-source desktop environments, including the standard GNOME and KDE graphical user interfaces. FreeBSD can even boot "diskless" from a central server, making individual workstations even cheaper and easier to administer.
Software Development: The basic FreeBSD system comes with a full complement of development tools including a full C/C++ compiler and debugger suite. Support for many other languages are also available through the ports and packages collection.
FreeBSD is available to download free of charge, or can be obtained on either CD-ROM or DVD. Please see Appendix A, Obtaining FreeBSD for more information about obtaining FreeBSD.
FreeBSD's advanced features, proven security, predictable release cycle, and permissive license have led to its use as a platform for building many commercial and open source appliances, devices, and products. Many of the world's largest IT companies use FreeBSD:
Apache - The Apache Software Foundation runs most of its public facing infrastructure, including possibly one of the largest SVN repositories in the world with over 1.4 million commits, on FreeBSD.
Apple - OS X borrows heavily from FreeBSD for the network stack, virtual file system, and many userland components. Apple iOS also contains elements borrowed from FreeBSD.
Cisco - IronPort network security and anti-spam appliances run a modified FreeBSD kernel.
Citrix - The NetScaler line of security appliances provide layer 4-7 load balancing, content caching, application firewall, secure VPN, and mobile cloud network access, along with the power of a FreeBSD shell.
Dell KACE - The KACE system management appliances run FreeBSD because of its reliability, scalability, and the community that supports its continued development.
Experts Exchange - All public facing web servers are powered by FreeBSD and they make extensive use of jails to isolate development and testing environments without the overhead of virtualization.
Isilon - Isilon's enterprise storage appliances are based on FreeBSD. The extremely liberal FreeBSD license allowed Isilon to integrate their intellectual property throughout the kernel and focus on building their product instead of an operating system.
iXsystems - The TrueNAS line of unified storage appliances is based on FreeBSD. In addition to their commercial products, iXsystems also manages development of the open source projects PC-BSD and FreeNAS.
Juniper - The JunOS operating system that powers all Juniper networking gear (including routers, switches, security, and networking appliances) is based on FreeBSD. Juniper is one of many vendors that showcases the symbiotic relationship between the project and vendors of commercial products. Improvements generated at Juniper are upstreamed into FreeBSD to reduce the complexity of integrating new features from FreeBSD back into JunOS in the future.
McAfee - SecurOS, the basis of McAfee enterprise firewall products including Sidewinder is based on FreeBSD.
NetApp - The Data ONTAP GX line of storage appliances are based on FreeBSD. In addition, NetApp has contributed back many features, including the new BSD licensed hypervisor, bhyve.
Netflix - The OpenConnect appliance that Netflix uses to stream movies to its customers is based on FreeBSD. Netflix has made extensive contributions to the codebase and works to maintain a zero delta from mainline FreeBSD. Netflix OpenConnect appliances are responsible for delivering more than 32% of all Internet traffic in North America.
Sandvine - Sandvine uses FreeBSD as the basis of their high performance realtime network processing platforms that make up their intelligent network policy control products.
Sony - The PlayStation 4 gaming console runs a modified version of FreeBSD.
Sophos - The Sophos Email Appliance product is based on a hardened FreeBSD and scans inbound mail for spam and viruses, while also monitoring outbound mail for malware as well as the accidental loss of sensitive information.
Spectra Logic - The nTier line of archive grade storage appliances run FreeBSD and OpenZFS.
The Weather Channel - The IntelliStar appliance that is installed at each local cable providers headend and is responsible for injecting local weather forecasts into the cable TV network's programming runs FreeBSD.
Verisign - Verisign is responsible for operating the .com and .net root domain registries as well as the accompanying DNS infrastructure. They rely on a number of different network operating systems including FreeBSD to ensure there is no common point of failure in their infrastructure.
Voxer - Voxer powers their mobile voice messaging platform with ZFS on FreeBSD. Voxer switched from a Solaris derivative to FreeBSD because of its superior documentation, larger and more active community, and more developer friendly environment. In addition to critical features like ZFS and DTrace, FreeBSD also offers TRIM support for ZFS.
WhatsApp - When WhatsApp needed a platform that would be able to handle more than 1 million concurrent TCP connections per server, they chose FreeBSD. They then proceeded to scale past 2.5 million connections per server.
Wheel Systems - The FUDO security appliance allows enterprises to monitor, control, record, and audit contractors and administrators who work on their systems. Based on all of the best security features of FreeBSD including ZFS, GELI, Capsicum, HAST, and auditdistd.
FreeBSD has also spawned a number of related open source projects:
BSD Router - A FreeBSD based replacement for large enterprise routers designed to run on standard PC hardware.
FreeNAS - A customized FreeBSD designed to be used as a network file server appliance. Provides a python based web interface to simplify the management of both the UFS and ZFS file systems. Includes support for NFS, SMB/CIFS, AFP, FTP, and iSCSI. Includes an extensible plugin system based on FreeBSD jails.
GhostBSD - A desktop oriented distribution of FreeBSD bundled with the Gnome desktop environment.
mfsBSD - A toolkit for building a FreeBSD system image that runs entirely from memory.
NAS4Free - A file server distribution based on FreeBSD with a PHP powered web interface.
PC-BSD - A customized version of FreeBSD geared towards desktop users with graphical utilities to exposing the power of FreeBSD to all users. Designed to ease the transition of Windows and OS X users.
pfSense - A firewall distribution based on FreeBSD with a huge array of features and extensive IPv6 support.
m0n0wall - A stripped down version of FreeBSD bundled with a web server and PHP. Designed as an embedded firewall appliance with a footprint of less than 12 MB.
ZRouter - An open source alternative firmware for embedded devices based on FreeBSD. Designed to replace the proprietary firmware on off-the-shelf routers.
FreeBSD is also used to power some of the biggest sites on the Internet, including:
and many more. Wikipedia also maintains a list of products based on FreeBSD.
The following section provides some background information on the project, including a brief history, project goals, and the development model of the project.
The FreeBSD Project had its genesis in the early part of 1993, partially as an outgrowth of the Unofficial 386BSDPatchkit by the patchkit's last 3 coordinators: Nate Williams, Rod Grimes and Jordan Hubbard.
The original goal was to produce an intermediate snapshot of 386BSD in order to fix a number of problems with it that the patchkit mechanism just was not capable of solving. The early working title for the project was 386BSD 0.5 or 386BSD Interim in reference of that fact.
386BSD was Bill Jolitz's operating system, which had been up to that point suffering rather severely from almost a year's worth of neglect. As the patchkit swelled ever more uncomfortably with each passing day, they decided to assist Bill by providing this interim "cleanup" snapshot. Those plans came to a rude halt when Bill Jolitz suddenly decided to withdraw his sanction from the project without any clear indication of what would be done instead.
The trio thought that the goal remained worthwhile, even without Bill's support, and so they adopted the name "FreeBSD" coined by David Greenman. The initial objectives were set after consulting with the system's current users and, once it became clear that the project was on the road to perhaps even becoming a reality, Jordan contacted Walnut Creek CDROM with an eye toward improving FreeBSD's distribution channels for those many unfortunates without easy access to the Internet. Walnut Creek CDROM not only supported the idea of distributing FreeBSD on CD but also went so far as to provide the project with a machine to work on and a fast Internet connection. Without Walnut Creek CDROM's almost unprecedented degree of faith in what was, at the time, a completely unknown project, it is quite unlikely that FreeBSD would have gotten as far, as fast, as it has today.
The first CD-ROM (and general net-wide) distribution was FreeBSD 1.0, released in December of 1993. This was based on the 4.3BSD-Lite ("Net/2") tape from U.C. Berkeley, with many components also provided by 386BSD and the Free Software Foundation. It was a fairly reasonable success for a first offering, and they followed it with the highly successful FreeBSD 1.1 release in May of 1994.
Around this time, some rather unexpected storm clouds formed on the horizon as Novell and U.C. Berkeley settled their long-running lawsuit over the legal status of the Berkeley Net/2 tape. A condition of that settlement was U.C. Berkeley's concession that large parts of Net/2 were "encumbered" code and the property of Novell, who had in turn acquired it from AT&T some time previously. What Berkeley got in return was Novell's "blessing" that the 4.4BSD-Lite release, when it was finally released, would be declared unencumbered and all existing Net/2 users would be strongly encouraged to switch. This included FreeBSD, and the project was given until the end of July 1994 to stop shipping its own Net/2 based product. Under the terms of that agreement, the project was allowed one last release before the deadline, that release being FreeBSD 22.214.171.124.
FreeBSD then set about the arduous task of literally re-inventing itself from a completely new and rather incomplete set of 4.4BSD-Lite bits. The "Lite" releases were light in part because Berkeley's CSRG had removed large chunks of code required for actually constructing a bootable running system (due to various legal requirements) and the fact that the Intel port of 4.4 was highly incomplete. It took the project until November of 1994 to make this transition, and in December it released FreeBSD 2.0 to the world. Despite being still more than a little rough around the edges, the release was a significant success and was followed by the more robust and easier to install FreeBSD 2.0.5 release in June of 1995.
Since that time, FreeBSD has made a series of releases each time improving the stability, speed, and feature set of the previous version.
For now, long-term development projects continue to take place in the 10.X-CURRENT (trunk) branch, and snapshot releases of 10.X are continually made available from the snapshot server as work progresses.
The goals of the FreeBSD Project are to provide software that may be used for any purpose and without strings attached. Many of us have a significant investment in the code (and project) and would certainly not mind a little financial compensation now and then, but we are definitely not prepared to insist on it. We believe that our first and foremost "mission" is to provide code to any and all comers, and for whatever purpose, so that the code gets the widest possible use and provides the widest possible benefit. This is, I believe, one of the most fundamental goals of Free Software and one that we enthusiastically support.
That code in our source tree which falls under the GNU General Public License (GPL) or Library General Public License (LGPL) comes with slightly more strings attached, though at least on the side of enforced access rather than the usual opposite. Due to the additional complexities that can evolve in the commercial use of GPL software we do, however, prefer software submitted under the more relaxed BSD copyright when it is a reasonable option to do so.
The development of FreeBSD is a very open and flexible process, being literally built from the contributions of thousands of people around the world, as can be seen from our list of contributors. FreeBSD's development infrastructure allow these thousands of contributors to collaborate over the Internet. We are constantly on the lookout for new developers and ideas, and those interested in becoming more closely involved with the project need simply contact us at the FreeBSD technical discussions mailing list. The FreeBSD announcements mailing list is also available to those wishing to make other FreeBSD users aware of major areas of work.
Useful things to know about the FreeBSD Project and its development process, whether working independently or in close cooperation:
For several years, the central source tree for FreeBSD
was maintained by
(Concurrent Versions System), a freely available source
code control tool. In June 2008, the Project switched
to using SVN
(Subversion). The switch was deemed necessary, as the
technical limitations imposed by
CVS were becoming obvious due
to the rapid expansion of the source tree and the amount
of history already stored. The Documentation Project
and Ports Collection repositories also moved from
CVS to
SVN in May 2012 and July
2012, respectively. Please refer to the Synchronizing your source
tree section for more information on obtaining
the FreeBSD
src/ repository and Using the Ports
Collection for details on obtaining the FreeBSD
Ports Collection.
The committers
are the people who have
write access to the Subversion
tree, and are authorized to make modifications to the
FreeBSD source (the term "committer" comes
commit, the source control
command which is used to bring new changes into the
repository). Anyone can submit a bug to the Bug
Database. Before submitting a bug report, the
FreeBSD mailing lists, IRC channels, or forums can be used to
help verify that an issue is actually a bug.
The FreeBSD core team would be equivalent to the board of directors if the FreeBSD Project were a company. The primary task of the core team is to make sure the project, as a whole, is in good shape and is heading in the right directions. Inviting dedicated and responsible developers to join our group of committers is one of the functions of the core team, as is the recruitment of new core team members as others move on. The current core team was elected from a pool of committer candidates in July 2014. Elections are held every 2 years.
Like most developers, most members of the core team are also volunteers when it comes to FreeBSD development and do not benefit from the project financially, so "commitment" should also not be misconstrued as meaning "guaranteed support." The "board of directors" analogy above is not very accurate, and it may be more suitable to say that these are the people who gave up their lives in favor of FreeBSD against their better judgement!
Last, but definitely not least, the largest group of developers are the users themselves who provide feedback and bug fixes to us on an almost constant basis. The primary way of keeping in touch with FreeBSD's more non-centralized development is to subscribe to the FreeBSD technical discussions mailing list where such things are discussed. See Appendix C, Resources on the Internet for more information about the various FreeBSD mailing lists.
The FreeBSD Contributors List is a long and growing one, so why not join it by contributing something back to FreeBSD today?
Providing code is not the only way of contributing to the project; for a more complete list of things that need doing, please refer to the FreeBSD Project web site.
In summary, our development model is organized as a loose set of concentric circles. The centralized model is designed for the convenience of the users of FreeBSD, who are provided with an easy way of tracking one central code base, not to keep potential contributors out! Our desire is to present a stable operating system with a large set of coherent application programs that the users can easily install and use — this model works very well in accomplishing that.
All we ask of those who would join us as FreeBSD developers is some of the same dedication its current people have to its continued success!
In addition to the base distributions, FreeBSD offers a
ported software collection with thousands of commonly
sought-after programs. At the time of this writing, there
were over 24,000 ports! The list of ports ranges from
http servers, to games, languages, editors, and almost
everything in between. The entire Ports Collection requires
approximately 500 MB. To compile a port, you simply
change to the directory of the program you wish to install,
make install, and let the system do
the rest. The full original distribution for each port you
build is retrieved dynamically so you need only enough disk
space to build the ports you want. Almost every port is also
provided as a pre-compiled "package", which can
be installed with a simple command
pkg install) by those who do not wish to
compile their own ports from source. More information on
packages and ports can be found in
Chapter 5, Installing Applications: Packages and Ports.
All recent FreeBSD versions provide an option in the
installer (either sysinstall(8) or bsdinstall(8)) to
install additional documentation under
/usr/local/share/doc/freebsd during the
initial system setup. Documentation may also be installed at
any later time using packages as described in
Section 24.3.2, "Updating Documentation from Ports". You may view the
locally installed manuals with any HTML capable browser using
the following URLs:
You can also view the master (and most frequently updated)
copies at
Beginning with FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE, FreeBSD provides an easy
to use, text-based installation
program named bsdinstall. This
chapter describes how to install FreeBSD using
bsdinstall. The use of
sysinstall, which is the installation
program used by FreeBSD 8.x, is covered in Chapter 3, Installing FreeBSD 8.
In general, the installation instructions in this chapter are written for the i386™ and AMD64 architectures. Where applicable, instructions specific to other platforms will be listed. There may be minor differences between the installer and what is shown here, so use this chapter as a general guide rather than as a set of literal instructions.
Users who prefer to install FreeBSD using a graphical installer may be interested in pc-sysinstall, the installer used by the PC-BSD Project. It can be used to install either a graphical desktop (PC-BSD) or a command line version of FreeBSD. Refer to the PC-BSD Users Handbook for details (http://wiki.pcbsd.org/index.php/PC-BSD%C2%AE_Users_Handbook/10.1).
After reading this chapter, you will know:
The minimum hardware requirements and FreeBSD supported architectures.
How to create the FreeBSD installation media.
How to start bsdinstall.
The questions bsdinstall will ask, what they mean, and how to answer them.
How to troubleshoot a failed installation.
How to access a live version of FreeBSD before committing to an installation.
Before reading this chapter, you should:
Read the supported hardware list that shipped with the version of FreeBSD to be installed and verify that the system's hardware is supported.
The hardware requirements to install FreeBSD vary by the FreeBSD version and the hardware architecture. Hardware architectures and devices supported by a FreeBSD release are listed on the Release Information page of the FreeBSD web site (http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/index.html).
A FreeBSD installation will require a minimum 64 MB of RAM and 1.5 GB of free hard drive space for the most minimal installation. However, that is a minimal install, leaving almost no free space. RAM requirements depend on usage. Specialized FreeBSD systems can run in as little as 128MB RAM while desktop systems should have at least 4 GB of RAM.
The processor requirements for each architecture can be summarized as follows:
This is the most common type of processor desktop and laptop computers will have. Other vendors may call this architecture x86-64.
There are two primary vendors of amd64 processors: Intel® (which produces Intel64 class processors) and AMD (which produces AMD64).
Examples of amd64 compatible processsors include: AMD Athlon™64, AMD Opteron™, multi-core Intel® Xeon™, and Intel® Core™ 2 and later processors.
This architecture is the 32-bit x86 architecture.
Almost all i386-compatible processors with a floating point unit are supported. All Intel® processors 486 or higher are supported.
FreeBSD will take advantage of Physical Address Extensions (PAE) support on CPUs that support this feature. A kernel with the PAE feature enabled will detect memory above 4 GB and allow it to be used by the system. This feature places constraints on the device drivers and other features of FreeBSD which may be used; refer to pae(4) for details.
Currently supported processors are the Itanium® and the Itanium® 2. Supported chipsets include the HP zx1, Intel® 460GX, and Intel® E8870. Both Uniprocessor (UP) and Symmetric Multi-processor (SMP) configurations are supported.
NEC PC-9801/9821 series with almost all i386-compatible processors, including 80486, Pentium®, Pentium® Pro, and Pentium® II, are all supported. All i386-compatible processors by AMD, Cyrix, IBM, and IDT are also supported. EPSON PC-386/486/586 series, which are compatible with NEC PC-9801 series, are supported. The NEC FC-9801/9821 and NEC SV-98 series should be supported.
High-resolution mode is not supported. NEC PC-98XA/XL/RL/XL^2, and NEC PC-H98 series are supported in normal (PC-9801 compatible) mode only. The SMP-related features of FreeBSD are not supported. The New Extend Standard Architecture (NESA) bus used in the PC-H98, SV-H98, and FC-H98 series, is not supported.
All New World ROM Apple® Mac® systems with built-in USB are supported. SMP is supported on machines with multiple CPUs.
A 32-bit kernel can only use the first 2 GB of RAM.
Systems supported by FreeBSD/sparc64 are listed at the FreeBSD/sparc64 Project (http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/sparc.html).
SMP is supported on all systems with more than 1 processor. A dedicated disk is required as it is not possible to share a disk with another operating system at this time.
Once it has been determined that the system meets the minimum hardware requirements for installing FreeBSD, the installation file should be downloaded and the installation media prepared. Before doing this, check that the system is ready for an installation by verifying the items in this checklist:
Back Up Important Data
Before installing any operating system, always backup all important data first. Do not store the backup on the system being installed. Instead, save the data to a removable disk such as a USB drive, another system on the network, or an online backup service. Test the backup before starting the installation to make sure it contains all of the needed files. Once the installer formats the system's disk, all data stored on that disk will be lost.
Decide Where to Install FreeBSD
If FreeBSD will be the only operating system installed, this step can be skipped. But if FreeBSD will share the disk with another operating system, decide which disk or partition will be used for FreeBSD.
In the i386 and amd64 architectures, disks can be divided into multiple partitions using one of two partitioning schemes. A traditional Master Boot Record (MBR) holds a partition table defining up to four primary partitions. For historical reasons, FreeBSD calls these primary partition slices. One of these primary partitions can be made into an extended partition containing multiple logical partitions. The GUID Partition Table (GPT) is a newer and simpler method of partitioning a disk. Common GPT implementations allow up to 128 partitions per disk, eliminating the need for logical partitions.
Some older operating systems, like Windows® XP, are not compatible with the GPT partition scheme. If FreeBSD will be sharing a disk with such an operating system, MBR partitioning is required.
The FreeBSD boot loader requires either a primary or GPT partition. If all of the primary or GPT partitions are already in use, one must be freed for FreeBSD. To create a partition without deleting existing data, use a partition resizing tool to shrink an existing partition and create a new partition using the freed space.
A variety of free and commercial partition resizing tools are listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disk_partitioning_software. GParted Live (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php) is a free live CD which includes the GParted partition editor. GParted is also included with many other Linux live CD distributions.
When used properly, disk shrinking utilities can safely create space for creating a new partition. Since the possibility of selecting the wrong partition exists, always backup any important data and verify the integrity of the backup before modifying disk partitions.
Disk partitions containing different operating systems make it possible to install multiple operating systems on one computer. An alternative is to use virtualization (Chapter 22, Virtualization) which allows multiple operating systems to run at the same time without modifying any disk partitions.
Collect Network Information
Some FreeBSD installation methods require a network connection in order to download the installation files. After any installation, the installer will offer to setup the system's network interfaces.
If the network has a DHCP server, it can be used to provide automatic network configuration. If DHCP is not available, the following network information for the system must be obtained from the local network administrator or Internet service provider:
Check for FreeBSD Errata
Although the FreeBSD Project strives to ensure that each release of FreeBSD is as stable as possible, bugs occasionally creep into the process. On very rare occasions those bugs affect the installation process. As these problems are discovered and fixed, they are noted in the FreeBSD Errata (http://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.1R/errata.html) on the FreeBSD web site. Check the errata before installing to make sure that there are no problems that might affect the installation.
Information and errata for all the releases can be found on the release information section of the FreeBSD web site (http://www.freebsd.org/releases/index.html).
The FreeBSD installer is not an application that can be run from within another operating system. Instead, download a FreeBSD installation file, burn it to the media associated with its file type and size (CD, DVD, or USB), and boot the system to install from the inserted media.
FreeBSD installation files are available at www.freebsd.org/where.html#download.
Each installation file's name includes the release version of
FreeBSD, the architecture, and the type of file. For example, to
install FreeBSD 10.0 on an amd64 system from a
DVD, download
FreeBSD-10.0-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso, burn
this file to a DVD, and boot the system
with the DVD inserted.
Several file types are available, though not all file types are available for all architectures. The possible file types are:
-bootonly.iso: This is the smallest
installation file as it only contains the installer. A
working Internet connection is required during
installation as the installer will download the files it
needs to complete the FreeBSD installation. This file should
be burned to a CD using a
CD burning application.
-disc1.iso: This file contains all
of the files needed to install FreeBSD, its source, and the
Ports Collection. It should be burned to a
CD using a CD
burning application.
-dvd1.iso: This file contains all
of the files needed to install FreeBSD, its source, and the
Ports Collection. It also contains a set of popular
binary packages for installing a window manager and some
applications so that a complete system can be installed
from media without requiring a connection to the Internet.
This file should be burned to a DVD
using a DVD burning application.
-memstick.img: This file contains
all of the files needed to install FreeBSD, its source, and
the Ports Collection. It should be burned to a
USB stick using the instructions
Also download
CHECKSUM.SHA256 from
the same directory as the image file and use it to check the
image file's integrity by calculating a
checksum. FreeBSD provides sha256(1)
for this, while other operating systems have similar programs.
Compare the calculated checksum with the one shown in
CHECKSUM.SHA256. The checksums must
match exactly. If the checksums do not match, the file is
corrupt and should be downloaded again.
*.img file is an
image of the complete contents of a
memory stick. It cannot be copied to
the target device as a file. Several applications are
available for writing the
*.img to a
USB stick. This section describes two of
these utilities.
Before proceeding, back up any important data on the USB stick. This procedure will erase the existing data on the stick.
dd to Write the
This example uses
/dev/da0 as
the target device where the image will be written. Be
very careful that the correct
device is used as this command will destroy the existing
data on the specified target device.
The dd(1) command-line utility is
available on BSD, Linux®, and Mac OS® systems. To burn
the image using
dd, insert the
USB stick and determine its device
name. Then, specify the name of the downloaded
installation file and the device name for the
USB stick. This example burns the
amd64 installation image to the first
USB device on an existing FreeBSD
dd if=
If this command fails, verify that the USB stick is not mounted and that the device name is for the disk, not a partition. Some operating systems might require this command to be run with sudo(8). Systems like Linux® might buffer writes. To force all writes to complete, use sync(8).
Be sure to give the correct drive letter as the existing data on the specified drive will be overwritten and destroyed.
Obtaining Image Writer for Windows®
Image Writer for
Windows® is a free application that can
correctly write an image file to a memory stick.
Download it from
and extract it into a folder.
Writing the Image with Image Writer
Double-click the
Win32DiskImager icon to start
the program. Verify that the drive letter shown under
Device is the drive
with the memory stick. Click the folder icon and select
the image to be written to the memory stick. Click
to accept the
image file name. Verify that everything is correct, and
that no folders on the memory stick are open in other
windows. When everything is ready, click
to write the
image file to the memory stick.
You are now ready to start installing FreeBSD.
By default, the installation will not make any changes to the disk(s) before the following message:
Your changes will now be written to disk. If you have chosen to overwrite existing data, it will be PERMANENTLY ERASED. Are you sure you want to commit your changes?
The install can be exited at any time prior to this warning. If there is a concern that something is incorrectly configured, just turn the computer off before this point and no changes will be made to the system's disks.
This section describes how to boot the system from the installation media which was prepared using the instructions in Section 2.3.1, "Prepare the Installation Media". When using a bootable USB stick, plug in the USB stick before turning on the computer. When booting from CD or DVD, turn on the computer and insert the media at the first opportunity. How to configure the system to boot from the inserted media depends upon the architecture.
These architectures provide a BIOS menu for selecting the boot device. Depending upon the installation media being used, select the CD/DVD or USB device as the first boot device. Most systems also provide a key for selecting the boot device during startup without having to enter the BIOS. Typically, the key is either F10, F11, F12, or Escape.
If the computer loads the existing operating system instead of the FreeBSD installer, then either:
The installation media was not inserted early enough in the boot process. Leave the media inserted and try restarting the computer.
The BIOS changes were incorrect or not saved. Double-check that the right boot device is selected as the first boot device.
This system is too old to support booting from the chosen media. In this case, the Plop Boot Manager (http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html) can be used to boot the system from the selected media.
On most machines, holding C on the
keyboard during boot will boot from the CD.
Otherwise, hold Command+Option+O+F, or
Windows+Alt+O+F on non-Apple® keyboards. At the
0 > prompt, enter
boot cd:,\ppc\loader cd:0
Most SPARC64® systems are set up to boot automatically from disk. To install FreeBSD from a CD requires a break into the PROM.
To do this, reboot the system and wait until the boot message appears. The message depends on the model, but should look something like this:
Sun Blade 100 (UltraSPARC-IIe), Keyboard Present Copyright 1998-2001 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. OpenBoot 4.2, 128 MB memory installed, Serial #51090132. Ethernet address 0:3:ba:b:92:d4, Host ID: 830b92d4.
If the system proceeds to boot from disk at this point,
press L1+A
or Stop+A
on the keyboard, or send a
BREAK over the
serial console. When using tip or
~# will
issue a BREAK. The PROM prompt will be
ok on systems with one
CPU and
ok {0} on
SMP systems, where the digit indicates the
number of the active CPU.
At this point, place the CD into the
drive and type
boot cdrom from the
PROM prompt.
Once the system boots from the installation media, a menu similar to the following will be displayed:
By default, the menu will wait ten seconds for user input before booting into the FreeBSD installer or, if FreeBSD is already installed, before booting into FreeBSD. To pause the boot timer in order to review the selections, press Space. To select an option, press its highlighted number, character, or key. The following options are available.
Boot Multi User: This will
continue the FreeBSD boot process. If the boot timer has
been paused, press 1, upper- or
lower-case B, or
Boot Single User: This mode can be
used to fix an existing FreeBSD installation as described in
Section 18.104.22.168, "Single-User Mode". Press
2 or the upper- or lower-case
S to enter this mode.
Escape to loader prompt: This will
boot the system into a repair prompt that contains a
limited number of low-level commands. This prompt is
described in Section 13.2.3, "Stage Three". Press
3 or Esc to boot into
this prompt.
Reboot: Reboots the system.
Configure Boot Options: Opens the
menu shown in, and described under, Figure 2.2, "FreeBSD Boot Options Menu".
The boot options menu is divided into two sections. The first section can be used to either return to the main boot menu or to reset any toggled options back to their defaults.
The next section is used to toggle the available options
On or
Off by pressing
the option's highlighted number or character. The system will
always boot using the settings for these options until they
are modified. Several options can be toggled using this
ACPI Support: If the system hangs
during boot, try toggling this option to
Safe Mode: If the system still
hangs during boot even with
Support set to
Off, try
setting this option to
Single User: Toggle this option to
On to fix an existing FreeBSD installation
as described in Section 126.96.36.199, "Single-User Mode". Once
the problem is fixed, set it back to
Verbose: Toggle this option to
On to see more detailed messages during
the boot process. This can be useful when troubleshooting
a piece of hardware.
After making the needed selections, press 1 or Backspace to return to the main boot menu, then press Enter to continue booting into FreeBSD. A series of boot messages will appear as FreeBSD carries out its hardware device probes and loads the installation program. Once the boot is complete, the welcome menu shown in Figure 2.3, "Welcome Menu" will be displayed.
Press Enter to select the default of to enter the installer. The rest of this chapter describes how to use this installer. Otherwise, use the right or left arrows or the colorized letter to select the desired menu item. The can be used to access a FreeBSD shell in order to use command line utilities to prepare the disks before installation. The option can be used to try out FreeBSD before installing it. The live version is described in Section 2.10, "Using the Live CD".
To review the boot messages, including the hardware
device probe, press the upper- or lower-case
S and then Enter to access
a shell. At the shell prompt, type
/var/run/dmesg.boot and use the space bar to
scroll through the messages. When finished, type
exit to return to the welcome
This section shows the order of the bsdinstall menus and the type of information that will be asked before the system is installed. Use the arrow keys to highlight a menu option, then Space to select or deselect that menu item. When finished, press Enter to save the selection and move onto the next screen.
Depending on the system console being used, bsdinstall may initially display the menu shown in Figure 2.4, "Keymap Selection".
To configure the keyboard layout, press Enter with selected, which will display the menu shown in Figure 2.5, "Selecting Keyboard Menu". To instead use the default layout, use the arrow key to select and press Enter to skip this menu screen.
When configuring the keyboard layout, use the up and down arrows to select the keymap that most closely represents the mapping of the keyboard attached to the system. Press Enter to save the selection.
Pressing Esc will exit this menu and use the default keymap. If the choice of keymap is not clear, is also a safe option.
In FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE and later, this menu has been enhanced. The full selection of keymaps is shown, with the default preselected. In addition, when selecting a different keymap, a dialog is displayed that allows the user to try the keymap and ensure it is correct before proceeding.
The next bsdinstall menu is used to set the hostname for the newly installed system.
Type in a hostname that is unique for the network. It
should be a fully-qualified hostname, such as
Next, bsdinstall will prompt to select optional components to install.
Deciding which components to install will depend largely on the intended use of the system and the amount of disk space available. The FreeBSD kernel and userland, collectively known as the base system, are always installed. Depending on the architecture, some of these components may not appear:
doc - Additional documentation,
mostly of historical interest, to install into
/usr/share/doc. The documentation
provided by the FreeBSD Documentation Project may be
installed later using the instructions in Section 24.3, "Updating the Documentation Set".
games - Several traditional
BSD games, including
rot13, and others.
lib32 - Compatibility libraries for
running 32-bit applications on a 64-bit version of
ports - The FreeBSD Ports Collection
is a collection of files which automates the downloading,
compiling and installation of third-party software
packages. Chapter 5, Installing Applications: Packages and Ports discusses how to use
the Ports Collection.
The installation program does not check for adequate disk space. Select this option only if sufficient hard disk space is available. The FreeBSD Ports Collection takes up about 500 MB of disk space.
src - The complete FreeBSD source code
for both the kernel and the userland. Although not
required for the majority of applications, it may be
required to build device drivers, kernel modules, or some
applications from the Ports Collection. It is also used
for developing FreeBSD itself. The full source tree requires
1 GB of disk space and recompiling the entire FreeBSD
system requires an additional 5 GB of space.
The menu shown in Figure 2.9, "Installing from the Network" only appears when
installing from a
CD as this installation media does not hold
copies of the installation files. Since the installation
files must be retrieved over a network connection, this menu
indicates that the network interface must be first
To configure the network connection, press Enter and follow the instructions in Section 2.8.2, "Configuring Network Interfaces". Once the interface is configured, select a mirror site that is located in the same region of the world as the computer on which FreeBSD is being installed. Files can be retrieved more quickly when the mirror is close to the target computer, reducing installation time.
Installation will then continue as if the installation files were located on the local installation media.
The next menu is used to determine the method for allocating disk space. The options available in the menu depend upon the version of FreeBSD being installed.
Guided partitioning automatically sets up
the disk partitions,
Manual partitioning
allows advanced users to create customized partitions from menu
options, and
Shell opens a shell prompt where
advanced users can create customized partitions using
command-line utilities like gpart(8), fdisk(8), and
ZFS partitioning, only
available in FreeBSD 10 and later, creates an optionally encrypted
root-on-ZFS system with support for boot
This section describes what to consider when laying out the disk partitions. It then demonstrates how to use the different partitioning methods.
When laying out file systems, remember that hard drives
transfer data faster from the outer tracks to the inner.
Thus, smaller and heavier-accessed file systems should be
closer to the outside of the drive, while larger partitions
/usr should be placed toward the
inner parts of the disk. It is a good idea to create
partitions in an order similar to:
/var, and
The size of the
/var partition
reflects the intended machine's usage. This partition is
used to hold mailboxes, log files, and printer spools.
Mailboxes and log files can grow to unexpected sizes
depending on the number of users and how long log files are
kept. On average, most users rarely need more than about a
gigabyte of free disk space in
Sometimes, a lot of disk space is required in
/var/tmp. When new software is
installed, the packaging tools extract a temporary copy of
the packages under
/var/tmp. Large
software packages, like Firefox,
OpenOffice or
LibreOffice may be tricky to
install if there is not enough disk space under
/usr partition holds many of the
files which support the system, including the FreeBSD Ports
Collection and system source code. At least 2 gigabytes is
recommended for this partition.
When selecting partition sizes, keep the space requirements in mind. Running out of space in one partition while barely using another can be a hassle.
As a rule of thumb, the swap partition should be about double the size of physical memory (RAM). Systems with minimal RAM may perform better with more swap. Configuring too little swap can lead to inefficiencies in the VM page scanning code and might create issues later if more memory is added.
On larger systems with multiple SCSI disks or multiple IDE disks operating on different controllers, it is recommended that swap be configured on each drive, up to four drives. The swap partitions should be approximately the same size. The kernel can handle arbitrary sizes but internal data structures scale to 4 times the largest swap partition. Keeping the swap partitions near the same size will allow the kernel to optimally stripe swap space across disks. Large swap sizes are fine, even if swap is not used much. It might be easier to recover from a runaway program before being forced to reboot.
By properly partitioning a system, fragmentation
introduced in the smaller write heavy partitions will not
bleed over into the mostly read partitions. Keeping the
write loaded partitions closer to the disk's edge will
increase I/O performance in the
partitions where it occurs the most. While
I/O performance in the larger partitions
may be needed, shifting them more toward the edge of the disk
will not lead to a significant performance improvement over
/var to the edge.
When this method is selected, a menu will display the available disk(s). If multiple disks are connected, choose the one where FreeBSD is to be installed.
Once the disk is selected, the next menu prompts to install to either the entire disk or to create a partition using free space. Ifis chosen, a general partition layout filling the whole disk is automatically created. Selecting creates a partition layout from the unused space on the disk.
After the partition layout has been created, review it to ensure it meets the needs of the installation. Selectingwill reset the partitions to their original values and pressing will recreate the automatic FreeBSD partitions. Partitions can also be manually created, modified, or deleted. When the partitioning is correct, select to continue with the installation.
Selecting this method opens the partition editor:
Highlight the installation drive
ada0 in this example) and select
to display a menu
of available partition schemes:
GPT is usually the most appropriate choice for amd64 computers. Older computers that are not compatible with GPT should use MBR. The other partition schemes are generally used for uncommon or older computers.
|Apple Partition Map, used by PowerPC®.
|BSD label without an MBR, sometimes called dangerously dedicated mode as non-BSD disk utilities may not recognize it.
|GUID Partition Table (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table).
|Master Boot Record (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record).
|MBR variant used by NEC PC-98 computers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pc9801).
|Volume Table Of Contents used by Sun SPARC64 and UltraSPARC computers.
After the partitioning scheme has been selected and created, selectagain to create the partitions.
A standard FreeBSD GPT installation uses at least three partitions:
freebsd-boot - Holds the FreeBSD boot
freebsd-ufs - A FreeBSD
UFS file system.
freebsd-swap - FreeBSD swap
Another partition type worth noting is
freebsd-zfs, used for partitions that will
contain a FreeBSD ZFS file system (Chapter 20, The Z File System (ZFS)). Refer to gpart(8) for
descriptions of the available GPT partition
Multiple file system partitions can be created and some
people prefer a traditional layout with separate partitions
/tmp, and
/usr. See
Example 2.1, "Creating Traditional Split File System
Partitions" for an
Size may be entered with common
abbreviations: K for kilobytes,
M for megabytes, or
G for gigabytes.
Proper sector alignment provides the best performance, and making partition sizes even multiples of 4K bytes helps to ensure alignment on drives with either 512-byte or 4K-byte sectors. Generally, using partition sizes that are even multiples of 1M or 1G is the easiest way to make sure every partition starts at an even multiple of 4K. There is one exception: the freebsd-boot partition should be no larger than 512K due to current boot code limitations.
Mountpoint is needed if the partition
will contain a file system. If only a single
UFS partition will be created, the
mountpoint should be
Label is a name by which the
partition will be known. Drive names or numbers can change if
the drive is connected to a different controller or port, but
the partition label does not change. Referring to labels
instead of drive names and partition numbers in files like
/etc/fstab makes the system more tolerant
to hardware changes. GPT labels appear in
/dev/gpt/ when a disk is attached. Other
partitioning schemes have different label capabilities and
their labels appear in different directories in
Use a unique label on every partition to avoid
conflicts from identical labels. A few letters from the
computer's name, use, or location can be added to the label.
For instance, use
labroot or
rootfslab for the UFS
root partition on the computer named
For a traditional partition layout where the
/tmp, and
directories are separate file systems on their own
partitions, create a GPT partitioning
scheme, then create the partitions as shown. Partition
sizes shown are typical for a 20G target disk. If more
space is available on the target disk, larger swap or
/var partitions may be useful. Labels
shown here are prefixed with
ex for
"example", but readers should use other unique
label values as described above.
By default, FreeBSD's
gptboot expects
the first UFS partition to be the
/ partition.
|Partition Type
|accept the default (remainder of the disk)
After the custom partitions have been created, selectto continue with the installation.
Support for automatic creation of root-on-ZFS
installations was added in FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE. This
partitioning mode only works with whole disks and will erase
the contents of the entire disk. The installer will
automatically create partitions aligned to 4k boundaries and
force ZFS to use 4k sectors. This is safe
even with 512 byte sector disks, and has the added benefit of
ensuring that pools created on 512 byte disks will be able to
have 4k sector disks added in the future, either as additional
storage space or as replacements for failed disks. The
installer can also optionally employ GELI
disk encryption as described in Section 18.12.2, "Disk Encryption with
If encryption is enabled, a 2 GB unencrypted boot pool
containing the
/boot directory is
created. It holds the kernel and other files necessary to
boot the system. A swap partition of a user selectable size
is also created, and all remaining space is used for the
ZFS pool.
The main ZFS configuration menu offers a number of options to control the creation of the pool.
Select T to configure the
Type and the disk(s) that will constitute the
pool. The automatic ZFS installer
currently only supports the creation of a single top level
vdev, except in stripe mode. To create more complex pools,
use the instructions in Section 2.6.5, "Shell Mode Partitioning" to create the pool. The
installer supports the creation of various pool types,
including stripe (not recommended, no redundancy), mirror
(best performance, least usable space), and RAID-Z 1, 2, and 3
(with the capability to withstand the concurrent failure of 1,
2, and 3 disks, respectively). while selecting the pool type,
a tooltip is displayed across the bottom of the screen with
advice about the number of required disks, and in the case of
RAID-Z, the optimal number of disks for each
Once a
Pool Type has been selected, a
list of available disks is displayed, and the user is prompted
to select one or more disks to make up the pool. The
configuration is then validated, to ensure enough disks are
selected. If not, select to return to the list of disks, or
to change the pool
If one or more disks are missing from the list, or if disks were attached after the installer was started, selectto repopulate the list of available disks. To ensure that the correct disks are selected, so as not to accidently destroy the wrong disks, the menu can be used to inspect each disk, including its partition table and various other information such as the device model number and serial number, if available.
The main ZFS configuration menu also allows the user to enter a pool name, disable forcing 4k sectors, enable or disable encryption, switch between GPT (recommended) and MBR partition table types, and select the amount of swap space. Once all options have been set to the desired values, select theoption at the top of the menu.
If GELI disk encryption was enabled, the installer will prompt twice for the passphrase to be used to encrypt the disks.
The installer then offers a last chance to cancel before the contents of the selected drives are destroyed to create the ZFS pool.
The installation then proceeds normally.
When creating advanced installations, the
bsdinstall paritioning menus may
not provide the level of flexibility required. Advanced users
can select the option from the
partitioning menu in order to manually partition the drives,
create the file system(s), populate
/tmp/bsdinstall_etc/fstab, and mount the
file systems under
/mnt. Once this is
done, type
exit to return to
bsdinstall and continue the
Once the disks are configured, the next menu provides the last chance to make changes before the selected hard drive(s) are formatted. If changes need to be made, selectto return to the main partitioning menu. will exit the installer without making any changes to the hard drive.
To instead start the actual installation, select Enter.and press
Installation time will vary depending on the distributions chosen, installation media, and speed of the computer. A series of messages will indicate the progress.
First, the installer formats the selected disk(s) and initializes the partitions. Next, in the case of a bootonly media, it downloads the selected components:
Next, the integrity of the distribution files is verified to ensure they have not been corrupted during download or misread from the installation media:
Finally, the verified distribution files are extracted to the disk:
Once all requested distribution files have been extracted, bsdinstall displays the first post-installation configuration screen. The available post-configuration options are described in the next section.
Once FreeBSD is installed, bsdinstall will prompt to configure several options before booting into the newly installed system. This section describes these configuration options.
Once the system has booted,
bsdconfig provides a menu-driven method for
configuring the system using these and additional
First, the
password must be set. While entering the password, the
characters being typed are not displayed on the screen. After
the password has been entered, it must be entered again. This
helps prevent typing errors.
Next, a list of the network interfaces found on the computer is shown. Select the interface to configure.
The network configuration menus will be skipped if the network was previously configured as part of a bootonly installation.
If an Ethernet interface is selected, the installer will skip ahead to the menu shown in Figure 2.35, "Choose IPv4 Networking". If a wireless network interface is chosen, the system will instead scan for wireless access points:
Wireless networks are identified by a Service Set Identifier (SSID), a short, unique name given to each network. SSIDs found during the scan are listed, followed by a description of the encryption types available for that network. If the desired SSID does not appear in the list, selectto scan again. If the desired network still does not appear, check for problems with antenna connections or try moving the computer closer to the access point. Rescan after each change is made.
Next, enter the encryption information for connecting to the selected wireless network. WPA2 encryption is strongly recommended as older encryption types, like WEP, offer little security. If the network uses WPA2, input the password, also known as the Pre-Shared Key (PSK). For security reasons, the characters typed into the input box are displayed as asterisks.
Next, choose whether or not an IPv4 address should be configured on the Ethernet or wireless interface:
There are two methods of IPv4 configuration. DHCP will automatically configure the network interface correctly and should be used if the network provides a DHCP server. Otherwise, the addressing information needs to be input manually as a static configuration.
Do not enter random network information as it will not work. If a DHCP server is not available, obtain the information listed in Required Network Information from the network administrator or Internet service provider.
If a DHCP server is available, selectin the next menu to automatically configure the network interface. The installer will appear to pause for a minute or so as it finds the DHCP server and obtains the addressing information for the system.
If a DHCP server is not available, selectand input the following addressing information in this menu:
IP Address - The
IPv4 address assigned to this computer.
The address must be unique and not already in use by
another piece of equipment on the local network.
Subnet Mask - The subnet mask for
the network.
Default Router - The
IP address of the network's default
The next screen will ask if the interface should be configured for IPv6. If IPv6 is available and desired, chooseto select it.
IPv6 also has two methods of configuration. StateLess Address AutoConfiguration (SLAAC) will automatically request the correct configuration information from a local router. Refer to http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4862 for more information. Static configuration requires manual entry of network information.
If an IPv6 router is available, selectin the next menu to automatically configure the network interface. The installer will appear to pause for a minute or so as it finds the router and obtains the addressing information for the system.
If an IPv6 router is not available, selectand input the following addressing information in this menu:
IPv6 Address - The
IPv6 address assigned to this computer.
The address must be unique and not already in use by
another piece of equipment on the local network.
Default Router - The
IPv6 address of the network's default
The last network configuration menu is used to configure
the Domain Name System (DNS) resolver,
which converts hostnames to and from network addresses. If
DHCP or SLAAC was used
to autoconfigure the network interface, the
Configuration values may already be filled in.
Otherwise, enter the local network's domain name in the
Search field.
DNS #2 are the IPv4
and/or IPv6 addresses of the
DNS servers. At least one
DNS server is required.
The next menu asks if the system clock uses UTC or local time. When in doubt, selectto choose the more commonly-used local time.
The next series of menus are used to determine the correct local time by selecting the geographic region, country, and time zone. Setting the time zone allows the system to automatically correct for regional time changes, such as daylight savings time, and perform other time zone related functions properly.
The example shown here is for a machine located in the Eastern time zone of the United States. The selections will vary according to the geographical location.
The appropriate region is selected using the arrow keys and then pressing Enter.
Select the appropriate country using the arrow keys and press Enter.
The appropriate time zone is selected using the arrow keys and pressing Enter.
Confirm the abbreviation for the time zone is correct. If it is, press Enter to continue with the post-installation configuration.
The next menu is used to configure which system services will be started whenever the system boots. All of these services are optional. Only start the services that are needed for the system to function.
Here is a summary of the services which can be enabled in this menu:
sshd - The Secure Shell
(SSH) daemon is used to remotely access
a system over an encrypted connection. Only enable this
service if the system should be available for remote
moused - Enable this service if the
mouse will be used from the command-line system
ntpd - The Network Time Protocol
(NTP) daemon for automatic clock
synchronization. Enable this service if there is a
Windows®, Kerberos, or LDAP server on
the network.
powerd - System power control
utility for power control and energy saving.
The next menu is used to configure whether or not crash dumps should be enabled. Enabling crash dumps can be useful in debugging issues with the system, so users are encouraged to enable crash dumps.
The next menu prompts to create at least one user account.
It is recommended to login to the system using a user account
rather than as
When logged in as
root, there are essentially no
limits or protection on what can be done. Logging in as a
normal user is safer and more secure.
Selectto add new users.
Follow the prompts and input the requested information for
the user account. The example shown in Figure 2.50, "Enter User Information" creates the
asample user account.
Here is a summary of the information to input:
Username - The name the user will
enter to log in. A common convention is to use the first
letter of the first name combined with the last name, as
long as each username is unique for the system. The
username is case sensitive and should not contain any
Full name - The user's full name.
This can contain spaces and is used as a description for
the user account.
Uid - User ID.
Typically, this is left blank so the system will assign a
Login group - The user's group.
Typically this is left blank to accept the default.
Invite - Additional groups to which the
user will be added as a member. If the user needs
administrative access, type
user into
other groups?
Login class - Typically left blank
for the default.
Shell - Type in one of the listed
values to set the interactive shell for the user. Refer
to Section 4.9, "Shells" for more information about
Home directory - The user's home
directory. The default is usually correct.
Home directory permissions -
Permissions on the user's home directory. The default is
usually correct.
Use password-based authentication?
- Typically
yes so that the user is
prompted to input their password at login.
Use an empty password? -
no as it is insecure to have
a blank password.
Use a random password? - Typically
no so that the user can set their own
password in the next prompt.
Enter password - The password for
this user. Characters typed will not show on the
Enter password again - The password
must be typed again for verification.
Lock out the account after
creation? - Typically
no so
that the user can login.
After entering everything, a summary is shown for review.
If a mistake was made, enter
no and try
again. If everything is correct, enter
to create the new user.
If there are more users to add, answer the
another user? question with
yes. Enter
no to finish
adding users and continue the installation.
For more information on adding users and user management, see Section 4.3, "Users and Basic Account Management".
After everything has been installed and configured, a final chance is provided to modify settings.
Use this menu to make any changes or do any additional configuration before completing the installation.
Add User - Described in Section 2.8.6, "Add Users".
Root Password - Described in Section 2.8.1, "Setting the
Hostname - Described in Section 2.5.2, "Setting the Hostname".
Network - Described in Section 2.8.2, "Configuring Network Interfaces".
Services - Described in Section 2.8.4, "Enabling Services".
Time Zone - Described in Section 2.8.3, "Setting the Time Zone".
Handbook - Download and install the
FreeBSD Handbook.
After any final configuration is complete, select.
bsdinstall will prompt if there are any additional configuration that needs to be done before rebooting into the new system. Select to exit to a shell within the new system or to proceed to the last step of the installation.
If further configuration or special setup is needed, selectto boot the install media into Live CD mode.
If the installation is complete, selectto reboot the computer and start the new FreeBSD system. Do not forget to remove the FreeBSD install media or the computer may boot from it again.
As FreeBSD boots, informational messages are displayed.
After the system finishes booting, a login prompt is
displayed. At the
login: prompt, enter the
username added during the installation. Avoid logging in as
root. Refer to
Section 220.127.116.11, "The Superuser Account" for instructions on how to
become the superuser when administrative access is
The messages that appeared during boot can be reviewed by
pressing Scroll-Lock to turn on the
scroll-back buffer. The PgUp,
PgDn, and arrow keys can be used to scroll
back through the messages. When finished, press
Scroll-Lock again to unlock the display and
return to the console. To review these messages once the
system has been up for some time, type
/var/run/dmesg.boot from a command prompt. Press
q to return to the command line after
If sshd was enabled in Figure 2.47, "Selecting Additional Services to Enable", the first boot may be a bit slower as the system will generate the RSA and DSA keys. Subsequent boots will be faster. The fingerprints of the keys will be displayed, as seen in this example:
Generating public/private rsa1 key pair. Your identification has been saved in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_key. Your public key has been saved in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_key.pub. The key fingerprint is: 10:a0:f5:af:93:ae:a3:1a:b2:bb:3c:35:d9:5a:b3:f3 email@example.com The key's randomart image is: +--[RSA1 1024]----+ | o.. | | o . . | | . o | | o | | o S | | + + o | |o . + * | |o+ ..+ . | |==o..o+E | +-----------------+ Generating public/private dsa key pair. Your identification has been saved in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key. Your public key has been saved in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key.pub. The key fingerprint is: 7e:1c:ce:dc:8a:3a:18:13:5b:34:b5:cf:d9:d1:47:b2 firstname.lastname@example.com The key's randomart image is: +--[ DSA 1024]----+ | .. . .| | o . . + | | . .. . E .| | . . o o . . | | + S = . | | + . = o | | + . * . | | . . o . | | .o. . | +-----------------+ Starting sshd.
Refer to Section 14.8, "OpenSSH" for more information about fingerprints and SSH.
FreeBSD does not install a graphical environment by default. Refer to Chapter 6, The X Window System for more information about installing and configuring a graphical window manager.
Proper shutdown of a FreeBSD computer helps protect data and
hardware from damage. Do not turn off the power
before the system has been properly shut down! If
the user is a member of the
wheel group, become the
superuser by typing
su at the command line
and entering the
root password. Then, type
shutdown -p now and the system will shut
down cleanly, and if the hardware supports it, turn itself
This section covers basic installation troubleshooting, such as common problems people have reported.
Check the Hardware Notes (http://www.freebsd.org/releases/index.html)
document for the version of FreeBSD to make sure the hardware is
supported. If the hardware is supported and lock-ups or other
problems occur, build a custom kernel using the instructions in
Chapter 9, Configuring the FreeBSD Kernel to add support for devices which
are not present in the
GENERIC kernel. The
default kernel assumes that most hardware devices are in their
factory default configuration in terms of
IRQs, I/O addresses, and
DMA channels. If the hardware has been
reconfigured, a custom kernel configuration file can tell FreeBSD
where to find things.
Some installation problems can be avoided or alleviated by updating the firmware on various hardware components, most notably the motherboard. Motherboard firmware is usually referred to as the BIOS. Most motherboard and computer manufacturers have a website for upgrades and upgrade information.
Manufacturers generally advise against upgrading the motherboard BIOS unless there is a good reason for doing so, like a critical update. The upgrade process can go wrong, leaving the BIOS incomplete and the computer inoperative.
If the system hangs while probing hardware during boot, or
it behaves strangely during install, ACPI may
be the culprit. FreeBSD makes extensive use of the system
ACPI service on the i386,
amd64, and ia64 platforms to aid in system configuration
if it is detected during boot. Unfortunately, some bugs still
exist in both the ACPI driver and within
system motherboards and BIOS firmware.
ACPI can be disabled by setting the
hint.acpi.0.disabled hint in the third stage
boot loader:
set hint.acpi.0.disabled="1"
This is reset each time the system is booted, so it is
necessary to add
hint.acpi.0.disabled="1" to
the file
/boot/loader.conf. More
information about the boot loader can be found in Section 13.1, "Synopsis".
The welcome menu of bsdinstall, shown in Figure 2.3, "Welcome Menu", provides a option. This is useful for those who are still wondering whether FreeBSD is the right operating system for them and want to test some of the features before installing.
The following points should be noted before using the:
To gain access to the system, authentication is
required. The username is
root and the password is
As the system runs directly from the installation media, performance will be significantly slower than that of a system installed on a hard disk.
This option only provides a command prompt and not a graphical interface.
FreeBSD provides a text-based, easy to use installation
program. FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE and later use the installation
program known as bsdinstall(8) while
FreeBSD 8.
X uses
sysinstall(8). This chapter describes how to use
sysinstall(8). The use of bsdinstall(8) is covered in
Chapter 2, Installing FreeBSD 9.
X and
After reading this chapter, you will know:
How to create the FreeBSD installation media.
How FreeBSD refers to and subdivides hard disks.
How to start sysinstall(8).
The questions sysinstall(8) asks, what they mean, and how to answer them.
Before reading this chapter, you should:
Read the supported hardware list that shipped with the version of FreeBSD to install, and verify that the system's hardware is supported.
In general, these installation instructions are written for the i386™ and FreeBSD/amd64 architectures. Where applicable, instructions specific to other platforms will be listed. There may be minor differences between the installer and what is shown here. This chapter should be used as a general guide rather than a literal installation manual.
The minimal configuration to install FreeBSD varies with the FreeBSD version and the hardware architecture.
A summary of this information is given in the following sections. Depending on the method chosen to install FreeBSD, a floppy drive, CDROM drive, or network adapter may be needed. Instructions on how to prepare the installation media can be found in Section 3.3.7, "Prepare the Boot Media".
Both FreeBSD/i386 and FreeBSD/pc98 require a 486 or better processor, at least 24 MB of RAM, and at least 150 MB of free hard drive space for the most minimal installation.
In the case of older hardware, installing more RAM and more hard drive space is often more important than a faster processor.
There are two classes of processors capable of running FreeBSD/amd64. The first are AMD64 processors, including the AMD Athlon™64, AMD Athlon™64-FX, and AMD Opteron™ or better processors.
The second class of processors includes those using the Intel® EM64T architecture. Examples of these processors include the Intel® Core™ 2 Duo, Quad, Extreme processor families, and the Intel® Xeon™ 3000, 5000, and 7000 sequences of processors.
If the machine is based on an nVidia nForce3 Pro-150, the BIOS setup must be used to disable the IO APIC. If this option does not exist, disable ACPI instead as there are bugs in the Pro-150 chipset.
To install FreeBSD/sparc64, use a supported platform (see Section 3.2.2, "Supported Hardware").
A dedicated disk is needed for FreeBSD/sparc64 as it is not possible to share a disk with another operating system at this time.
A list of supported hardware is provided with each FreeBSD
release in the FreeBSD Hardware Notes. This document can usually
be found in a file named
HARDWARE.TXT, in
the top-level directory of a CDROM or FTP distribution, or in
sysinstall(8)'s documentation menu. It lists, for a
given architecture, which hardware devices are known to be
supported by each release of FreeBSD. Copies of the supported
hardware list for various releases and architectures can also
be found on the Release
Information page of the FreeBSD website.
Before installing FreeBSD it is recommended to inventory the components in the computer. The FreeBSD installation routines will show components such as hard disks, network cards, and CDROM drives with their model number and manufacturer. FreeBSD will also attempt to determine the correct configuration for these devices, including information about IRQ and I/O port usage. Due to the vagaries of computer hardware, this process is not always completely successful, and FreeBSD may need some manual configuration.
If another operating system is already installed, use the
facilities provided by that operating systems to view the
hardware configuration. If the settings of an expansion card
are not obvious, check if they are printed on the card itself.
Popular IRQ numbers are 3, 5, and 7, and I/O port addresses
are normally written as hexadecimal numbers, such as
It is recommended to print or write down this information before installing FreeBSD. It may help to use a table, as seen in this example:
|Device Name
|I/O port(s)
|First hard disk
|40 GB, made by Seagate, first IDE master
|First IDE slave
|Second hard disk
|20 GB, made by IBM, second IDE master
|First IDE controller
|Network card
|Intel® 10/100
|3Com® 56K faxmodem, on COM1
Once the inventory of the components in the computer is complete, check if it matches the hardware requirements of the FreeBSD release to install.
If the computer contains valuable data, ensure it is backed up, and that the backup has been tested before installing FreeBSD. The FreeBSD installer will prompt before writing any data to disk, but once that process has started, it cannot be undone.
If FreeBSD is to be installed on the entire hard disk, skip this section.
However, if FreeBSD will co-exist with other operating systems, a rough understanding of how data is laid out on the disk is useful.
A PC disk can be divided into discrete chunks known as partitions. Since FreeBSD also has partitions, naming can quickly become confusing. Therefore, these disk chunks are referred to as slices in FreeBSD. For example, the FreeBSD version of fdisk(8) refers to slices instead of partitions. By design, the PC only supports four partitions per disk. These partitions are called primary partitions. To work around this limitation and allow more than four partitions, a new partition type was created, the extended partition. A disk may contain only one extended partition. Special partitions, called logical partitions, can be created inside this extended partition.
Each partition has a partition
ID, which is a number used to identify the
type of data on the partition. FreeBSD partitions have the
partition ID of
In general, each operating system will identify
partitions in a particular way. For example, Windows®,
assigns each primary and logical partition a
drive letter, starting with
FreeBSD must be installed into a primary partition. If there are multiple disks, a FreeBSD partition can be created on all, or some, of them. When FreeBSD is installed, at least one partition must be available. This might be a blank partition or it might be an existing partition whose data can be overwritten.
If all the partitions on all the disks are in use, free
one of them for FreeBSD using the tools provided by an existing
operating system, such as Windows®
If there is a spare partition, use that. If it is too small, shrink one or more existing partitions to create more available space.
A minimal installation of FreeBSD takes as little as 100 MB of disk space. However, that is a very minimal install, leaving almost no space for files. A more realistic minimum is 250 MB without a graphical environment, and 350 MB or more for a graphical user interface. If other third-party software will be installed, even more space is needed.
You can use a tool such as GParted to resize your partitions and make space for FreeBSD. GParted is known to work on NTFS and is available on a number of Live CD Linux distributions, such as SystemRescueCD.
Incorrect use of a shrinking tool can delete the data on the disk. Always have a recent, working backup before using this type of tool.
Consider a computer with a single 4 GB disk that
already has a version of Windows® installed, where the
disk has been split into two drive letters,
C: and
D:, each
of which is 2 GB in size. There is 1 GB of data
C:, and 0.5 GB of data on
This disk has two partitions, one per drive letter.
Copy all existing data from
D: to
C:, which will free up the second
partition, ready for FreeBSD.
Consider a computer with a single 4 GB disk that
already has a version of Windows® installed. When
Windows® was installed, it created one large partition,
C: drive that is 4 GB in size.
Currently, 1.5 GB of space is used, and FreeBSD should
have 2 GB of space.
In order to install FreeBSD, either:
Backup the Windows® data and then reinstall Windows®, asking for a 2 GB partition at install time.
Use one of the tools described above to shrink your Windows® partition.
Before installing from an FTP site or an NFS server, make note of the network configuration. The installer will prompt for this information so that it can connect to the network to complete the installation.
If using an Ethernet network or an Internet connection using an Ethernet adapter via cable or DSL, the following information is needed:
IP address
IP address of the default gateway
DNS server IP addresses
Subnet Mask
If this information is unknown, ask the system administrator or service provider. Make note if this information is assigned automatically using DHCP.
If using a dialup modem, FreeBSD can still be installed over the Internet, it will just take a very long time.
You will need to know:
The phone number to dial the Internet Service Provider (ISP)
The COM: port the modem is connected to
The username and password for the ISP account
Although the FreeBSD Project strives to ensure that each release of FreeBSD is as stable as possible, bugs do occasionally creep into the process. On rare occasions those bugs affect the installation process. As these problems are discovered and fixed, they are noted in the FreeBSD Errata, which is found on the FreeBSD website. Check the errata before installing to make sure that there are no late-breaking problems to be aware of.
Information about all releases, including the errata for each release, can be found on the release information section of the FreeBSD website.
The FreeBSD installer can install FreeBSD from files located in any of the following places:
A CDROM or DVD
A USB Memory Stick
A MS-DOS® partition on the same computer
Floppy disks (FreeBSD/pc98 only)
An FTP site through a firewall or using an HTTP proxy
An NFS server
A dedicated parallel or serial connection
If installing from a purchased FreeBSD CD/DVD, skip ahead to Section 3.3.7, "Prepare the Boot Media".
To obtain the FreeBSD installation files, skip ahead to Section 3.13, "Preparing Custom Installation Media" which explains how to prepare the installation media. After reading that section, come back here and read on to Section 3.3.7, "Prepare the Boot Media".
The FreeBSD installation process is started by booting the computer into the FreeBSD installer. It is not a program that can be run within another operating system. The computer normally boots using the operating system installed on the hard disk, but it can also be configured to boot from a CDROM or from a USB disk.
If installing from a CD/DVD to a computer whose BIOS supports booting from the CD/DVD, skip this section. The FreeBSD CD/DVD images are bootable and can be used to install FreeBSD without any other special preparation.
To create a bootable memory stick, follow these steps:
Acquire the Memory Stick Image
Memory stick images for
FreeBSD 8.
X can be downloaded
from the
ISO-IMAGES/ directory at
arch and
version with the architecture
and the version number to install. For example, the
memory stick images for
FreeBSD/i386 9.3-RELEASE are
available from
A different directory path is used for
FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE and later versions. How to
download and install
FreeBSD 9.
is covered in Chapter 2, Installing FreeBSD 9.
X and
The memory stick image has a
extension. The
ISO-IMAGES/ directory
contains a number of different images and the one to
use depends on the version of FreeBSD and the type of media
supported by the hardware being installed to.
Before proceeding, back up the data on the USB stick, as this procedure will erase it.
Write the Image File to the Memory Stick
The example below lists
/dev/da0 as the target device
where the image will be written. Be very careful that
you have the correct device as the output target, or
you may destroy your existing data.
Writing the Image with dd(1)
.img file is
not a regular file that can just
be copied to the memory stick. It is an image of the
complete contents of the disk. This means that
dd(1) must be used to write the image directly to
the disk:
dd if=FreeBSD-9.3-RELEASE-i386-memstick.img of=/dev/
If an
Operation not
permitted error is displayed, make
certain that the target device is not in use, mounted,
or being automounted by another program. Then try
Make sure to use the correct drive letter as the output target, as this command will overwrite and destroy any existing data on the specified device.
Obtaining Image Writer for Windows
Image Writer for
Windows is a free application that can
correctly write an image file to a memory stick.
Download it from
and extract it into a folder.
Writing the Image with Image Writer
Double-click the
Win32DiskImager icon to
start the program. Verify that the drive letter shown
Device is the
drive with the memory stick. Click the folder icon
and select the image to be written to the memory
stick. Click to accept
the image file name. Verify that everything is
correct, and that no folders on the memory stick are
open in other windows. Finally, click
to write the image file
to the drive.
To create the boot floppy images for a FreeBSD/pc98 installation, follow these steps:
Acquire the Boot Floppy Images
The FreeBSD/pc98 boot disks can be downloaded from
the floppies directory,
version with the
version number to install.
The floppy images have a
floppies/ contains a number
of different images. Download
boot.flp as well as the number of
files associated with the type of installation, such as
kern.small* or
The FTP program must use binary mode to download these disk images. Some web browsers use text or ASCII mode, which will be apparent if the disks are not bootable.
Prepare the Floppy Disks
Prepare one floppy disk per downloaded image file. It is imperative that these disks are free from defects. The easiest way to test this is to reformat the disks. Do not trust pre-formatted floppies. The format utility in Windows® will not tell about the presence of bad blocks, it simply marks them as "bad" and ignores them. It is advised to use brand new floppies.
If the installer crashes, freezes, or otherwise misbehaves, one of the first things to suspect is the floppies. Write the floppy image files to new disks and try again.
Write the Image Files to the Floppy Disks
.flp files are
not regular files that can be copied
to the disk. They are images of the complete contents of
the disk. Specific tools must be used to write the
images directly to the disk.
FreeBSD provides a tool called
for creating the floppies on a computer running Windows®.
This tool can be downloaded from
ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/pc98/ on the
FreeBSD FTP site. Download this tool, insert a floppy, then
specify the filename to write to the floppy drive:
rawrite boot.flp A:
Repeat this command for each
file, replacing the floppy disk each time, being sure to
label the disks with the name of the file. Adjust the
command line as necessary, depending on where the
.flp files are located.
When writing the floppies on a UNIX®-like system, such as another FreeBSD system, use dd(1) to write the image files directly to disk. On FreeBSD, run:
dd if=boot.flp of=/dev/fd0
On FreeBSD,
/dev/fd0 refers to the
first floppy disk. Other UNIX® variants might have
different names for the floppy disk device, so check the
documentation for the system as necessary.
You are now ready to start installing FreeBSD.
By default, the installer will not make any changes to the disk(s) until after the following message:
Last Chance: Are you SURE you want continue the installation? If you're running this on a disk with data you wish to save then WE STRONGLY ENCOURAGE YOU TO MAKE PROPER BACKUPS before proceeding! We can take no responsibility for lost disk contents!
The install can be exited at any time prior to this final warning without changing the contents of the hard drive. If there is a concern that something is configured incorrectly, turn the computer off before this point, and no damage will be done.
Turn on the computer. As it starts it should display an option to enter the system set up menu, or BIOS, commonly reached by keys like F2, F10, Del, or Alt+S. Use whichever keystroke is indicated on screen. In some cases the computer may display a graphic while it starts. Typically, pressing Esc will dismiss the graphic and display the boot messages.
Find the setting that controls which devices the
system boots from. This is usually labeled as the
"Boot Order" and commonly shown as a list
of devices, such as
First Hard
Disk, and so on.
If booting from the CD/DVD, make sure that the CDROM drive is selected. If booting from a USB disk, make sure that it is selected instead. When in doubt, consult the manual that came with the computer or its motherboard.
Make the change, then save and exit. The computer should now restart.
If using a prepared a "bootable" USB stick, as described in Section 3.3.7, "Prepare the Boot Media", plug in the USB stick before turning on the computer.
If booting from CD/DVD, turn on the computer, and insert the CD/DVD at the first opportunity.
For FreeBSD/pc98, installation boot floppies
are available and can be prepared as described in
Section 3.3.7, "Prepare the Boot Media". The first
floppy disc will contain
boot.flp. Put this floppy in the
floppy drive to boot into the installer.
If the computer starts up as normal and loads the existing operating system, then either:
The disks were not inserted early enough in the boot process. Leave them in, and try restarting the computer.
The BIOS changes did not work correctly. Redo that step until the right option is selected.
That particular BIOS does not support booting from the desired media.
FreeBSD will start to boot. If booting from CD/DVD, messages will be displayed, similar to these:
Booting from CD-Rom... 645MB medium detected CD Loader 1.2 Building the boot loader arguments Looking up /BOOT/LOADER... Found Relocating the loader and the BTX Starting the BTX loader BTX loader 1.00 BTX version is 1.02 Consoles: internal video/keyboard BIOS CD is cd0 BIOS drive C: is disk0 BIOS drive D: is disk1 BIOS 636kB/261056kB available memory FreeBSD/i386 bootstrap loader, Revision 1.1 Loading /boot/defaults/loader.conf /boot/kernel/kernel text=0x64daa0 data=0xa4e80+0xa9e40 syms=[0x4+0x6cac0+0x4+0x88e9d] \
If booting from floppy disc, a display similar to this will be shown:
Booting from Floppy... Uncompressing ... done BTX loader 1.00 BTX version is 1.01 Console: internal video/keyboard BIOS drive A: is disk0 BIOS drive C: is disk1 BIOS 639kB/261120kB available memory FreeBSD/i386 bootstrap loader, Revision 1.1 Loading /boot/defaults/loader.conf /kernel text=0x277391 data=0x3268c+0x332a8 | Insert disk labelled "Kernel floppy 1" and press any key...
Remove the
boot.flp floppy,
insert the next floppy, and press
Enter. When prompted, insert the other
disks as required.
The boot process will then display the FreeBSD boot loader menu:
Either wait ten seconds, or press Enter.
Most SPARC64® systems are set to boot automatically from disk. To install FreeBSD, boot over the network or from a CD/DVD and wait until the boot message appears. The message depends on the model, but should look similar to:
Sun Blade 100 (UltraSPARC-IIe), Keyboard Present Copyright 1998-2001 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. OpenBoot 4.2, 128 MB memory installed, Serial #51090132. Ethernet address 0:3:ba:b:92:d4, Host ID: 830b92d4.
If the system proceeds to boot from disk, press
or Stop+A
on the keyboard, or send a
BREAK over the
serial console using
~# in tip(1) or
cu(1) to get to the PROM prompt. It looks like
ok {0}
This is the prompt used on systems with just one CPU.
This is the prompt used on SMP systems and the digit indicates the number of the active CPU.
At this point, place the CD/DVD into the drive and from
the PROM prompt, type
boot cdrom.
The last few hundred lines that have been displayed on screen are stored and can be reviewed.
To review this buffer, press Scroll Lock to turn on scrolling in the display. Use the arrow keys or PageUp and PageDown to view the results. Press Scroll Lock again to stop scrolling.
Do this now, to review the text that scrolled off the screen when the kernel was carrying out the device probes. Text similar to Figure 3.2, "Typical Device Probe Results" will be displayed, although it will differ depending on the devices in the computer.
avail memory = 253050880 (247120K bytes) Preloaded elf kernel "kernel" at 0xc0817000. Preloaded mfs_root "/mfsroot" at 0xc0817084. md0: Preloaded image </mfsroot> 4423680 bytes at 0xc03ddcd4 md1: Malloc disk Using $PIR table, 4 entries at 0xc00fde60 npx0: <math processor> on motherboard npx0: INT 16 interface pcib0: <Host to PCI bridge> on motherboard pci0: <PCI bus> on pcib0 pcib1:<VIA 82C598MVP (Apollo MVP3) PCI-PCI (AGP) bridge> at device 1.0 on pci0 pci1: <PCI bus> on pcib1 pci1: <Matrox MGA G200 AGP graphics accelerator> at 0.0 irq 11 isab0: <VIA 82C586 PCI-ISA bridge> at device 7.0 on pci0 isa0: <iSA bus> on isab0 atapci0: <VIA 82C586 ATA33 controller> port 0xe000-0xe00f at device 7.1 on pci0 ata0: at 0x1f0 irq 14 on atapci0 ata1: at 0x170 irq 15 on atapci0 uhci0 <VIA 83C572 USB controller> port 0xe400-0xe41f irq 10 at device 7.2 on pci 0 usb0: <VIA 83572 USB controller> on uhci0 usb0: USB revision 1.0 uhub0: VIA UHCI root hub, class 9/0, rev 1.00/1.00, addr1 uhub0: 2 ports with 2 removable, self powered pci0: <unknown card> (vendor=0x1106, dev=0x3040) at 7.3 dc0: <ADMtek AN985 10/100BaseTX> port 0xe800-0xe8ff mem 0xdb000000-0xeb0003ff ir q 11 at device 8.0 on pci0 dc0: Ethernet address: 00:04:5a:74:6b:b5 miibus0: <MII bus> on dc0 ukphy0: <Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface> on miibus0 ukphy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto ed0: <NE2000 PCI Ethernet (RealTek 8029)> port 0xec00-0xec1f irq 9 at device 10. 0 on pci0 ed0 address 52:54:05:de:73:1b, type NE2000 (16 bit) isa0: too many dependant configs (8) isa0: unexpected small tag 14 orm0: <Option ROM> at iomem 0xc0000-0xc7fff on isa0 fdc0: <NEC 72065B or clone> at port 0x3f0-0x3f5,0x3f7 irq 6 drq2 on isa0 fdc0: FIFO enabled, 8 bytes threshold fd0: <1440-KB 3.5" drive> on fdc0 drive 0 atkbdc0: <Keyboard controller (i8042)> at port 0x60,0x64 on isa0 atkbd0: <AT Keyboard> flags 0x1 irq1 on atkbdc0 kbd0 at atkbd0 psm0: <PS/2 Mouse> irq 12 on atkbdc0 psm0: model Generic PS/@ mouse, device ID 0 vga0: <Generic ISA VGA> at port 0x3c0-0x3df iomem 0xa0000-0xbffff on isa0 sc0: <System console> at flags 0x100 on isa0 sc0: VGA <16 virtual consoles, flags=0x300> sio0 at port 0x3f8-0x3ff irq 4 flags 0x10 on isa0 sio0: type 16550A sio1 at port 0x2f8-0x2ff irq 3 on isa0 sio1: type 16550A ppc0: <Parallel port> at port 0x378-0x37f irq 7 on isa0 pppc0: SMC-like chipset (ECP/EPP/PS2/NIBBLE) in COMPATIBLE mode ppc0: FIFO with 16/16/15 bytes threshold plip0: <PLIP network interface> on ppbus0 ad0: 8063MB <IBM-DHEA-38451> [16383/16/63] at ata0-master UDMA33 acd0: CD-RW <LITE-ON LTR-1210B> at ata1-slave PIO4 Mounting root from ufs:/dev/md0c /stand/sysinstall running as init on vty0
Check the probe results carefully to make sure that FreeBSD
found all the devices. If a device was not found, it will
not be listed. A custom kernel can be used to
add in support for devices which are not in the
GENERIC kernel.
After the device probe, the menu shown in Figure 3.3, "Selecting Country Menu" will be displayed. Use the arrow key to choose a country, region, or group. Then press Enter to set the country.
If Enter.is selected as the country, the standard American keyboard map will be used. If a different country is chosen, the following menu will be displayed. Use the arrow keys to choose the correct keyboard map and press
After the country selection, the sysinstall(8) main menu will display.
The FreeBSD 8.
X installer,
sysinstall(8), is console based and is divided into a
number of menus and screens that can be used to configure and
control the installation process.
This menu system is controlled by the arrow keys, Enter, Tab, Space, and other keys. To view a detailed description of these keys and what they do, ensure that the entry is highlighted and that the button is selected, as shown in Figure 3.5, "Selecting Usage from Sysinstall Main Menu", then press Enter.
The instructions for using the menu system will be displayed. After reviewing them, press Enter to return to the Main Menu.
From the Main Menu, select Enter.with the arrow keys and press
This will display the Documentation Menu.
It is important to read the documents provided. To view a document, select it with the arrow keys and press Enter. When finished reading a document, press Enter to return to the Documentation Menu.
To return to the Main Installation Menu, select Enter.with the arrow keys and press
To change the keyboard mapping, use the arrow keys to select Enter. This is only required when using a non-standard or non-US keyboard.from the menu and press
A different keyboard mapping may be chosen by selecting the menu item using the up and down arrow keys and pressing Space. Pressing Space again will unselect the item. When finished, choose the using the arrow keys and press Enter.
Only a partial list is shown in this screen representation. Selecting Tab will use the default keymap and return to the Main Install Menu.by pressing
Select Enter.and press
The default values are usually fine for most users and do not need to be changed. The release name will vary according to the version being installed.
The description of the selected item will appear at the bottom of the screen highlighted in blue. Notice that one of the options isto reset all values to startup defaults.
Press F1 to read the help screen about the various options.
Press Q to return to the Main Install menu.
The first task is to allocate disk space for FreeBSD, and label that space so that sysinstall(8) can prepare it. In order to do this you need to know how FreeBSD expects to find information on the disk.
Before installing and configuring FreeBSD it is important to be aware how FreeBSD deals with BIOS drive mappings.
In a PC running a BIOS-dependent operating system such as Microsoft® Windows®, the BIOS is able to abstract the normal disk drive order and the operating system goes along with the change. This allows the user to boot from a disk drive other than the "primary master". This is especially convenient for users buy an identical second hard drive, and perform routine copies of the first drive to the second drive. If the first drive fails, is attacked by a virus, or is scribbled upon by an operating system defect, they can easily recover by instructing the BIOS to logically swap the drives. It is like switching the cables on the drives, without having to open the case.
Systems with SCSI controllers often include BIOS extensions which allow the SCSI drives to be re-ordered in a similar fashion for up to seven drives.
A user who is accustomed to taking advantage of these features may become surprised when the results with FreeBSD are not as expected. FreeBSD does not use the BIOS, and does not know the "logical BIOS drive mapping". This can lead to perplexing situations, especially when drives are physically identical in geometry and have been made as data clones of one another.
When using FreeBSD, always restore the BIOS to natural drive numbering before installing FreeBSD, and then leave it that way. If drives need to be switched around, take the time to open the case and move the jumpers and cables.
After choosing to begin a standard installation in sysinstall(8), this message will appear:
Message In the next menu, you will need to set up a DOS-style ("fdisk") partitioning scheme for your hard disk. If you simply wish to devote all disk space to FreeBSD (overwriting anything else that might be on the disk(s) selected) then use the (A)ll command to select the default partitioning scheme followed by a (Q)uit. If you wish to allocate only free space to FreeBSD, move to a partition marked "unused" and use the (C)reate command. [ OK ] [ Press enter or space ]
Press Enter and a list of all the hard
drives that the kernel found when it carried out the device
probes will be displayed. Figure 3.13, "Select Drive for FDisk" shows an example from a
system with two IDE disks called
ad0 and
Note that
ad1 is not listed
Consider two IDE hard disks where one is the master on the
first IDE controller and one is the master on the second IDE
controller. If FreeBSD numbered these as
ad0 and
everything would work.
But if a third disk is later added as the slave device on
the first IDE controller, it would now be
ad1, and the previous
ad1 would become
ad2. Because device names are used to
find filesystems, some filesystems may no longer appear
correctly, requiring a change to the FreeBSD
To work around this, the kernel can be configured to name
IDE disks based on where they are and not the order in which
they were found. With this scheme, the master disk on the
second IDE controller will always be
ad2, even if there are no
ad0 or
This configuration is the default for the FreeBSD kernel,
which is why the display in this example shows
ad0 and
ad2. The
machine on which this screenshot was taken had IDE disks on
both master channels of the IDE controllers and no disks on
the slave channels.
Select the disk on which to install FreeBSD, and then press FDisk will start, with a display similar to that shown in Figure 3.14, "Typical Default FDisk Partitions"..
The FDisk display is broken into three sections.
The first section, covering the first two lines of the display, shows details about the currently selected disk, including its FreeBSD name, the disk geometry, and the total size of the disk.
The second section shows the slices that are currently on
the disk, where they start and end, how large they are, the
name FreeBSD gives them, and their description and sub-type.
This example shows two small unused slices which are artifacts
of disk layout schemes on the PC. It also shows one large
FAT slice, which appears as
C: in Windows®, and an extended slice,
which may contain other drive letters in Windows®.
The third section shows the commands that are available in FDisk.
This step varies, depending on how the disk is to be sliced.
To install FreeBSD to the entire disk, which will delete all
the other data on this disk, press A, which
corresponds to the
option. The existing slices will be removed and replaced with
a small area flagged as
unused and one
large slice for FreeBSD. Then, select the newly created FreeBSD
slice using the arrow keys and press S to
mark the slice as being bootable. The screen will then look
similar to Figure 3.15, "Fdisk Partition Using Entire Disk". Note the
A in the
Flags column,
which indicates that this slice is
active, and will be booted from.
If an existing slice needs to be deleted to make space for FreeBSD, select the slice using the arrow keys and press D. Then, press C to be prompted for the size of the slice to create. Enter the appropriate value and press Enter. The default value in this box represents the largest possible slice to make, which could be the largest contiguous block of unallocated space or the size of the entire hard disk.
If you have already made space for FreeBSD then you can press C to create a new slice. Again, you will be prompted for the size of slice you would like to create.
When finished, press Q. Any changes will be saved in sysinstall(8), but will not yet be written to disk.
The next menu provides the option to install a boot manager. In general, install the FreeBSD boot manager if:
There is more than one drive and FreeBSD will be installed onto a drive other than the first one.
FreeBSD will be installed alongside another operating system on the same disk, and you want to choose whether to start FreeBSD or the other operating system when the computer starts.
If FreeBSD is going to be the only operating system on this machine, installed on the first hard disk, then theboot manager will suffice. Choose if using a third-party boot manager capable of booting FreeBSD.
Make a selection and press Enter.
The help screen, reached by pressing F1, discusses the problems that can be encountered when trying to share the hard disk between operating systems.
If there is more than one drive, it will return to the Select Drives screen after the boot manager selection. To install FreeBSD on to more than one disk, select another disk and repeat the slice process using FDisk.
If installing FreeBSD on a drive other than the first drive, the FreeBSD boot manager needs to be installed on both drives.
Use Tab to toggle between the last drive selected, , and .
Press Tab once to toggle to , then press Enter to continue with the installation.
Next, create some partitions inside each slice.
Remember that each partition is lettered, from
a through to
h, and that
c, and
d have conventional meanings that should be
adhered to.
Certain applications can benefit from particular partition schemes, especially when laying out partitions across more than one disk. However, for a first FreeBSD installation, do not give too much thought to how to partition the disk. It is more important to install FreeBSD and start learning how to use it. You can always re-install FreeBSD to change the partition scheme after becoming more familiar with the operating system.
The following scheme features four partitions: one for swap space and three for filesystems.
|This is the root filesystem. Every other filesystem will be mounted somewhere under this one. 1 GB is a reasonable size for this filesystem as user files should not be stored here and a regular FreeBSD install will put about 128 MB of data here.
|2-3 x RAM
The system's swap space is kept on the
|512 MB to 4096 MB
/var contains files that are
constantly varying, such as log files and other
administrative files. Many of these files are read
from or written to extensively during FreeBSD's
day-to-day running. Putting these files on another
filesystem allows FreeBSD to optimize the access of these
files without affecting other files in other
directories that do not have the same access
|Rest of disk (at least 8 GB)
|All other files will typically be stored in
/usr and its
The values above are given as example and should be used
by experienced users only. Users are encouraged to use the
automatic partition layout called
Defaults by the FreeBSD partition editor.
If installing FreeBSD on to more than one disk, create partitions in the other configured slices. The easiest way to do this is to create two partitions on each disk, one for the swap space, and one for a filesystem.
|See description
|Swap space can be split across each disk. Even
though the
a partition is free,
convention dictates that swap space stays on the
b partition.
|Rest of disk
|The rest of the disk is taken up with one big
partition. This could easily be put on the
a partition, instead of the
e partition. However, convention
says that the
a partition on a
slice is reserved for the filesystem that will be the
root (
/) filesystem. Following
this convention is not necessary, but
sysinstall(8) uses it, so following it makes the
installation slightly cleaner. This filesystem can be
mounted anywhere; this example mounts it as
n is a number that
changes for each disk.
Having chosen the partition layout, create it using sysinstall(8).
Message Now, you need to create BSD partitions inside of the fdisk partition(s) just created. If you have a reasonable amount of disk space (1GB or more) and don't have any special requirements, simply use the (A)uto command to allocate space automatically. If you have more specific needs or just don't care for the layout chosen by (A)uto, press F1 for more information on manual layout. [ OK ] [ Press enter or space ]
Press Enter to start the FreeBSD partition editor, called Disklabel.
Figure 3.18, "Sysinstall Disklabel Editor" shows the display when Disklabel starts. The display is divided into three sections.
The first few lines show the name of the disk being
worked on and the slice that contains the partitions to
create. At this point, Disklabel
calls this the
Partition name rather than
slice name. This display also shows the amount of free space
within the slice; that is, space that was set aside in the
slice, but that has not yet been assigned to a
The middle of the display shows the partitions that have been created, the name of the filesystem that each partition contains, their size, and some options pertaining to the creation of the filesystem.
The bottom third of the screen shows the keystrokes that are valid in Disklabel.
Disklabel can automatically create partitions and assign them default sizes. The default sizes are calculated with the help of an internal partition sizing algorithm based on the disk size. Press A to see a display similar to that shown in Figure 3.19, "Sysinstall Disklabel Editor with Auto Defaults". Depending on the size of the disk, the defaults may or may not be appropriate.
The default partitioning assigns
/tmp its own partition instead of
being part of the
/ partition. This
helps avoid filling the
/ partition
with temporary files.
To replace the default partitions, use the arrow keys to select the first partition and press D to delete it. Repeat this to delete all the suggested partitions.
To create the first partition,
mounted as
/, make sure the proper disk
slice at the top of the screen is selected and press
C. A dialog box will appear, prompting for
the size of the new partition, as shown in Figure 3.20, "Free Space for Root Partition". The size can be entered
as the number of disk blocks to use or as a number followed by
M for megabytes,
G for gigabytes, or
for cylinders.
The default size shown will create a partition that takes
up the rest of the slice. If using the partition sizes
described in the earlier example, delete the existing figure
using Backspace, and then type in
512M, as shown in Figure 3.21, "Edit Root Partition Size". Then press
After choosing the partition's size, the installer will ask whether this partition will contain a filesystem or swap space. The dialog box is shown in Figure 3.22, "Choose the Root Partition Type". This first partition will contain a filesystem, so check that is selected and press Enter.
Finally, tell Disklabel where
the filesystem will be mounted. The dialog box is shown in
Figure 3.23, "Choose the Root Mount Point". Type
/, and then press
The display will then update to show the newly created
partition. Repeat this procedure for the other partitions.
When creating the swap partition, it will not prompt for the
filesystem mount point. When creating the final partition,
/usr, leave the suggested size as is to
use the rest of the slice.
The final FreeBSD DiskLabel Editor screen will appear similar to Figure 3.24, "Sysinstall Disklabel Editor", although the values chosen may be different. Press Q to finish.
Deciding which distribution set to install will depend largely on the intended use of the system and the amount of disk space available. The predefined options range from installing the smallest possible configuration to everything. Those who are new to UNIX® or FreeBSD should select one of these canned options. Customizing a distribution set is typically for the more experienced user.
Press F1 for more information on the distribution set options and what they contain. When finished reviewing the help, press Enter to return to the Select Distributions Menu.
If a graphical user interface is desired, the configuration of Xorg and selection of a default desktop must be done after the installation of FreeBSD. More information regarding the installation and configuration of a Xorg can be found in Chapter 6, The X Window System.
If compiling a custom kernel is anticipated, select an option which includes the source code. For more information on why a custom kernel should be built or how to build a custom kernel, see Chapter 9, Configuring the FreeBSD Kernel.
The most versatile system is one that includes everything. If there is adequate disk space, select Figure 3.25, "Choose Distributions", by using the arrow keys and pressing Enter. If there is a concern about disk space, consider using an option that is more suitable for the situation. Do not fret over the perfect choice, as other distributions can be added after installation., as shown in
After selecting the desired distribution, an opportunity to install the FreeBSD Ports Collection is presented. The Ports Collection is an easy and convenient way to install software as it provides a collection of files that automate the downloading, compiling, and installation of third-party software packages. Chapter 5, Installing Applications: Packages and Ports discusses how to use the Ports Collection.
The installation program does not check to see if you have adequate space. Select this option only if you have adequate hard disk space. As of FreeBSD 10.1, the FreeBSD Ports Collection takes up about 500 MB of disk space. You can safely assume a larger value for more recent versions of FreeBSD.
User Confirmation Requested Would you like to install the FreeBSD ports collection? This will give you ready access to over 24,000 ported software packages, at a cost of around 500 MB of disk space when "clean" and possibly much more than that if a lot of the distribution tarballs are loaded (unless you have the extra CDs from a FreeBSD CD/DVD distribution available and can mount it on /cdrom, in which case this is far less of a problem). The Ports Collection is a very valuable resource and well worth having on your /usr partition, so it is advisable to say Yes to this option. For more information on the Ports Collection & the latest ports, visit: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ports [ Yes ] No
Select Enter to continue. The Choose Distributions menu will redisplay.with the arrow keys to install the Ports Collection or to skip this option. Press
Once satisfied with the options, select Enter to continue.with the arrow keys, ensure that is highlighted, and press
If installing from a CD/DVD, use the arrow keys to highlight Enter to proceed with the installation.. Ensure that is highlighted, then press
For other methods of installation, select the appropriate option and follow the instructions.
Press F1 to display the Online Help for installation media. Press Enter to return to the media selection menu.
There are three FTP installation modes to choose from: active FTP, passive FTP, or via a HTTP proxy.
This option makes 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 the connection hangs with passive mode (the default), try using active mode.
This option instructs sysinstall(8) to use passive mode for all FTP operations. This allows the user to pass through firewalls that do not allow incoming connections on random TCP ports.
This option instructs sysinstall(8) to use the HTTP protocol to connect to a proxy for all FTP operations. The proxy will translate the requests and send them to the FTP server. This allows the user to pass through firewalls that do not allow FTP, but offer a HTTP proxy. In this case, specify the proxy in addition to the FTP server.
For a proxy FTP server, give the name of the server as
part of the username, after an "@" sign. The
proxy server then "fakes" the real server. For
example, to install from
ftp.FreeBSD.org, using the
proxy FTP server
foo.example.com, listening
on port 1234, go to the options menu, set the FTP username to
firstname.lastname@example.com and the password to an
email address. As the installation media, specify FTP (or
passive FTP, if the proxy supports it), and the URL
/pub/FreeBSD from
ftp.FreeBSD.org is proxied
foo.example.com, the proxy
will fetch the files from
ftp.FreeBSD.org as the
installer requests them.
The installation can now proceed if desired. This is also the last chance for aborting the installation to prevent changes to the hard drive.
User Confirmation Requested Last Chance! Are you SURE you want to continue the installation? If you're running this on a disk with data you wish to save then WE STRONGLY ENCOURAGE YOU TO MAKE PROPER BACKUPS before proceeding! We can take no responsibility for lost disk contents! [ Yes ] No
Select Enter to proceed.and press
The installation time will vary according to the distribution chosen, installation media, and the speed of the computer. There will be a series of messages displayed, indicating the status.
The installation is complete when the following message is displayed:
Message Congratulations! You now have FreeBSD installed on your system. We will now move on to the final configuration questions. For any option you do not wish to configure, simply select No. If you wish to re-enter this utility after the system is up, you may do so by typing: /usr/sbin/sysinstall. [ OK ] [ Press enter or space ]
Press Enter to proceed with post-installation configurations.
Selecting Enter will abort the installation so no changes will be made to the system. The following message will appear:and pressing
Message Installation complete with some errors. You may wish to scroll through the debugging messages on VTY1 with the scroll-lock feature. You can also choose "No" at the next prompt and go back into the installation menus to retry whichever operations have failed. [ OK ]
This message is generated because nothing was installed. Pressing Enter will return to the Main Installation Menu to exit the installation.
Configuration of various options can be performed after a successful installation. An option can be configured by re-entering the configuration menus before booting the new FreeBSD system or after boot using sysinstall(8) and then selecting the menu.
If PPP was previously configured for an FTP install, this screen will not display and can be configured after boot as described above.
For detailed information on Local Area Networks and configuring FreeBSD as a gateway/router refer to the Advanced Networking chapter.
User Confirmation Requested Would you like to configure any Ethernet or PPP network devices? [ Yes ] No
To configure a network device, select Enter. Otherwise, select to continue.and press
Select the interface to be configured with the arrow keys and press Enter.
User Confirmation Requested Do you want to try IPv6 configuration of the interface? Yes [ No ]
In this private local area network, the current Internet type protocol (IPv4) was sufficient and Enter pressed.was selected with the arrow keys and
If connected to an existing IPv6 network with an RA server, choose Enter. It will take several seconds to scan for RA servers.and press
User Confirmation Requested Do you want to try DHCP configuration of the interface? Yes [ No ]
If Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol DHCP) is not required, select Enter.with the arrow keys and press
Selecting dhclient(8) and, if successful, will fill in the network configuration information automatically. Refer to Section 29.6, "Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP)" for more information.will execute
The following Network Configuration screen shows the configuration of the Ethernet device for a system that will act as the gateway for a Local Area Network.
Use Tab to select the information fields and fill in appropriate information:
The fully-qualified hostname, such as
k6-2.example.com in
this case.
The name of the domain that the machine is in, such
example.com for this
IP address of host forwarding packets to non-local destinations. This must be filled in if the machine is a node on the network. Leave this field blank if the machine is the gateway to the Internet for the network. The IPv4 Gateway is also known as the default gateway or default route.
IP address of the local DNS server. There is no
local DNS server on this private local area network so
the IP address of the provider's DNS server
220.127.116.11) was
The IP address to be used for this interface was
The address block being used for this local area
network is
192.168.0.0 -
with a netmask of
Any additional interface-specific options to ifconfig(8). There were none in this case.
Use Tab to select when finished and press Enter.
User Confirmation Requested Would you like to bring the ed0 interface up right now? [ Yes ] No
Choosing Enter will bring the machine up on the network so it is ready for use. However, this does not accomplish much during installation, since the machine still needs to be rebooted.and pressing
User Confirmation Requested Do you want this machine to function as a network gateway? [ Yes ] No
If the machine will be acting as the gateway for a local area network and forwarding packets between other machines, select Enter. If the machine is a node on a network, select and press Enter to continue.and press
User Confirmation Requested Do you want to configure inetd and the network services that it provides? Yes [ No ]
/etc/inetd.conf with a text
editor. See Section 29.2.1, "Configuration File" for more
Otherwise, selectto configure these services during install. An additional confirmation will display:
User Confirmation Requested The Internet Super Server (inetd) allows a number of simple Internet services to be enabled, including finger, ftp and telnetd. Enabling these services may increase risk of security problems by increasing the exposure of your system. With this in mind, do you wish to enable inetd? [ Yes ] No
Selectto continue.
User Confirmation Requested inetd(8) relies on its configuration file, /etc/inetd.conf, to determine which of its Internet services will be available. The default FreeBSD inetd.conf(5) leaves all services disabled by default, so they must be specifically enabled in the configuration file before they will function, even once inetd(8) is enabled. Note that services for IPv6 must be separately enabled from IPv4 services. Select [Yes] now to invoke an editor on /etc/inetd.conf, or [No] to use the current settings. [ Yes ] No
# at the beginning of the
lines representing those services.
Once the edits are complete, press Esc to display a menu which will exit the editor and save the changes.
User Confirmation Requested Would you like to enable SSH login? Yes [ No ]
Selecting sshd(8), the daemon for OpenSSH. This allows secure remote access to the machine. For more information about OpenSSH, see Section 14.8, "OpenSSH".will enable
User Confirmation Requested Do you want to have anonymous FTP access to this machine? Yes [ No ]
Selecting the default Enter will still allow users who have accounts with passwords to use FTP to access the machine.and pressing
Anyone can access the machine if anonymous FTP connections are allowed. The security implications should be considered before enabling this option. For more information about security, see Chapter 14, Security.
To allow anonymous FTP, use the arrow keys to select Enter. An additional confirmation will display:and press
User Confirmation Requested Anonymous FTP permits un-authenticated users to connect to the system FTP server, if FTP service is enabled. Anonymous users are restricted to a specific subset of the file system, and the default configuration provides a drop-box incoming directory to which uploads are permitted. You must separately enable both inetd(8), and enable ftpd(8) in inetd.conf(5) for FTP services to be available. If you did not do so earlier, you will have the opportunity to enable inetd(8) again later. If you want the server to be read-only you should leave the upload directory option empty and add the -r command-line option to ftpd(8) in inetd.conf(5) Do you wish to continue configuring anonymous FTP? [ Yes ] No
This message indicates that the FTP service will also
have to be enabled in
to allow anonymous FTP connections. Select and
press Enter to continue. The following
screen will display:
Use Tab to select the information fields and fill in appropriate information:
The user ID to assign to the anonymous FTP user. All files uploaded will be owned by this ID.
Which group to place the anonymous FTP user into.
String describing this user in
Where files available for anonymous FTP will be kept.
Where files uploaded by anonymous FTP users will go.
The FTP root directory will be put in
/var by default. If there is not
enough room there for the anticipated FTP needs, use
/usr instead by setting the FTP root
directory to
Once satisfied with the values, press Enter to continue.
User Confirmation Requested Create a welcome message file for anonymous FTP users? [ Yes ] No
If Enter and the ee(1) editor will automatically start.is selected, press
Use the instructions to change the message. Note the file name location at the bottom of the editor screen.
Press Esc and a pop-up menu will default to . Press Enter to exit and continue. Press Enter again to save any changes.
The Network File System (NFS) allows sharing of files across a network. A machine can be configured as a server, a client, or both. Refer to Section 29.3, "Network File System (NFS)" for more information.
User Confirmation Requested Do you want to configure this machine as an NFS server? Yes [ No ]
If there is no need for a NFS server, select Enter.and press
/etc/exports must be
Message Operating as an NFS server means that you must first configure an /etc/exports file to indicate which hosts are allowed certain kinds of access to your local filesystems. Press [Enter] now to invoke an editor on /etc/exports [ OK ]
Press Enter to continue. A text editor
will start, allowing
/etc/exports to be
Use the instructions to add the exported filesystems. Note the file name location at the bottom of the editor screen.
Press Esc and a pop-up menu will default to . Press Enter to exit and continue.
There are several options available to customize the system console.
User Confirmation Requested Would you like to customize your system console settings? [ Yes ] No
To view and configure the options, select Enter.and press
A commonly used option is the screen saver. Use the arrow keys to select Enter.and then press
Select the desired screen saver using the arrow keys and then press Enter. The System Console Configuration menu will redisplay.
The default time interval is 300 seconds. To change the time interval, select Enter. A pop-up menu will appear:again. At the Screen Saver Options menu, select using the arrow keys and press
The value can be changed, then select Enter to return to the System Console Configuration menu.and press
Select Enter to continue with the post-installation configuration.and press
Setting the time zone allows the system to automatically correct for any regional time changes and perform other time zone related functions properly.
The example shown is for a machine located in the Eastern time zone of the United States. The selections will vary according to the geographic location.
User Confirmation Requested Would you like to set this machine's time zone now? [ Yes ] No
Select Enter to set the time zone.and press
User Confirmation Requested Is this machine's CMOS clock set to UTC? If it is set to local time or you don't know, please choose NO here! Yes [ No ]
Select Enter.or according to how the machine's clock is configured, then press
The appropriate region is selected using the arrow keys and then pressing Enter.
Select the appropriate country using the arrow keys and press Enter.
The appropriate time zone is selected using the arrow keys and pressing Enter.
Confirmation Does the abbreviation 'EDT' look reasonable? [ Yes ] No
Confirm that the abbreviation for the time zone is correct. If it looks okay, press Enter to continue with the post-installation configuration.
This option allows cut and paste in the console and user programs using a 3-button mouse. If using a 2-button mouse, refer to moused(8) for details on emulating the 3-button style. This example depicts a non-USB mouse configuration:
User Confirmation Requested Does this system have a PS/2, serial, or bus mouse? [ Yes ] No
Select Enter.for a PS/2, serial, or bus mouse, or for a USB mouse, then press
Use the arrow keys to select Enter.and press
The mouse used in this example is a PS/2 type, so the default Enter to exit this menu.is appropriate. To change the mouse protocol, use the arrow keys to select another option. Ensure that is highlighted and press
Use the arrow keys to select Enter.and press
This system had a PS/2 mouse, so the default Enter.is appropriate. To change the port, use the arrow keys and then press
Last, use the arrow keys to select Enter to enable and test the mouse daemon., and press
Move the mouse around the screen to verify that the cursor responds properly. If it does, select Enter. If not, the mouse has not been configured correctly. Select and try using different configuration options.and press
Select Enter to continue with the post-installation configuration.with the arrow keys and press
Packages are pre-compiled binaries and are a convenient way to install software.
Installation of one package is shown for purposes of illustration. Additional packages can also be added at this time if desired. After installation, sysinstall(8) can be used to add additional packages.
User Confirmation Requested The FreeBSD package collection is a collection of hundreds of ready-to-run applications, from text editors to games to WEB servers and more. Would you like to browse the collection now? [ Yes ] No
Select Enter to be presented with the Package Selection screens:and press
Only packages on the current installation media are available for installation at any given time.
All packages available will be displayed if Enter.is selected. Otherwise, select a particular category. Highlight the selection with the arrow keys and press
A menu will display showing all the packages available for the selection made:
The bash shell is shown as selected. Select as many packages as desired by highlighting the package and pressing Space. A short description of each package will appear in the lower left corner of the screen.
Press Tab to toggle between the last selected package, , and .
Once finished marking the packages for installation, press Tab once to toggle to and press Enter to return to the Package Selection menu.
The left and right arrow keys will also toggle between Enter to return to the Package Selection menu.and . This method can also be used to select and press
Use the Tab and arrow keys to select and press Enter to see the installation confirmation message:
Select Enter to start the package installation. Installation messages will appear until all of the installations have completed. Make note if there are any error messages.and press
The final configuration continues after packages are installed. If no packages are selected, selectto return to the final configuration.
Add at least one user during the installation so that the
system can be used without logging in as
root. The root partition is
generally small and running applications as
root can quickly fill it. A
bigger danger is noted below:
User Confirmation Requested Would you like to add any initial user accounts to the system? Adding at least one account for yourself at this stage is suggested since working as the "root" user is dangerous (it is easy to do things which adversely affect the entire system). [ Yes ] No
Select Enter to continue with adding a user.and press
Select Enter.with the arrow keys and press
The following descriptions will appear in the lower part of the screen as the items are selected with Tab to assist with entering the required information:
The login name of the new user (mandatory).
The numerical ID for this user (leave blank for automatic choice).
The login group name for this user (leave blank for automatic choice).
The password for this user (enter this field with care!).
The user's full name (comment).
The groups this user belongs to.
The user's home directory (leave blank for default).
The user's login shell (leave blank for
default of
In this example, the login shell was changed from
/bin/sh to
/usr/local/bin/bash to use the
bash shell that was previously
installed as a package. Do not use a shell that does not
exist or the user will not be able to login. The most common
shell used in FreeBSD is the C shell,
The user was also added to the
wheel group to be able to
become a superuser with
root privileges.
Once satisfied, pressand the User and Group Management menu will redisplay:
Groups can also be added at this time. Otherwise, this menu may be accessed using sysinstall(8) at a later time.
When finished adding users, select Enter to continue the installation.with the arrow keys and press
Message Now you must set the system manager's password. This is the password you'll use to log in as "root". [ OK ] [ Press enter or space ]
Press Enter to set the
root password.
The password will need to be typed in twice correctly. Do not forget this password. Notice that the typed password is not echoed, nor are asterisks displayed.
New password: Retype new password :
The installation will continue after the password is successfully entered.
A message will ask if configuration is complete:
User Confirmation Requested Visit the general configuration menu for a chance to set any last options? Yes [ No ]
Select Enter to return to the Main Installation Menu.with the arrow keys and press
Select Enter. The installer will prompt to confirm exiting the installation:with the arrow keys and press
User Confirmation Requested Are you sure you wish to exit? The system will reboot. [ Yes ] No
Select. If booting from the CDROM drive, the following message will remind you to remove the disk:
Message Be sure to remove the media from the drive. [ OK ] [ Press enter or space ]
The CDROM drive is locked until the machine starts to reboot, then the disk can quickly be removed from the drive. Pressto reboot.
The system will reboot so watch for any error messages that may appear, see Section 3.10.15, "FreeBSD Bootup" for more details.
Configuring network services can be a daunting task for users that lack previous knowledge in this area. Since networking and the Internet are critical to all modern operating systems, it is useful to have some understanding of FreeBSD's extensive networking capabilities.
Network services are programs that accept input from
anywhere on the network. Since there have been cases where
bugs in network services have been exploited by attackers, it
is important to only enable needed network services. If in
doubt, do not enable a network service until it is needed.
Services can be enabled with sysinstall(8) or by editing
Selecting theoption will display a menu similar to the one below:
The first option, Section 3.10.1, "Network Device Configuration"., is covered in
Selecting the amd(8). This is usually used in conjunction with NFS for automatically mounting remote filesystems.option adds support for
Next is theoption. When selected, a menu will pop up where specific AMD flags can be entered. The menu already contains a set of default options:
-a /.amd_mnt -l syslog /host /etc/amd.map /net /etc/amd.map
-a sets the default mount location which
is specified here as
-l specifies the default
log; however, when syslogd(8) is
used, all log activity will be sent to the system log daemon.
/host is used to mount an exported file
system from a remote host, while
is used to mount an exported filesystem from an
IP address. The default options for
AMD exports are defined in
Theoption permits anonymous FTP connections. Select this option to make this machine an anonymous FTP server. Be aware of the security risks involved with this option. Another menu will be displayed to explain the security risks and configuration in depth.
Themenu will configure the machine to be a gateway. This menu can also be used to unset the option if it was accidentally selected during installation.
The inetd(8).option can be used to configure or completely disable
Theoption is used to configure the system's default Mail Transfer Agent (MTA). Selecting this option will bring up the following menu:
This menu offers a choice as to which MTA to install and set as the default. An MTA is a mail server which delivers email to users on the system or the Internet.
Select Sendmail as the default MTA. Select to set Sendmail as the default MTA, but disable its ability to receive incoming email from the Internet. The other options, and , provide alternatives to Sendmail.to install
The next menu after the MTA menu is Section 29.3, "Network File System (NFS)" for more information about client and server configuration.. This menu is used to configure the system to communicate with a NFS server which in turn is used to make filesystems available to other machines on the network over the NFS protocol. See
Below that option is theoption, for setting the system up as an NFS server. This adds the required information to start up the Remote Procedure Call RPC services. RPC is used to coordinate connections between hosts and programs.
Next in line is theoption, which deals with time synchronization. When selected, a menu like the one below shows up:
From this menu, select the server which is geographically closest. This will make the time synchronization more accurate as a farther server may have more connection latency.
The next option is the PCNFSD selection. This option will install the net/pcnfsd package from the Ports Collection. This is a useful utility which provides NFS authentication services for systems which are unable to provide their own, such as Microsoft's MS-DOS® operating system.
Now, scroll down a bit to see the other options:
RPC communication between
NFS servers and clients is managed by
rpcbind(8) which is required for NFS
servers to operate correctly. Status monitoring is provided
by rpc.statd(8) and the reported status is usually held
/var/db/statd.status. The next option
is for rpc.lockd(8) which provides file locking
services. This is usually used with rpc.statd(8) to
monitor which hosts are requesting locks and how frequently
they request them. While these last two options are useful
for debugging, they are not required for
NFS servers and clients to operate
The next menu, routed(8), manages
network routing tables, discovers multicast routers, and
supplies a copy of the routing tables to any physically
connected host on the network upon request. This is mainly
used for machines which act as a gateway for the local
network. If selected, a menu will request the default
location of the utility. To accept the default location,
press Enter. Yet another menu will ask for
the flags to pass to routed(8). The default of
-q should appear on the screen.
The next menu, rwhod(8) during system initialization. This utility broadcasts system messages across the network periodically, or collects them when in "consumer" mode. More information can be found in ruptime(1) and rwho(1)., starts
The next to last option in the list is for sshd(8), the secure shell server for OpenSSH. It is highly recommended over the standard telnetd(8) and ftpd(8) servers as it is used to create a secure, encrypted connection from one host to another.
The final option iswhich are defined in RFC 1323 and RFC 1644. While on many hosts this can speed up connections, it can also cause some connections to be dropped. It is not recommended for servers, but may be beneficial for stand alone machines.
Once the network services are configured, scroll up to the very top item which is sysinstall(8) by selecting twice then .and continue on to the next configuration item or simply exit
If everything went well, messages will scroll along the screen and a login prompt will appear. To view these messages, press Scroll-Lock then use PgUp and PgDn. Press Scroll-Lock again to return to the prompt.
All of the messages may not display due to buffer limitations, but they can be read after logging using dmesg(8).
Login using the username and password which were set
during installation. Avoid logging in as
root except when
Typical boot messages (version information omitted):
Copyright (c) 1992-2002 The FreeBSD Project. Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Timecounter "i8254" frequency 1193182 Hz CPU: AMD-K6(tm) 3D processor (300.68-MHz 586-class CPU) Origin = "AuthenticAMD" Id = 0x580 Stepping = 0 Features=0x8001bf<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,MCE,CX8,MMX> AMD Features=0x80000800<SYSCALL,3DNow!> real memory = 268435456 (262144K bytes) config> di sn0 config> di lnc0 config> di le0 config> di ie0 config> di fe0 config> di cs0 config> di bt0 config> di aic0 config> di aha0 config> di adv0 config> q avail memory = 256311296 (250304K bytes) Preloaded elf kernel "kernel" at 0xc0491000. Preloaded userconfig_script "/boot/kernel.conf" at 0xc049109c. md0: Malloc disk Using $PIR table, 4 entries at 0xc00fde60 npx0: <math processor> on motherboard npx0: INT 16 interface pcib0: <Host to PCI bridge> on motherboard pci0: <PCI bus> on pcib0 pcib1: <VIA 82C598MVP (Apollo MVP3) PCI-PCI (AGP) bridge> at device 1.0 on pci0 pci1: <PCI bus> on pcib1 pci1: <Matrox MGA G200 AGP graphics accelerator> at 0.0 irq 11 isab0: <VIA 82C586 PCI-ISA bridge> at device 7.0 on pci0 isa0: <ISA bus> on isab0 atapci0: <VIA 82C586 ATA33 controller> port 0xe000-0xe00f at device 7.1 on pci0 ata0: at 0x1f0 irq 14 on atapci0 ata1: at 0x170 irq 15 on atapci0 uhci0: <VIA 83C572 USB controller> port 0xe400-0xe41f irq 10 at device 7.2 on pci0 usb0: <VIA 83C572 USB controller> on uhci0 usb0: USB revision 1.0 uhub0: VIA UHCI root hub, class 9/0, rev 1.00/1.00, addr 1 uhub0: 2 ports with 2 removable, self powered chip1: <VIA 82C586B ACPI interface> at device 7.3 on pci0 ed0: <NE2000 PCI Ethernet (RealTek 8029)> port 0xe800-0xe81f irq 9 at device 10.0 on pci0 ed0: address 52:54:05:de:73:1b, type NE2000 (16 bit) isa0: too many dependant configs (8) isa0: unexpected small tag 14 fdc0: <NEC 72065B or clone> at port 0x3f0-0x3f5,0x3f7 irq 6 drq 2 on isa0 fdc0: FIFO enabled, 8 bytes threshold fd0: <1440-KB 3.5" drive> on fdc0 drive 0 atkbdc0: <keyboard controller (i8042)> at port 0x60-0x64 on isa0 atkbd0: <AT Keyboard> flags 0x1 irq 1 on atkbdc0 kbd0 at atkbd0 psm0: <PS/2 Mouse> irq 12 on atkbdc0 psm0: model Generic PS/2 mouse, device ID 0 vga0: <Generic ISA VGA> at port 0x3c0-0x3df iomem 0xa0000-0xbffff on isa0 sc0: <System console> at flags 0x1 on isa0 sc0: VGA <16 virtual consoles, flags=0x300> sio0 at port 0x3f8-0x3ff irq 4 flags 0x10 on isa0 sio0: type 16550A sio1 at port 0x2f8-0x2ff irq 3 on isa0 sio1: type 16550A ppc0: <Parallel port> at port 0x378-0x37f irq 7 on isa0 ppc0: SMC-like chipset (ECP/EPP/PS2/NIBBLE) in COMPATIBLE mode ppc0: FIFO with 16/16/15 bytes threshold ppbus0: IEEE1284 device found /NIBBLE Probing for PnP devices on ppbus0: plip0: <PLIP network interface> on ppbus0 lpt0: <Printer> on ppbus0 lpt0: Interrupt-driven port ppi0: <Parallel I/O> on ppbus0 ad0: 8063MB <IBM-DHEA-38451> [16383/16/63] at ata0-master using UDMA33 ad2: 8063MB <IBM-DHEA-38451> [16383/16/63] at ata1-master using UDMA33 acd0: CDROM <DELTA OTC-H101/ST3 F/W by OIPD> at ata0-slave using PIO4 Mounting root from ufs:/dev/ad0s1a swapon: adding /dev/ad0s1b as swap device Automatic boot in progress... /dev/ad0s1a: FILESYSTEM CLEAN; SKIPPING CHECKS /dev/ad0s1a: clean, 48752 free (552 frags, 6025 blocks, 0.9% fragmentation) /dev/ad0s1f: FILESYSTEM CLEAN; SKIPPING CHECKS /dev/ad0s1f: clean, 128997 free (21 frags, 16122 blocks, 0.0% fragmentation) /dev/ad0s1g: FILESYSTEM CLEAN; SKIPPING CHECKS /dev/ad0s1g: clean, 3036299 free (43175 frags, 374073 blocks, 1.3% fragmentation) /dev/ad0s1e: filesystem CLEAN; SKIPPING CHECKS /dev/ad0s1e: clean, 128193 free (17 frags, 16022 blocks, 0.0% fragmentation) Doing initial network setup: hostname. ed0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 inet 192.168.0.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.0.255 inet6 fe80::5054::5ff::fede:731b%ed0 prefixlen 64 tentative scopeid 0x1 ether 52:54:05:de:73:1b lo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 16384 inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x8 inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128 inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000 Additional routing options: IP gateway=YES TCP keepalive=YES routing daemons:. additional daemons: syslogd. Doing additional network setup:. Starting final network daemons: creating ssh RSA host key Generating public/private rsa1 key pair. Your identification has been saved in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_key. Your public key has been saved in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_key.pub. The key fingerprint is: cd:76:89:16:69:0e:d0:6e:f8:66:d0:07:26:3c:7e:2d email@example.com creating ssh DSA host key Generating public/private dsa key pair. Your identification has been saved in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key. Your public key has been saved in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key.pub. The key fingerprint is: f9:a1:a9:47:c4:ad:f9:8d:52:b8:b8:ff:8c:ad:2d:e6 email@example.com. setting ELF ldconfig path: /usr/lib /usr/lib/compat /usr/X11R6/lib /usr/local/lib a.out ldconfig path: /usr/lib/aout /usr/lib/compat/aout /usr/X11R6/lib/aout starting standard daemons: inetd cron sshd usbd sendmail. Initial rc.i386 initialization:. rc.i386 configuring syscons: blank_time screensaver moused. Additional ABI support: linux. Local package initialization:. Additional TCP options:. FreeBSD/i386 (k6-2.example.com) (ttyv0) login: rpratt Password:
Generating the RSA and DSA keys may take some time on slower machines. This happens only on the initial boot-up of a new installation. Subsequent boots will be faster.
If Xorg has been configured
and a default desktop chosen, it can be started by typing
startx at the command line.
It is important to properly shutdown the operating system.
Do not just turn off the power. First, become the superuser
using su(1) and entering the
root password. This will work
only if the user is a member of
wheel. Otherwise, login as
root. To shutdown
the system, type
shutdown -h now.
The operating system has halted. Please press any key to reboot.
It is safe to turn off the power after the shutdown command has been issued and the message "Please press any key to reboot" appears. If any key is pressed instead of turning off the power switch, the system will reboot.
The Ctrl+Alt+Del key combination can also be used to reboot the system; however, this is not recommended.
This section covers basic installation troubleshooting of common problems. There are also a few questions and answers for people wishing to dual-boot FreeBSD with Windows®.
Due to various limitations of the PC architecture, it is impossible for device probing to be 100% reliable. However, there are a few things to try if it fails.
Check the Hardware Notes document for the version of FreeBSD to make sure the hardware is supported.
If the hardware is supported but still experiences
lock-ups or other problems, build a custom kernel to add in
support for devices which are not present in the
GENERIC kernel. The default kernel
assumes that most hardware devices are in their factory
default configuration in terms of IRQs, I/O addresses, and
DMA channels. If the hardware has been reconfigured, create a
custom kernel configuration file and recompile to tell FreeBSD
where to find things.
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.
Some installation problems can be avoided or alleviated by updating the firmware on various hardware components, most notably the motherboard BIOS. Most motherboard and computer manufacturers have a website where upgrade information may be located.
Most manufacturers strongly advise against upgrading the motherboard BIOS unless there is a good reason for doing so, such as a critical update. The upgrade process can go wrong, causing permanent damage to the BIOS chip.
At this time, FreeBSD does not support file systems compressed with the Double Space™ application. Therefore the file system will need to be uncompressed before FreeBSD can access the data. This can be done by running the Compression Agent located in the > > menu.
FreeBSD can support MS-DOS® file systems (sometimes called
FAT file systems). The mount_msdosfs(8) command grafts
such file systems onto the existing directory hierarchy,
allowing the file system's contents to be accessed. The
mount_msdosfs(8) program is not usually invoked directly;
instead, it is called by the system through a line in
/etc/fstab or by using mount(8) with
the appropriate parameters.
A typical line in
/dev/ad0sN /dos msdosfs rw 0 0
/dos must already exist for this to
work. For details about the format of
/etc/fstab, see fstab(5).
A typical call to mount(8) for a FAT filesystem looks like:
mount -t msdosfs /dev/ad0s1 /mnt
In this example, the FAT filesystem is located on the first partition of the primary hard disk. The output from dmesg(8) and mount(8) should produce enough information to give an idea of the partition layout.
FreeBSD may number FAT partitions differently than other operating systems. In particular, extended partitions are usually given higher slice numbers than primary partitions. Use fdisk(8) to help determine which slices belong to FreeBSD and which belong to other operating systems.
My system hangs while probing hardware during boot or it behaves strangely during install.
FreeBSD makes extensive use of the system ACPI service
on the i386, amd64, and ia64 platforms to aid in system
configuration if it is detected during boot.
Unfortunately, some bugs still exist in the ACPI driver
and various system motherboards. The use of ACPI can be
disabled by setting
This is reset each time the system is booted, so it
is necessary to add
When booting from the hard disk for the first time after installing FreeBSD, the kernel loads and probes hardware, but stops with messages like:
changing root device to ad1s1a panic: cannot mount root
What is wrong?
This can occur when the boot disk is not the first disk in the system. The BIOS uses a different numbering scheme to FreeBSD, and working out which numbers correspond to which is difficult to get right.
If this occurs, tell FreeBSD where the root filesystem is by specifying the BIOS disk number, the disk type, and the FreeBSD disk number for that type.
Consider two IDE disks, each configured as the
master on their respective IDE bus, where FreeBSD should be
booted from the second disk. The BIOS sees these as
disk 0 and disk 1, while FreeBSD sees them as
If FreeBSD is on BIOS disk 1, of type
Note that if there is a slave on the primary bus, the above is not necessary and is effectively wrong.
The second situation involves booting from a SCSI
disk when there are one or more IDE disks in the system.
In this case, the FreeBSD disk number is lower than the
BIOS disk number. For two IDE disks and a SCSI disk,
where the SCSI disk is BIOS disk 2, type
This tells FreeBSD to boot from BIOS disk 2, which is
the first SCSI disk in the system. If there is only IDE
disk, use
Once the correct value to use is determined, put the
command in
When booting from the hard disk for the first time
after installing FreeBSD, the Boot Manager prompt just
The hard disk geometry was set incorrectly in the partition editor when FreeBSD was installed. Go back into the partition editor and specify the actual geometry of the hard disk. FreeBSD must be reinstalled again from the beginning with the correct geometry.
For a dedicated FreeBSD system that does not need future compatibility with another operating system, use the entire disk by selectingin the installer's partition editor.
The system finds the ed(4) network card but continuously displays device timeout errors.
The card is probably on a different IRQ from what
is specified in
Either move the jumper on the card to the
configuration setting or specify the IRQ as
Another possibility is that the card is at IRQ 9, which is shared by IRQ 2 and frequently a cause of problems, especially if a VGA card is using IRQ 2. Do not use IRQ 2 or 9 if at all possible.
When sysinstall(8) is usedin an Xorg terminal, the yellow font is difficult to read against the light gray background. Is there a way to provide higher contrast for this application?
If the default colors chosen by sysinstall(8)
make text illegible while using
x11/xterm or
x11/rxvt, add the following to
This section describes how to install FreeBSD in exceptional cases.
This type of installation is called a "headless install" because the machine to be installed does not have either an attached monitor or a VGA output. This type of installation is possible using a serial console, another machine which acts as the main display and keyboard. To do this, follow the steps to create an installation USB stick, explained in Section 3.3.7, "Prepare the Boot Media", or download the correct installation ISO image as described in Section 3.13.1, "Creating an Installation ISO".
To modify the installation media to boot into a serial console, follow these steps. If using a CD/DVD media, skip the first step):
Enabling the Installation USB Stick to Boot into a Serial Console
By default, booting into the USB stick boots into the installer. To instead boot into a serial console, mount the USB disk onto a FreeBSD system using mount(8):
mount /dev/
Adapt the device node and the mount point to the situation.
Once the USB stick is mounted, set it to boot into a
serial console. Add this line to
/boot/loader.conf on the USB
echo 'console="comconsole"' >>
Now that the USB is stick configured correctly, unmount the disk using umount(8):
Now, unplug the USB stick and jump directly to the third step of this procedure.
Enabling the Installation CD/DVD to Boot into a Serial Console
By default, when booting into the installation CD/DVD, FreeBSD boots into its normal install mode. To instead boot into a serial console, extract, modify, and regenerate the ISO image before burning it to the CD/DVD media.
From the FreeBSD system with the saved installation ISO image, use tar(1) to extract all the files:
tar -C
/path/to/headless-iso-pxvf FreeBSD-
Next, set the installation media to boot into a
serial console. Add this line to the
/boot/loader.conf of the extracted
ISO image:
echo 'console="comconsole"' >>
Then, create a new ISO image from the modified tree. This example uses mkisofs(8) from the sysutils/cdrtools package or port:
mkisofs -v -b boot/cdboot -no-emul-boot -r -J -V "
Headless_install" \ -o
Now that the ISO image is configured correctly, burn it to a CD/DVD media using a burning application.
Connecting the Null-modem Cable
Connect a null-modem cable to the serial ports of the two machines. A normal serial cable will not work. A null-modem cable is required.
Booting Up for the Install
It is now time to go ahead and start the install. Plug in the USB stick or insert the CD/DVD media in the headless install machine and power it on.
Connecting to the Headless Machine
Next, connect to that machine with cu(1):
cu -l /dev/cuau0
The headless machine can now be controlled using cu(1). It will load the kernel and then display a selection of which type of terminal to use. Select the FreeBSD color console and proceed with the installation.
Some situations may require a customized FreeBSD installation media and/or source. This might be physical media or a source that sysinstall(8) can use to retrieve the installation files. Some example situations include:
A local network with many machines has a private FTP server hosting the FreeBSD installation files which the machines should use for installation.
FreeBSD does not recognize the CD/DVD drive but Windows® does. In this case, copy the FreeBSD installation files to a Windows® partition on the same computer, and then install FreeBSD using those files.
The computer to install does not have a CD/DVD drive or a network card, but can be connected using a null-printer cable to a computer that does.
A tape will be used to install FreeBSD.
As part of each release, the FreeBSD Project provides ISO images for each supported architecture. These images can be written ("burned") to CD or DVD media using a burning application, and then used to install FreeBSD. If a CD/DVD writer is available, this is the easiest way to install FreeBSD.
Download the Correct ISO Images
The ISO images for each release can be downloaded from
or the closest mirror. Substitute
arch and
version as appropriate.
An image directory normally contains the following images:
|This CD image starts the installation process by booting from a CD-ROM drive but it does not contain the support for installing FreeBSD from the CD itself. Perform a network based install, such as from an FTP server, after booting from this CD.
|This DVD image contains everything necessary to install the base FreeBSD operating system, a collection of pre-built packages, and the documentation. It also supports booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode.
|This image can be written to a USB memory stick in order to install machines capable of booting from USB drives. It also supports booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode. The only included package is the documentation package.
|This image can be written to a USB memory
stick in order to install machines capable of
booting from USB drives. Similar to the
bootonly.iso image, it does
not contain the distribution sets on the medium
itself, but does support network-based
installations (for example, via ftp).
|This CD image contains the base FreeBSD operating system and the documentation package but no other packages.
|A CD image with as many third-party packages
as would fit on the disc. This image is not
available for
FreeBSD 9.
|Another CD image with as many third-party
packages as would fit on the disc. This image is
not available for
FreeBSD 9.
|This CD image contains support for booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode but does not support doing an install from the CD itself.
When performing a CD installation, download either
bootonly ISO image or
disc1. Do not download both, since
disc1 contains everything that the
bootonly ISO image contains.
Use the
bootonly ISO to perform a
network install over the Internet. Additional software
can be installed as needed using the Ports Collection as
described in Chapter 5, Installing Applications: Packages and Ports.
dvd1 to install FreeBSD and a
selection of third-party packages from the disc.
Burn the Media
Next, write the downloaded image(s) to disc. If using another FreeBSD system, refer to Section 18.5.2, "Burning a CD" for instructions.
If using another platform, use any burning utility that exists for that platform. The images are in the standard ISO format which most CD writing applications support.
To build a customized release of FreeBSD, refer to the Release Engineering Article.
FreeBSD discs are laid out in the same way as the FTP site. This makes it easy to create a local FTP site that can be used by other machines on a network to install FreeBSD.
On the FreeBSD computer that will host the FTP site, ensure that the CD/DVD is in the drive and mounted:
mount /cdrom
Create an account for anonymous FTP. Use vipw(8) to insert this line:
Ensure that the FTP service is enabled in
Anyone with network connectivity to the machine can now
chose a media type of FTP and type in
ftp:// after picking
"Other" in the FTP sites menu during the
If the boot media for the FTP clients is not precisely the same version as that provided by the local FTP site, sysinstall(8) will not complete the installation. To override this, go into the menu and change the distribution name to .
This approach is acceptable for a machine on the local network which is protected by a firewall. Offering anonymous FTP services to other machines over the Internet exposes the computer to increased security risks. It is strongly recommended to follow good security practices when providing services over the Internet.
To prepare for an installation from a Windows® partition,
copy the files from the distribution into a directory in the
root directory of the partition, such as
c:\freebsd. Since the directory
structure must be reproduced, it is recommended to use
robocopy when copying from a CD/DVD. For
example, to prepare for a minimal installation of FreeBSD:
md c:\freebsd
robocopy e:\bin c:\freebsd\bin\ /s
robocopy e:\manpages c:\freebsd\manpages\ /s
This example assumes that
C: has
enough free space and
E: is where the
CD/DVD is mounted.
Alternatively, download the distribution from ftp.FreeBSD.org. Each distribution is in its own directory; for example, the base distribution can be found in the 9.3/base/ directory.
Copy the distributions to install from a Windows®
partition to
c:\freebsd. Both the
base and
distributions are needed for the most minimal
There are three types of network installations available: Ethernet, PPP, and PLIP.
For the fastest possible network installation, use an Ethernet adapter. FreeBSD supports most common Ethernet cards. A list of supported cards is provided in the Hardware Notes for each release of FreeBSD. If using a supported PCMCIA Ethernet card, be sure that it is plugged in before the system is powered on as FreeBSD does not support hot insertion of PCMCIA cards during installation.
Make note of the system's IP address, subnet mask, hostname, default gateway address, and DNS server addresses if these values are statically assigned. If installing by FTP through a HTTP proxy, make note of the proxy's address. If you do not know these values, ask the system administrator or ISP before trying this type of installation.
If using a dialup modem, have the service provider's PPP information handy as it is needed early in the installation process.
If PAP or CHAP are used to connect to the
ISP without using a script, type
dial at the FreeBSD
ppp prompt. Otherwise, know how to
dial the ISP using the "AT
commands" specific to the modem, as the PPP dialer
provides only a simple terminal emulator. Refer to Section 27.2, "Configuring PPP" and
for further information. Logging can be directed to the
screen using
set log local ....
If a hard-wired connection to another FreeBSD machine is available, the installation can occur over a null-modem parallel port cable. The data rate over the parallel port is higher than what is typically possible over a serial line.
To perform an NFS installation, copy the needed FreeBSD distribution files to an NFS server and then point the installer's NFS media selection to it.
If the server supports only a "privileged
port", set the option
NFS Secure
in the menu so that the
installation can proceed.
If using a poor quality Ethernet card which suffers
from slow transfer rates, toggle the
NFS Slow flag to on.
In order for an NFS installation to
work, the server must support subdir mounts. For example,
if the FreeBSD 10.1 distribution lives on:
ziggy will have to allow the direct
mounting of
not just
/usr or
In FreeBSD, this is controlled by using
-alldirs in
/etc/exports. Other
NFS servers may have different
conventions. If the server is displaying
permission denied messages, it is
likely that this is not enabled properly.
This chapter covers the basic commands and functionality of the FreeBSD operating system. Much of this material is relevant for any UNIX®-like operating system. New FreeBSD users are encouraged to read through this chapter carefully.
After reading this chapter, you will know:
How to use and configure virtual consoles.
How to create and manage users and groups on FreeBSD.
How UNIX® file permissions and FreeBSD file flags work.
The default FreeBSD file system layout.
The FreeBSD disk organization.
How to mount and unmount file systems.
What processes, daemons, and signals are.
What a shell is, and how to change the default login environment.
How to use basic text editors.
What devices and device nodes are.
How to read manual pages for more information.
Unless FreeBSD has been configured to automatically start a graphical environment during startup, the system will boot into a command line login prompt, as seen in this example:
FreeBSD/amd64 (pc3.example.org) (ttyv0) login:
The first line contains some information about the system.
amd64 indicates that the system in this
example is running a 64-bit version of FreeBSD. The hostname is
pc3.example.org, and
ttyv0 indicates that this is the
"system console". The second line is the login
Since FreeBSD is a multiuser system, it needs some way to distinguish between different users. This is accomplished by requiring every user to log into the system before gaining access to the programs on the system. Every user has a unique name "username" and a personal "password".
To log into the system console, type the username that was configured during system installation, as described in Section 2.8.6, "Add Users", and press Enter. Then enter the password associated with the username and press Enter. The password is not echoed for security reasons.
Once the correct password is input, the message of the
day (MOTD) will be displayed followed
by a command prompt. Depending upon the shell that was
selected when the user was created, this prompt will be a
$, or
% character. The prompt indicates that
the user is now logged into the FreeBSD system console and ready
to try the available commands.
While the system console can be used to interact with the system, a user working from the command line at the keyboard of a FreeBSD system will typically instead log into a virtual console. This is because system messages are configured by default to display on the system console. These messages will appear over the command or file that the user is working on, making it difficult to concentrate on the work at hand.
By default, FreeBSD is configured to provide several virtual consoles for inputting commands. Each virtual console has its own login prompt and shell and it is easy to switch between virtual consoles. This essentially provides the command line equivalent of having several windows open at the same time in a graphical environment.
The key combinations
have been reserved by FreeBSD for switching between virtual
consoles. Use
to switch to the system console
to access the first virtual console
to access the second virtual console
ttyv2), and so on.
When switching from one console to the next, FreeBSD manages the screen output. The result is an illusion of having multiple virtual screens and keyboards that can be used to type commands for FreeBSD to run. The programs that are launched in one virtual console do not stop running when the user switches to a different virtual console.
Refer to syscons(4), atkbd(4), vidcontrol(1) and kbdcontrol(1) for a more technical description of the FreeBSD console and its keyboard drivers.
In FreeBSD, the number of available virtual consoles is
configured in this section of
# name getty type status comments # ttyv0 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" xterm on secure # Virtual terminals ttyv1 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" xterm on secure ttyv2 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" xterm on secure ttyv3 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" xterm on secure ttyv4 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" xterm on secure ttyv5 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" xterm on secure ttyv6 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" xterm on secure ttyv7 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" xterm on secure ttyv8 "/usr/X11R6/bin/xdm -nodaemon" xterm off secure
To disable a virtual console, put a comment symbol
#) at the beginning of the line
representing that virtual console. For example, to reduce the
number of available virtual consoles from eight to four, put a
# in front of the last four lines
representing virtual consoles
Do not comment out the line for the
system console
ttyv0. Note that the last
virtual console (
ttyv8) is used to access
the graphical environment if Xorg
has been installed and configured as described in
Chapter 6, The X Window System.
For a detailed description of every column in this file and the available options for the virtual consoles, refer to ttys(5).
The FreeBSD boot menu provides an option labelled as
"Boot Single User". If this option is selected,
the system will boot into a special mode known as
"single user mode". This mode is typically used
to repair a system that will not boot or to reset the
root password when
it is not known. While in single user mode, networking and
other virtual consoles are not available. However, full
root access to the
system is available, and by default, the
root password is not
needed. For these reasons, physical access to the keyboard is
needed to boot into this mode and determining who has physical
access to the keyboard is something to consider when securing
a FreeBSD system.
The settings which control single user mode are found in
this section of
# name getty type status comments # # If console is marked "insecure", then init will ask for the root password # when going to single-user mode. console none unknown off secure
By default, the status is set to
secure. This assumes that who has physical
access to the keyboard is either not important or it is
controlled by a physical security policy. If this setting is
changed to
insecure, the assumption is that
the environment itself is insecure because anyone can access
the keyboard. When this line is changed to
insecure, FreeBSD will prompt for the
root password when a
user selects to boot into single user mode.
Be careful when changing this setting to
insecure! If the
root password is
forgotten, booting into single user mode is still possible,
but may be difficult for someone who is not familiar with
the FreeBSD booting process.
The FreeBSD console default video mode may be adjusted to
1024x768, 1280x1024, or any other size supported by the
graphics chip and monitor. To use a different video mode
load the
VESA module:
kldload vesa
To determine which video modes are supported by the hardware, use vidcontrol(1). To get a list of supported video modes issue the following:
vidcontrol -i mode
The output of this command lists the video modes that are
supported by the hardware. To select a new video mode,
specify the mode using vidcontrol(1) as the
root user:
vidcontrol MODE_279
If the new video mode is acceptable, it can be permanently
set on boot by adding it to
FreeBSD allows multiple users to use the computer at the same time. While only one user can sit in front of the screen and use the keyboard at any one time, any number of users can log in to the system through the network. To use the system, each user should have their own user account.
This chapter describes:
The different types of user accounts on a FreeBSD system.
How to add, remove, and modify user accounts.
How to set limits to control the resources that users and groups are allowed to access.
How to create groups and add users as members of a group.
Since all access to the FreeBSD system is achieved using accounts and all processes are run by users, user and account management is important.
There are three main types of accounts: system accounts, user accounts, and the superuser account.
System accounts are used to run services such as DNS, mail, and web servers. The reason for this is security; if all services ran as the superuser, they could act without restriction.
Examples of system accounts are
news, and
nobody is the
generic unprivileged system account. However, the more
services that use
nobody, the more
files and processes that user will become associated with,
and hence the more privileged that user becomes.
User accounts are assigned to real people and are used to log in and use the system. Every person accessing the system should have a unique user account. This allows the administrator to find out who is doing what and prevents users from clobbering the settings of other users.
Each user can set up their own environment to accommodate their use of the system, by configuring their default shell, editor, key bindings, and language settings.
Every user account on a FreeBSD system has certain information associated with it:
The user name is typed at the
login: prompt. Each user must have
a unique user name. There are a number of rules for
creating valid user names which are documented in
passwd(5). It is recommended to use user names
that consist of eight or fewer, all lower case
characters in order to maintain backwards
compatibility with applications.
Each account has an associated password.
The User ID (UID) is a number used to uniquely identify the user to the FreeBSD system. Commands that allow a user name to be specified will first convert it to the UID. It is recommended to use a UID less than 65535, since higher values may cause compatibility issues with some software.
The Group ID (GID) is a number used to uniquely identify the primary group that the user belongs to. Groups are a mechanism for controlling access to resources based on a user's GID rather than their UID. This can significantly reduce the size of some configuration files and allows users to be members of more than one group. It is recommended to use a GID of 65535 or lower as higher GIDs may break some software.
Login classes are an extension to the group mechanism that provide additional flexibility when tailoring the system to different users. Login classes are discussed further in Section 14.13.1, "Configuring Login Classes".
By default, passwords do not expire. However, password expiration can be enabled on a per-user basis, forcing some or all users to change their passwords after a certain amount of time has elapsed.
By default, FreeBSD does not expire accounts. When creating accounts that need a limited lifespan, such as student accounts in a school, specify the account expiry date using pw(8). After the expiry time has elapsed, the account cannot be used to log in to the system, although the account's directories and files will remain.
The user name uniquely identifies the account to FreeBSD, but does not necessarily reflect the user's real name. Similar to a comment, this information can contain spaces, uppercase characters, and be more than 8 characters long.
The home directory is the full path to a directory
on the system. This is the user's starting directory
when the user logs in. A common convention is to put
all user home directories under
Each user stores their personal files and
subdirectories in their own home directory.
The shell provides the user's default environment for interacting with the system. There are many different kinds of shells and experienced users will have their own preferences, which can be reflected in their account settings.
The superuser account, usually called
root, is used to
manage the system with no limitations on privileges. For
this reason, it should not be used for day-to-day tasks like
sending and receiving mail, general exploration of the
system, or programming.
The superuser, unlike other user accounts, can operate without limits, and misuse of the superuser account may result in spectacular disasters. User accounts are unable to destroy the operating system by mistake, so it is recommended to login as a user account and to only become the superuser when a command requires extra privilege.
Always double and triple-check any commands issued as the superuser, since an extra space or missing character can mean irreparable data loss.
There are several ways to gain superuser privilege.
While one can log in as
root, this is
highly discouraged.
Instead, use su(1) to become the superuser. If
- is specified when running this command,
the user will also inherit the root user's environment. The
user running this command must be in the
wheel group or
else the command will fail. The user must also know the
password for the
root user
In this example, the user only becomes superuser in
order to run
make install as this step
requires superuser privilege. Once the command completes,
the user types
exit to leave the
superuser account and return to the privilege of their user
su -Password:
make install
The built-in su(1) framework works well for single systems or small networks with just one system administrator. An alternative is to install the security/sudo package or port. This software provides activity logging and allows the administrator to configure which users can run which commands as the superuser.
FreeBSD provides a variety of different commands to manage user accounts. The most common commands are summarized in Table 4.1, "Utilities for Managing User Accounts", followed by some examples of their usage. See the manual page for each utility for more details and usage examples.
|The recommended command-line application for adding new users.
|The recommended command-line application for removing users.
|A flexible tool for changing user database information.
|The command-line tool to change user passwords.
|A powerful and flexible tool for modifying all aspects of user accounts.
The recommended program for adding new users is
adduser(8). When a new user is added, this program
automatically updates
/etc/passwd and
/etc/group. It also creates a home
directory for the new user, copies in the default
configuration files from
/usr/share/skel, and can optionally
mail the new user a welcome message. This utility must be
run as the superuser.
The adduser(8) utility is interactive and walks
through the steps for creating a new user account. As seen
in Example 4.2, "Adding a User on FreeBSD", either input
the required information or press Return
to accept the default value shown in square brackets.
In this example, the user has been invited into the
wheel group,
allowing them to become the superuser with su(1).
When finished, the utility will prompt to either
create another user or to exit.
jruFull name:
J. Random UserUid (Leave empty for default): Login group [jru]: Login group is jru. Invite jru into other groups? []:
wheelLogin class [default]: Shell (sh csh tcsh zsh nologin) [sh]:
zshHome directory [/home/jru]: Home directory permissions (Leave empty for default): Use password-based authentication? [yes]: Use an empty password? (yes/no) [no]: Use a random password? (yes/no) [no]: Enter password: Enter password again: Lock out the account after creation? [no]: Username : jru Password : **** Full Name : J. Random User Uid : 1001 Class : Groups : jru wheel Home : /home/jru Shell : /usr/local/bin/zsh Locked : no OK? (yes/no):
yesadduser: INFO: Successfully added (jru) to the user database. Add another user? (yes/no):
Since the password is not echoed when typed, be careful to not mistype the password when creating the user account.
To completely remove a user from the system, run rmuser(8) as the superuser. This command performs the following steps:
Removes the user's crontab(1) entry, if one exists.
Removes any at(1) jobs belonging to the user.
Kills all processes owned by the user.
Removes the user from the system's local password file.
Optionally removes the user's home directory, if it is owned by the user.
Removes the incoming mail files belonging to the
user from
Removes all files owned by the user from temporary
file storage areas such as
Finally, removes the username from all groups to
which it belongs in
/etc/group. If
a group becomes empty and the group name is the same as
the username, the group is removed. This complements
the per-user unique groups created by
rmuser(8) cannot be used to remove superuser accounts since that is almost always an indication of massive destruction.
By default, an interactive mode is used, as shown in the following example.
rmuser Interactive Account
rmuser jruMatching password entry: jru:*:1001:1001::0:0:J. Random User:/home/jru:/usr/local/bin/zsh Is this the entry you wish to remove?
yRemove user's home directory (/home/jru)?
yRemoving user (jru): mailspool home passwd.
Any user can use chpass(1) to change their default shell and personal information associated with their user account. The superuser can use this utility to change additional account information for any user.
When passed no options, aside from an optional username, chpass(1) displays an editor containing user information. When the user exits from the editor, the user database is updated with the new information.
This utility will prompt for the user's password when exiting the editor, unless the utility is run as the superuser.
In Example 4.4, "Using
chpass as
Superuser", the
superuser has typed
chpass jru and is
now viewing the fields that can be changed for this user.
jru runs this
command instead, only the last six fields will be displayed
and available for editing. This is shown in
Example 4.5, "Using
chpass as Regular
chpass as
#Changing user database information for jru. Login: jru Password: * Uid [#]: 1001 Gid [# or name]: 1001 Change [month day year]: Expire [month day year]: Class: Home directory: /home/jru Shell: /usr/local/bin/zsh Full Name: J. Random User Office Location: Office Phone: Home Phone: Other information:
chpass as Regular
#Changing user database information for jru. Shell: /usr/local/bin/zsh Full Name: J. Random User Office Location: Office Phone: Home Phone: Other information:
The commands chfn(1) and chsh(1) are links
to chpass(1), as are ypchpass(1),
ypchfn(1), and ypchsh(1). Since
NIS support is automatic, specifying
yp before the command is not
necessary. How to configure NIS is covered in Chapter 29, Network Servers.
Any user can easily change their password using passwd(1). To prevent accidental or unauthorized changes, this command will prompt for the user's original password before a new password can be set:
passwdChanging local password for jru. Old password: New password: Retype new password: passwd: updating the database... passwd: done
The superuser can change any user's password by specifying the username when running passwd(1). When this utility is run as the superuser, it will not prompt for the user's current password. This allows the password to be changed when a user cannot remember the original password.
passwd jruChanging local password for jru. New password: Retype new password: passwd: updating the database... passwd: done
As with chpass(1), yppasswd(1) is a link to passwd(1), so NIS works with either command.
The pw(8) utility can create, remove, modify, and display users and groups. It functions as a front end to the system user and group files. pw(8) has a very powerful set of command line options that make it suitable for use in shell scripts, but new users may find it more complicated than the other commands presented in this section.
A group is a list of users. A group is identified by its group name and GID. In FreeBSD, the kernel uses the UID of a process, and the list of groups it belongs to, to determine what the process is allowed to do. Most of the time, the GID of a user or process usually means the first group in the list.
The group name to GID mapping is listed
/etc/group. This is a plain text file
with four colon-delimited fields. The first field is the
group name, the second is the encrypted password, the third
the GID, and the fourth the comma-delimited
list of members. For a more complete description of the
syntax, refer to group(5).
The superuser can modify
using a text editor. Alternatively, pw(8) can be used to
add and edit groups. For example, to add a group called
teamtwo and then
confirm that it exists:
pw groupadd teamtwo
pw groupshow teamtwoteamtwo:*:1100:
In this example,
1100 is the
GID of
teamtwo. Right
teamtwo has no
members. This command will add
jru as a member of
pw groupmod teamtwo -M jru
pw groupshow teamtwoteamtwo:*:1100:jru
The argument to
-M is a comma-delimited
list of users to be added to a new (empty) group or to replace
the members of an existing group. To the user, this group
membership is different from (and in addition to) the user's
primary group listed in the password file. This means that
the user will not show up as a member when using
groupshow with pw(8), but will show up
when the information is queried via id(1) or a similar
tool. When pw(8) is used to add a user to a group, it
only manipulates
/etc/group and does not
attempt to read additional data from
pw groupmod teamtwo -m db
pw groupshow teamtwoteamtwo:*:1100:jru,db
In this example, the argument to
-m is a
comma-delimited list of users who are to be added to the
group. Unlike the previous example, these users are appended
to the group and do not replace existing users in the
id jruuid=1001(jru) gid=1001(jru) groups=1001(jru), 1100(teamtwo)
In this example,
jru is a member of
the groups
jru and
For more information about this command and the format of
/etc/group, refer to pw(8) and
In FreeBSD, every file and directory has an associated set of permissions and several utilities are available for viewing and modifying these permissions. Understanding how permissions work is necessary to make sure that users are able to access the files that they need and are unable to improperly access the files used by the operating system or owned by other users.
This section discusses the traditional UNIX® permissions used in FreeBSD. For finer grained file system access control, refer to Section 14.9, "Access Control Lists".
In UNIX®, basic permissions are assigned using
three types of access: read, write, and execute. These access
types are used to determine file access to the file's owner,
group, and others (everyone else). The read, write, and execute
permissions can be represented as the letters
w, and
x. They can also be represented as binary
numbers as each permission is either on or off
0). When represented as a number, the
order is always read as
rwx, where
r has an on value of
w has an on value of
x has an on value of
Table 4.1 summarizes the possible numeric and alphabetic
possibilities. When reading the "Directory
Listing" column, a
- is used to
represent a permission that is set to off.
|Directory Listing
|No read, no write, no execute
|No read, no write, execute
|No read, write, no execute
|No read, write, execute
|Read, no write, no execute
|Read, no write, execute
|Read, write, no execute
|Read, write, execute
Use the
-l argument to ls(1) to view a
long directory listing that includes a column of information
about a file's permissions for the owner, group, and everyone
else. For example, a
ls -l in an arbitrary
directory may show:
ls -ltotal 530 -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 512 Sep 5 12:31 myfile -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 512 Sep 5 12:31 otherfile -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 7680 Sep 5 12:31 email.txt
The first (leftmost) character in the first column indicates
whether this file is a regular file, a directory, a special
character device, a socket, or any other special pseudo-file
device. In this example, the
- indicates a
regular file. The next three characters,
in this example, give the permissions for the owner of the file.
The next three characters,
r--, give the
permissions for the group that the file belongs to. The final
three characters,
r--, give the permissions
for the rest of the world. A dash means that the permission is
turned off. In this example, the permissions are set so the
owner can read and write to the file, the group can read the
file, and the rest of the world can only read the file.
According to the table above, the permissions for this file
would be
644, where each digit represents the
three parts of the file's permission.
How does the system control permissions on devices? FreeBSD
treats most hardware devices as a file that programs can open,
read, and write data to. These special device files are
stored in
Directories are also treated as files. They have read, write, and execute permissions. The executable bit for a directory has a slightly different meaning than that of files. When a directory is marked executable, it means it is possible to change into that directory using cd(1). This also means that it is possible to access the files within that directory, subject to the permissions on the files themselves.
In order to perform a directory listing, the read permission must be set on the directory. In order to delete a file that one knows the name of, it is necessary to have write and execute permissions to the directory containing the file.
There are more permission bits, but they are primarily used in special circumstances such as setuid binaries and sticky directories. For more information on file permissions and how to set them, refer to chmod(1).
Symbolic permissions use characters instead of octal values to assign permissions to files or directories. Symbolic permissions use the syntax of (who) (action) (permissions), where the following values are available:
|Group owner
|All ("world")
|Adding permissions
|Removing permissions
|Explicitly set permissions
|Sticky bit
|Set UID or GID
These values are used with chmod(1), but with
letters instead of numbers. For example, the following
command would block other users from accessing
chmod go= FILE
A comma separated list can be provided when more than one
set of changes to a file must be made. For example, the
following command removes the group and
"world" write permission on
FILE, and adds the execute
permissions for everyone:
chmod go-w,a+x
In addition to file permissions, FreeBSD supports the use of
"file flags". These flags add an additional
level of security and control over files, but not directories.
With file flags, even
root can be
prevented from removing or altering files.
File flags are modified using chflags(1). For
example, to enable the system undeletable flag on the file
file1, issue the following
chflags sunlink file1
To disable the system undeletable flag, put a
"no" in front of the
chflags nosunlink file1
To view the flags of a file, use
-lo with
ls -lo file1
-rw-r--r-- 1 trhodes trhodes sunlnk 0 Mar 1 05:54 file1
Several file flags may only be added or removed by the
root user. In other
cases, the file owner may set its file flags. Refer to
chflags(1) and chflags(2) for more
Other than the permissions already discussed, there are
three other specific settings that all administrators should
know about. They are the
setgid, and
These settings are important for some UNIX® operations as they provide functionality not normally granted to normal users. To understand them, the difference between the real user ID and effective user ID must be noted.
The real user ID is the UID who owns
or starts the process. The effective UID
is the user ID the process runs as. As an example,
passwd(1) runs with the real user ID when a user changes
their password. However, in order to update the password
database, the command runs as the effective ID of the
root user. This
allows users to change their passwords without seeing a
Permission Denied error.
The setuid permission may be set by prefixing a permission set with the number four (4) as shown in the following example:
chmod 4755 suidexample.sh
The permissions on
now look like the following:
-rwsr-xr-x 1 trhodes trhodes 63 Aug 29 06:36 suidexample.sh
Note that a
s is now part of the
permission set designated for the file owner, replacing the
executable bit. This allows utilities which need elevated
permissions, such as passwd(1).
nosuid mount(8) option will
cause such binaries to silently fail without alerting
the user. That option is not completely reliable as a
nosuid wrapper may be able to circumvent
To view this in real time, open two terminals. On
one, type
passwd as a normal user.
While it waits for a new password, check the process
table and look at the user information for
In terminal A:
Changing local password for trhodes Old Password:
In terminal B:
ps aux | grep passwd
trhodes 5232 0.0 0.2 3420 1608 0 R+ 2:10AM 0:00.00 grep passwd root 5211 0.0 0.2 3620 1724 2 I+ 2:09AM 0:00.01 passwd
Although passwd(1) is run as a normal user, it is
using the effective UID of
setgid permission performs the
same function as the
setuid permission;
except that it alters the group settings. When an application
or utility executes with this setting, it will be granted the
permissions based on the group that owns the file, not the
user who started the process.
To set the
setgid permission on a
file, provide chmod(1) with a leading two (2):
chmod 2755 sgidexample.sh
In the following listing, notice that the
s is now in the field designated for the
group permission settings:
-rwxr-sr-x 1 trhodes trhodes 44 Aug 31 01:49 sgidexample.sh
In these examples, even though the shell script in question is an executable file, it will not run with a different EUID or effective user ID. This is because shell scripts may not access the setuid(2) system calls.
setuid and
setgid permission bits may lower system
security, by allowing for elevated permissions. The third
special permission, the
sticky bit, can
strengthen the security of a system.
When the
sticky bit is set on a
directory, it allows file deletion only by the file owner.
This is useful to prevent file deletion in public directories,
such as
/tmp, by users
who do not own the file. To utilize this permission, prefix
the permission set with a one (1):
chmod 1777 /tmp
sticky bit permission will display
as a
t at the very end of the permission
ls -al / | grep tmp
drwxrwxrwt 10 root wheel 512 Aug 31 01:49 tmp
The FreeBSD directory hierarchy is fundamental to obtaining an overall understanding of the system. The most important directory is root or, "/". This directory is the first one mounted at boot time and it contains the base system necessary to prepare the operating system for multi-user operation. The root directory also contains mount points for other file systems that are mounted during the transition to multi-user operation.
A mount point is a directory where additional file systems
can be grafted onto a parent file system (usually the root file
system). This is further described in
Section 4.6, "Disk Organization". Standard mount points
/mnt/, and
/cdrom/. These directories are usually
referenced to entries in
/etc/fstab. This
file is a table of various file systems and mount points and is
read by the system. Most of the file systems in
/etc/fstab are mounted automatically at
boot time from the script rc(8) unless their entry includes
noauto. Details can be found in
Section 4.7.1, "The
fstab File".
A complete description of the file system hierarchy is available in hier(7). The following table provides a brief overview of the most common directories.
|Root directory of the file system.
|User utilities fundamental to both single-user and multi-user environments.
|Programs and configuration files used during operating system bootstrap.
|Default boot configuration files. Refer to loader.conf(5) for details.
|Device nodes. Refer to intro(4) for details.
|System configuration files and scripts.
|Default system configuration files. Refer to rc(8) for details.
|Configuration files for mail transport agents such as sendmail(8).
|named(8) configuration files.
|Scripts that run daily, weekly, and monthly, via cron(8). Refer to periodic(8) for details.
|ppp(8) configuration files.
|Empty directory commonly used by system administrators as a temporary mount point.
|Process file system. Refer to procfs(5), mount_procfs(8) for details.
|Statically linked programs for emergency recovery as described in rescue(8).
|Home directory for the
|System programs and administration utilities fundamental to both single-user and multi-user environments.
|Temporary files which are usually
not preserved across a system
reboot. A memory-based file system is often mounted
/tmp. This can be automated
using the tmpmfs-related variables of rc.conf(5)
or with an entry in
refer to mdmfs(8) for details.
|The majority of user utilities and applications.
|Common utilities, programming tools, and applications.
|Standard C include files.
|Archive libraries.
|Miscellaneous utility data files.
|System daemons and system utilities executed by other programs.
|Local executables and libraries. Also used as
the default destination for the FreeBSD ports framework.
/usr/local, the
general layout sketched out by hier(7) for
/usr should be
used. Exceptions are the man directory, which is
directly under
/usr/local rather than
/usr/local/share, and
the ports documentation is in
|Architecture-specific target tree produced by
building the
|The FreeBSD Ports Collection (optional).
|System daemons and system utilities executed by users.
|Architecture-independent files.
|BSD and/or local source files.
|Multi-purpose log, temporary, transient, and
spool files. A memory-based file system is sometimes
mounted at
/var. This can
be automated using the varmfs-related variables in
rc.conf(5) or with an entry in
/etc/fstab; refer to
mdmfs(8) for details.
|Miscellaneous system log files.
|User mailbox files.
|Miscellaneous printer and mail system spooling directories.
|Temporary files which are usually preserved
across a system reboot, unless
/var is a
memory-based file system.
|NIS maps.
The smallest unit of organization that FreeBSD uses to find
files is the filename. Filenames are case-sensitive, which
means that
readme.txt and
README.TXT are two separate files. FreeBSD
does not use the extension of a file to determine whether the
file is a program, document, or some other form of data.
Files are stored in directories. A directory may contain no files, or it may contain many hundreds of files. A directory can also contain other directories, allowing a hierarchy of directories within one another in order to organize data.
Files and directories are referenced by giving the file or
directory name, followed by a forward slash,
/, followed by any other directory names that
are necessary. For example, if the directory
foo contains a directory
bar which contains the
readme.txt, the full name, or
path, to the file is
foo/bar/readme.txt. Note that this is
different from Windows® which uses
\ to
separate file and directory names. FreeBSD does not use drive
letters, or other drive names in the path. For example, one
would not type
c:\foo\bar\readme.txt on
Directories and files are stored in a file system. Each
file system contains exactly one directory at the very top
level, called the root directory for that
file system. This root directory can contain other directories.
One file system is designated the
root file system or
Every other file system is mounted under
the root file system. No matter how many disks are on the FreeBSD
system, every directory appears to be part of the same
Consider three file systems, called
B, and
C. Each file
system has one root directory, which contains two other
directories, called
(and likewise
B2 and
A the root file system. If
ls(1) is used to view the contents of this directory,
it will show two subdirectories,
A1 and
A2. The directory tree looks like
A file system must be mounted on to a directory in another
file system. When mounting file system
on to the directory
A1, the root directory
B replaces
A1, and
the directories in
B appear
Any files that are in the
B1 or
B2 directories can be reached with the path
/A1/B1 or
/A1/B2 as necessary. Any
files that were in
have been temporarily hidden. They will reappear if
B is unmounted from
B had been mounted on
A2 then the diagram would look like
and the paths would be
/A2/B1 and
File systems can be mounted on top of one another.
Continuing the last example, the
C file
system could be mounted on top of the
directory in the
B file system, leading to
this arrangement:
C could be mounted directly on to the
A file system, under the
A1 directory:
It is entirely possible to have one large root file system, and not need to create any others. There are some drawbacks to this approach, and one advantage.
Different file systems can have different
mount options. For example, the root
file system can be mounted read-only, making it impossible
for users to inadvertently delete or edit a critical file.
Separating user-writable file systems, such as
/home, from other
file systems allows them to be mounted
nosuid. This option prevents the
suid/guid bits
on executables stored on the file system from taking effect,
possibly improving security.
FreeBSD automatically optimizes the layout of files on a file system, depending on how the file system is being used. So a file system that contains many small files that are written frequently will have a different optimization to one that contains fewer, larger files. By having one big file system this optimization breaks down.
FreeBSD's file systems are robust if power is lost. However, a power loss at a critical point could still damage the structure of the file system. By splitting data over multiple file systems it is more likely that the system will still come up, making it easier to restore from backup as necessary.
File systems are a fixed size. If you create a file system when you install FreeBSD and give it a specific size, you may later discover that you need to make the partition bigger. This is not easily accomplished without backing up, recreating the file system with the new size, and then restoring the backed up data.
FreeBSD features the growfs(8) command, which makes it possible to increase the size of file system on the fly, removing this limitation.
File systems are contained in partitions. This does not
have the same meaning as the common usage of the term partition
(for example, MS-DOS® partition), because of FreeBSD's UNIX®
heritage. Each partition is identified by a letter from
a through to
h. Each
partition can contain only one file system, which means that
file systems are often described by either their typical mount
point in the file system hierarchy, or the letter of the
partition they are contained in.
FreeBSD also uses disk space for swap space to provide virtual memory. This allows your computer to behave as though it has much more memory than it actually does. When FreeBSD runs out of memory, it moves some of the data that is not currently being used to the swap space, and moves it back in (moving something else out) when it needs it.
Some partitions have certain conventions associated with them.
|Normally contains the root file system.
|Normally contains swap space.
|Normally the same size as the enclosing slice.
This allows utilities that need to work on the entire
slice, such as a bad block scanner, to work on the
c partition. A file system would not
normally be created on this partition.
d used to have a
special meaning associated with it, although that is now
gone and
d may work as any normal
Disks in FreeBSD are divided into slices, referred to in Windows® as partitions, which are numbered from 1 to 4. These are then divided into partitions, which contain file systems, and are labeled using letters.
Slice numbers follow the device name, prefixed with an
s, starting at 1. So
"da0s1" is the first slice on
the first SCSI drive. There can only be four physical slices on
a disk, but there can be logical slices inside physical slices
of the appropriate type. These extended slices are numbered
starting at 5, so "ada0s5" is
the first extended slice on the first SATA disk. These devices
are used by file systems that expect to occupy a slice.
Slices, "dangerously dedicated" physical
drives, and other drives contain
partitions, which are represented as
letters from
a to
h. This
letter is appended to the device name, so
"da0a" is the
a partition on the first
da drive, which is
"dangerously dedicated".
"ada1s3e" is the fifth
partition in the third slice of the second SATA disk
Finally, each disk on the system is identified. A disk name starts with a code that indicates the type of disk, and then a number, indicating which disk it is. Unlike slices, disk numbering starts at 0. Common codes are listed in Table 4.3, "Disk Device Names".
When referring to a partition, include the disk name,
s, the slice number, and then the partition
letter. Examples are shown in
Example 4.12, "Sample Disk, Slice, and Partition Names".
Example 4.13, "Conceptual Model of a Disk" shows a conceptual model of a disk layout.
When installing FreeBSD, configure the disk slices, create partitions within the slice to be used for FreeBSD, create a file system or swap space in each partition, and decide where each file system will be mounted.
|Drive Type
|Drive Device Name
|SATA and IDE hard drives
ada or
|SCSI hard drives and USB storage devices
|SATA and IDE CD-ROM drives
cd or
|SCSI CD-ROM drives
|Floppy drives
|Assorted non-standard CD-ROM drives
mcd for Mitsumi
CD-ROM and
scd for
Sony CD-ROM devices
|SCSI tape drives
|IDE tape drives
|RAID drives
|Examples include
aacd for
Adaptec® AdvancedRAID,
mlxd and
mlyd for Mylex®,
amrd for AMI MegaRAID®,
idad for Compaq Smart RAID,
twed for 3ware® RAID.
|The first partition (
a) on the
first slice (
s1) on the first IDE
disk (
|The fifth partition (
e) on the
second slice (
s2) on the second
SCSI disk (
This diagram shows FreeBSD's view of the first IDE disk
attached to the system. Assume that the disk is 4 GB in
size, and contains two 2 GB slices (MS-DOS® partitions).
The first slice contains a MS-DOS® disk,
C:, and the second slice contains a
FreeBSD installation. This example FreeBSD installation has three
data partitions, and a swap partition.
The three partitions will each hold a file system.
a will be used for the root file
e for the
/var/ directory
hierarchy, and
f for the
/usr/ directory
The file system is best visualized as a tree, rooted, as it
were, at
/usr, and the other
directories in the root directory are branches, which may have
their own branches, such as
/usr/local, and so
There are various reasons to house some of these
directories on separate file systems.
/var contains the
spool/, and various types
of temporary files, and as such, may get filled up. Filling up
the root file system is not a good idea, so splitting
/var from
/ is often
Another common reason to contain certain directory trees on other file systems is if they are to be housed on separate physical disks, or are separate virtual disks, such as Network File System mounts, described in Section 29.3, "Network File System (NFS)", or CDROM drives.
During the boot process (Chapter 13, The FreeBSD Booting Process), file
systems listed in
/etc/fstab are
automatically mounted except for the entries containing
noauto. This file contains entries in the
following format:
An existing device name as explained in Table 4.3, "Disk Device Names".
An existing directory on which to mount the file system.
The file system type to pass to mount(8). The
default FreeBSD file system is
rw for read-write file
systems, or
ro for read-only file
systems, followed by any other options that may be
needed. A common option is
noauto for
file systems not normally mounted during the boot
sequence. Other options are listed in
Used by dump(8) to determine which file systems require dumping. If the field is missing, a value of zero is assumed.
Determines the order in which file systems should be
checked. File systems that should be skipped should
have their
passno set to zero. The
root file system needs to be checked before everything
else and should have its
passno set
to one. The other file systems should be set to
values greater than one. If more than one file system
has the same
passno, fsck(8)
will attempt to check file systems in parallel if
Refer to fstab(5) for more information on the format
/etc/fstab and its options.
File systems are mounted using mount(8). The most basic syntax is as follows:
This command provides many options which are described in mount(8), The most commonly used options include:
Mount all the file systems listed in
/etc/fstab, except those marked as
"noauto", excluded by the
-t flag, or those that are already
Do everything except for the actual mount system
call. This option is useful in conjunction with the
-v flag to determine what mount(8)
is actually trying to do.
Force the mount of an unclean file system (dangerous), or the revocation of write access when downgrading a file system's mount status from read-write to read-only.
Mount the file system read-only. This is identical
to using
-o ro.
Mount the specified file system type or mount only
file systems of the given type, if
is included. "ufs" is the default file
system type.
Update mount options on the file system.
Be verbose.
Mount the file system read-write.
The following options can be passed to
as a comma-separated list:
Do not interpret setuid or setgid flags on the file system. This is also a useful security option.
To unmount a file system use umount(8). This command
takes one parameter which can be a mountpoint, device name,
-a or
All forms take
-f to force unmounting,
-v for verbosity. Be warned that
-f is not generally a good idea as it might
crash the computer or damage data on the file system.
To unmount all mounted file systems, or just the file
system types listed after
-t, use
-a or
-A. Note that
-A does not attempt to unmount the root file
FreeBSD is a multi-tasking operating system. Each program running at any one time is called a process. Every running command starts at least one new process and there are a number of system processes that are run by FreeBSD.
Each process is uniquely identified by a number called a
process ID (PID).
Similar to files, each process has one owner and group, and
the owner and group permissions are used to determine which
files and devices the process can open. Most processes also
have a parent process that started them. For example, the
shell is a process, and any command started in the shell is a
process which has the shell as its parent process. The
exception is a special process called init(8) which is
always the first process to start at boot time and which always
has a PID of
Some programs are not designed to be run with continuous user input and disconnect from the terminal at the first opportunity. For example, a web server responds to web requests, rather than user input. Mail servers are another example of this type of application. These types of programs are known as daemons. The term daemon comes from Greek mythology and represents an entity that is neither good nor evil, and which invisibly performs useful tasks. This is why the BSD mascot is the cheerful-looking daemon with sneakers and a pitchfork.
There is a convention to name programs that normally run as
daemons with a trailing "d". For example,
BIND is the Berkeley Internet Name
Domain, but the actual program that executes is
named. The
Apache web server program is
httpd and the line printer spooling daemon
lpd. This is only a naming convention.
For example, the main mail daemon for the
Sendmail application is
sendmail, and not
To see the processes running on the system, use ps(1) or top(1). To display a static list of the currently running processes, their PIDs, how much memory they are using, and the command they were started with, use ps(1). To display all the running processes and update the display every few seconds in order to interactively see what the computer is doing, use top(1).
By default, ps(1) only shows the commands that are running and owned by the user. For example:
psPID TT STAT TIME COMMAND 8203 0 Ss 0:00.59 /bin/csh 8895 0 R+ 0:00.00 ps
The output from ps(1) is organized into a number of
columns. The
PID column displays the
process ID. PIDs are assigned starting at
1, go up to 99999, then wrap around back to the beginning.
However, a PID is not reassigned if it is
already in use. The
TT column shows the
tty the program is running on and
shows the program's state.
TIME is the
amount of time the program has been running on the CPU. This
is usually not the elapsed time since the program was started,
as most programs spend a lot of time waiting for things to
happen before they need to spend time on the CPU. Finally,
COMMAND is the command that was used to
start the program.
A number of different options are available to change the
information that is displayed. One of the most useful sets is
auxww, where
a displays
information about all the running processes of all users,
u displays the username and memory usage of
the process' owner,
x displays
information about daemon processes, and
causes ps(1) to display the full command line for each
process, rather than truncating it once it gets too long to
fit on the screen.
The output from top(1) is similar:
toplast pid: 9609; load averages: 0.56, 0.45, 0.36 up 0+00:20:03 10:21:46 107 processes: 2 running, 104 sleeping, 1 zombie CPU: 6.2% user, 0.1% nice, 8.2% system, 0.4% interrupt, 85.1% idle Mem: 541M Active, 450M Inact, 1333M Wired, 4064K Cache, 1498M Free ARC: 992M Total, 377M MFU, 589M MRU, 250K Anon, 5280K Header, 21M Other Swap: 2048M Total, 2048M Free PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND 557 root 1 -21 r31 136M 42296K select 0 2:20 9.96% Xorg 8198 dru 2 52 0 449M 82736K select 3 0:08 5.96% kdeinit4 8311 dru 27 30 0 1150M 187M uwait 1 1:37 0.98% firefox 431 root 1 20 0 14268K 1728K select 0 0:06 0.98% moused 9551 dru 1 21 0 16600K 2660K CPU3 3 0:01 0.98% top 2357 dru 4 37 0 718M 141M select 0 0:21 0.00% kdeinit4 8705 dru 4 35 0 480M 98M select 2 0:20 0.00% kdeinit4 8076 dru 6 20 0 552M 113M uwait 0 0:12 0.00% soffice.bin 2623 root 1 30 10 12088K 1636K select 3 0:09 0.00% powerd 2338 dru 1 20 0 440M 84532K select 1 0:06 0.00% kwin 1427 dru 5 22 0 605M 86412K select 1 0:05 0.00% kdeinit4
The output is split into two sections. The header (the
first five or six lines) shows the PID of
the last process to run, the system load averages (which are a
measure of how busy the system is), the system uptime (time
since the last reboot) and the current time. The other
figures in the header relate to how many processes are
running, how much memory and swap space has been used, and how
much time the system is spending in different CPU states. If
the ZFS file system module has been loaded,
ARC line indicates how much data was
read from the memory cache instead of from disk.
Below the header is a series of columns containing similar information to the output from ps(1), such as the PID, username, amount of CPU time, and the command that started the process. By default, top(1) also displays the amount of memory space taken by the process. This is split into two columns: one for total size and one for resident size. Total size is how much memory the application has needed and the resident size is how much it is actually using now.
top(1) automatically updates the display every two
seconds. A different interval can be specified with
One way to communicate with any running process or daemon
is to send a signal using kill(1).
There are a number of different signals; some have a specific
meaning while others are described in the application's
documentation. A user can only send a signal to a process
they own and sending a signal to someone else's process will
result in a permission denied error. The exception is the
root user, who can
send signals to anyone's processes.
The operating system can also send a signal to a process.
If an application is badly written and tries to access memory
that it is not supposed to, FreeBSD will send the process the
"Segmentation Violation" signal
SIGSEGV). If an application has been
written to use the alarm(3) system call to be alerted
after a period of time has elapsed, it will be sent the
"Alarm" signal
Two signals can be used to stop a process:
SIGTERM and
SIGTERM is the polite way to kill a process
as the process can read the signal, close any log files it may
have open, and attempt to finish what it is doing before
shutting down. In some cases, a process may ignore
SIGTERM if it is in the middle of some task
that can not be interrupted.
SIGKILL can not be ignored by a
process. Sending a
SIGKILL to a
process will usually stop that process there and then.
Other commonly used signals are
SIGUSR1, and
Since these are general purpose signals, different
applications will respond differently.
For example, after changing a web server's configuration
file, the web server needs to be told to re-read its
configuration. Restarting
httpd would
result in a brief outage period on the web server. Instead,
send the daemon the
SIGHUP signal. Be
aware that different daemons will have different behavior, so
refer to the documentation for the daemon to determine if
SIGHUP will achieve the desired
This example shows how to send a signal to
inetd(8). The inetd(8) configuration file is
/etc/inetd.conf, and inetd(8) will
re-read this configuration file when it is sent a
Find the PID of the process to send the signal to using pgrep(1). In this example, the PID for inetd(8) is 198:
pgrep -l inetd198 inetd -wW
Use kill(1) to send the signal. Because
inetd(8) is owned by
root, use
su(1) to become
/bin/kill -s HUP 198
Like most UNIX® commands, kill(1) will not print
any output if it is successful. If a signal is sent to a
process not owned by that user, the message
PID: Operation
not permitted will be displayed. Mistyping
the PID will either send the signal to
the wrong process, which could have negative results, or
will send the signal to a PID that is
not currently in use, resulting in the error
PID: No such
Many shells provide
kill as a
built in command, meaning that the shell will send the
signal directly, rather than running
/bin/kill. Be aware that different
shells have a different syntax for specifying the name
of the signal to send. Rather than try to learn all of
them, it can be simpler to specify
When sending other signals, substitute
TERM or
KILL with the
name of the signal.
A shell provides a command line
interface for interacting with the operating system. A shell
receives commands from the input channel and executes them.
Many shells provide built in functions to help with everyday
tasks such as file management, file globbing, command line
editing, command macros, and environment variables. FreeBSD comes
with several shells, including the Bourne shell (sh(1)) and
the extended C shell (tcsh(1)). Other shells are available
from the FreeBSD Ports Collection, such as
zsh and
The shell that is used is really a matter of taste. A C
programmer might feel more comfortable with a C-like shell such
as tcsh(1). A Linux® user might prefer
bash. Each shell has unique properties that
may or may not work with a user's preferred working environment,
which is why there is a choice of which shell to use.
One common shell feature is filename completion. After a
user types the first few letters of a command or filename and
presses Tab, the shell completes the rest of
the command or filename. Consider two files called
foobar and
To delete
foobar, the user might type
rm foo and press Tab to
complete the filename.
But the shell only shows
rm foo. It was
unable to complete the filename because both
foobar and
start with
foo. Some shells sound a beep or
show all the choices if more than one name matches. The user
must then type more characters to identify the desired filename.
Typing a
t and pressing Tab
again is enough to let the shell determine which filename is
desired and fill in the rest.
Another feature of the shell is the use of environment variables. Environment variables are a variable/key pair stored in the shell's environment. This environment can be read by any program invoked by the shell, and thus contains a lot of program configuration. Table 4.4, "Common Environment Variables" provides a list of common environment variables and their meanings. Note that the names of environment variables are always in uppercase.
|Current logged in user's name.
|Colon-separated list of directories to search for binaries.
|Network name of the Xorg display to connect to, if available.
|The current shell.
|The name of the user's type of terminal. Used to determine the capabilities of the terminal.
|Database entry of the terminal escape codes to perform various terminal functions.
|Type of operating system.
|The system's CPU architecture.
|The user's preferred text editor.
|The user's preferred utility for viewing text one page at a time.
|Colon-separated list of directories to search for manual pages.
How to set an environment variable differs between shells.
In tcsh(1) and csh(1), use
setenv to set environment variables. In
sh(1) and
bash, use
export to set the current environment
variables. This example sets the default
/usr/local/bin/emacs for the
tcsh(1) shell:
setenv EDITOR /usr/local/bin/emacs
The equivalent command for
would be:
export EDITOR="/usr/local/bin/emacs"
To expand an environment variable in order to see its
current setting, type a
$ character in front
of its name on the command line. For example,
echo $TERM displays the current
$TERM setting.
Shells treat special characters, known as meta-characters,
as special representations of data. The most common
meta-character is
*, which represents any
number of characters in a filename. Meta-characters can be used
to perform filename globbing. For example,
* is equivalent to
ls because
the shell takes all the files that match
echo lists them on the command
To prevent the shell from interpreting a special character,
escape it from the shell by starting it with a backslash
\). For example,
$TERM prints the terminal setting whereas
echo \$TERM literally prints the string
The easiest way to permanently change the default shell is
to use
chsh. Running this command will
open the editor that is configured in the
EDITOR environment variable, which by default
is set to vi(1). Change the
line to the full path of the new shell.
Alternately, use
chsh -s which will set
the specified shell without opening an editor. For example,
to change the shell to
chsh -s /usr/local/bin/bash
The new shell must be present in
/etc/shells. If the shell was
installed from the FreeBSD Ports Collection as described in
Chapter 5, Installing Applications: Packages and Ports, it should be automatically added
to this file. If it is missing, add it using this command,
replacing the path with the path of the shell:
/usr/local/bin/bash>> /etc/shells
Then, rerun chsh(1).
The UNIX® shell is not just a command interpreter, it acts as a powerful tool which allows users to execute commands, redirect their output, redirect their input and chain commands together to improve the final command output. When this functionality is mixed with built in commands, the user is provided with an environment that can maximize efficiency.
Shell redirection is the action of sending the output or the input of a command into another command or into a file. To capture the output of the ls(1) command, for example, into a file, redirect the output:
ls > directory_listing.txt
The directory contents will now be listed in
directory_listing.txt. Some commands can
be used to read input, such as sort(1). To sort this
listing, redirect the input:
sort < directory_listing.txt
The input will be sorted and placed on the screen. To redirect that input into another file, one could redirect the output of sort(1) by mixing the direction:
sort < directory_listing.txt > sorted.txt
In all of the previous examples, the commands are performing redirection using file descriptors. Every UNIX® system has file descriptors, which include standard input (stdin), standard output (stdout), and standard error (stderr). Each one has a purpose, where input could be a keyboard or a mouse, something that provides input. Output could be a screen or paper in a printer. And error would be anything that is used for diagnostic or error messages. All three are considered I/O based file descriptors and sometimes considered streams.
Through the use of these descriptors, the shell allows output and input to be passed around through various commands and redirected to or from a file. Another method of redirection is the pipe operator.
The UNIX® pipe operator, "|" allows the output of one command to be directly passed or directed to another program. Basically, a pipe allows the standard output of a command to be passed as standard input to another command, for example:
cat directory_listing.txt | sort | less
In that example, the contents of
directory_listing.txt will be sorted and
the output passed to less(1). This allows the user to
scroll through the output at their own pace and prevent it
from scrolling off the screen.
Most FreeBSD configuration is done by editing text files. Because of this, it is a good idea to become familiar with a text editor. FreeBSD comes with a few as part of the base system, and many more are available in the Ports Collection.
A simple editor to learn is ee(1), which stands for
easy editor. To start this editor, type
filename is the name of the file to
be edited. Once inside the editor, all of the commands for
manipulating the editor's functions are listed at the top of the
display. The caret (
^) represents
Ctrl, so
^e expands to
Ctrl+e. To leave ee(1), press Esc,
then choose the "leave editor" option from the main
menu. The editor will prompt to save any changes if the file
has been modified.
FreeBSD also comes with more powerful text editors, such as vi(1), as part of the base system. Other editors, like editors/emacs and editors/vim, are part of the FreeBSD Ports Collection. These editors offer more functionality at the expense of being more complicated to learn. Learning a more powerful editor such as vim or Emacs can save more time in the long run.
Many applications which modify files or require typed input
will automatically open a text editor. To change the default
editor, set the
EDITOR environment
variable as described in Section 4.9, "Shells".
A device is a term used mostly for hardware-related
activities in a system, including disks, printers, graphics
cards, and keyboards. When FreeBSD boots, the majority of the boot
messages refer to devices being detected. A copy of the boot
messages are saved to
Each device has a device name and number. For example,
ada0 is the first SATA hard drive,
kbd0 represents the
Most devices in a FreeBSD must be accessed through special
files called device nodes, which are located in
The most comprehensive documentation on FreeBSD is in the form
of manual pages. Nearly every program on the system comes with
a short reference manual explaining the basic operation and
available arguments. These manuals can be viewed using
command is the name of the
command to learn about. For example, to learn more about
ls(1), type:
man ls
Manual pages are divided into sections which represent the type of topic. In FreeBSD, the following sections are available:
User commands.
System calls and error numbers.
Functions in the C libraries.
Device drivers.
File formats.
Games and other diversions.
Miscellaneous information.
System maintenance and operation commands.
System kernel interfaces.
In some cases, the same topic may appear in more than one
section of the online manual. For example, there is a
chmod user command and a
chmod() system call. To tell man(1)
which section to display, specify the section number:
man 1 chmod
This will display the manual page for the user command chmod(1). References to a particular section of the online manual are traditionally placed in parenthesis in written documentation, so chmod(1) refers to the user command and chmod(2) refers to the system call.
If the name of the manual page is unknown, use
-k to search for keywords in the manual page
man -k
This command displays a list of commands that have the keyword "mail" in their descriptions. This is equivalent to using apropos(1).
To read the descriptions for all of the commands in
/usr/bin, type:
cd /usr/bin
man -f * | more
cd /usr/bin
whatis * |more
FreeBSD includes several applications and utilities produced
by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). In addition to manual
pages, these programs may include hypertext documents called
info files. These can be viewed using
info(1) or, if editors/emacs is
installed, the info mode of
To use info(1), type:
For a brief introduction, type
h. For
a quick command reference, type
[1] There are a few tasks that can not be interrupted. For example, if the process is trying to read from a file that is on another computer on the network, and the other computer is unavailable, the process is said to be "uninterruptible". Eventually the process will time out, typically after two minutes. As soon as this time out occurs the process will be killed.
FreeBSD is bundled with a rich collection of system tools as part of the base system. In addition, FreeBSD provides two complementary technologies for installing third-party software: the FreeBSD Ports Collection, for installing from source, and packages, for installing from pre-built binaries. Either method may be used to install software from local media or from the network.
After reading this chapter, you will know:
The difference between binary packages and ports.
How to find third-party software that has been ported to FreeBSD.
How to manage binary packages using pkg.
How to build third-party software from source using the Ports Collection.
How to find the files installed with the application for post-installation configuration.
What to do if a software installation fails.
The typical steps for installing third-party software on a UNIX® system include:
Find and download the software, which might be distributed in source code format or as a binary.
Unpack the software from its distribution format. This is typically a tarball compressed with compress(1), gzip(1), or bzip2(1).
Locate the documentation in
or some file in a
doc/ subdirectory and
read up on how to install the software.
If the software was distributed in source format,
compile it. This may involve editing a
Makefile or running a
configure script.
Test and install the software.
If the software package was not deliberately ported, or tested to work, on FreeBSD, the source code may need editing in order for it to install and run properly. At the time of this writing, over 24,000 third-party applications have been ported to FreeBSD.
A FreeBSD package contains pre-compiled copies of all the
commands for an application, as well as any configuration files
and documentation. A package can be manipulated with the
pkg commands, such as
pkg install.
A FreeBSD port is a collection of files designed to automate the process of compiling an application from source code. The files that comprise a port contain all the necessary information to automatically download, extract, patch, compile, and install the application.
The ports system can also be used to generate packages which can be manipulated with the FreeBSD package management commands.
Both packages and ports understand dependencies. If a package or port is used to install an application and a dependent library is not already installed, the library will automatically be installed first.
While the two technologies are similar, packages and ports each have their own strengths. Select the technology that meets your requirements for installing a particular application.
A compressed package tarball is typically smaller than the compressed tarball containing the source code for the application.
Packages do not require compilation time. For large applications, such as Mozilla, KDE, or GNOME, this can be important on a slow system.
Packages do not require any understanding of the process involved in compiling software on FreeBSD.
Packages are normally compiled with conservative options because they have to run on the maximum number of systems. By compiling from the port, one can change the compilation options.
Some applications have compile-time options relating to which features are installed. For example, Apache can be configured with a wide variety of different built-in options.
In some cases, multiple packages will exist for the same
application to specify certain settings. For example,
Ghostscript is available as a
ghostscript package and a
ghostscript-nox11 package, depending on
whether or not Xorg is installed.
Creating multiple packages rapidly becomes impossible if an
application has more than one or two different compile-time
The licensing conditions of some software forbid binary distribution. Such software must be distributed as source code which must be compiled by the end-user.
Some people do not trust binary distributions or prefer to read through source code in order to look for potential problems.
Source code is needed in order to apply custom patches.
To keep track of updated ports, subscribe to the FreeBSD ports mailing list and the FreeBSD ports bugs mailing list.
Before installing any application, check http://vuxml.freebsd.org/
for security issues related to the application or type
pkg audit -F to check all installed
applications for known vulnerabilities.
The remainder of this chapter explains how to use packages and ports to install and manage third-party software on FreeBSD.
FreeBSD's list of available applications is growing all the time. There are a number of ways to find software to install:
The FreeBSD web site maintains an up-to-date searchable list of all the available applications, at http://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/. The ports can be searched by application name or by software category.
Dan Langille maintains FreshPorts.org which provides a comprehensive search utility and also tracks changes to the applications in the Ports Collection. Registered users can create a customized watch list in order to receive an automated email when their watched ports are updated.
If finding a particular application becomes challenging, try searching a site like SourceForge.net or GitHub.com then check back at the FreeBSD site to see if the application has been ported.
To search the binary package repository for an application:
pkg searchgit-subversion-
Package names include the version number and in case of
ports based on python, the version number of the version of
python the package was built with. Some ports also have
multiple versions available. In case of
subversion there are different
versions available, as well as different compile options.
In this case, the staticly linked version of
subversion. When indicating
which package to install, it is best to specify the
application by the port origin, which is the path in the
ports tree. Repeat the
pkg search with
-o to list the origin of each
pkg search -odevel/git-subversion java/java-subversion devel/p5-subversion devel/py-hgsubversion devel/py-subversion devel/ruby-subversion devel/subversion16 devel/subversion17 devel/subversion devel/subversion-book devel/subversion-static
Searching by shell globs, regular expressions, exact
match, by description, or any other field in the repository
database is also supported by
pkg search.
After installing ports-mgmt/pkg or
ports-mgmt/pkg-devel, see
pkg-search(8) for more details.
If the Ports Collection is already installed, there are
several methods to query the local version of the ports
tree. To find out which category a port is in, type
whereis ,
file is the program to be
whereis lsoflsof: /usr/ports/sysutils/lsof
Alternately, an echo(1) statement can be used:
echo /usr/ports/*/*lsof*/usr/ports/sysutils/lsof
Note that this will also return any matched files
downloaded into the
/usr/ports/distfiles directory.
Another way to find software is by using the Ports
Collection's built-in search mechanism. To use the search
feature, cd to
/usr/ports then run
search name=program-name where
program-name is the name of the
software. For example, to search for
cd /usr/ports
make search name=lsofPort: lsof-4.88.d,8 Path: /usr/ports/sysutils/lsof Info: Lists information about open files (similar to fstat(1)) Maint: email@example.com Index: sysutils B-deps: R-deps:
The built-in search mechanism uses a file
of index information. If a message indicates that the
INDEX is required, run
make fetchindex to download the current
index file. With the
INDEX present,
make search will be able to perform the
requested search.
The "Path:" line indicates where to find the port.
To receive less information, use the
quicksearch feature:
cd /usr/ports
make quicksearch name=lsofPort: lsof-4.88.d,8 Path: /usr/ports/sysutils/lsof Info: Lists information about open files (similar to fstat(1))
For more in-depth searching, use
make search
key= or
make quicksearch
key=, where
string is some text to search
for. The text can be in comments, descriptions, or
dependencies in order to find ports which relate to a
particular subject when the name of the program is
When using
search or
quicksearch, the search string
is case-insensitive. Searching for "LSOF" will
yield the same results as searching for
pkg is the next generation replacement for the traditional FreeBSD package management tools, offering many features that make dealing with binary packages faster and easier.
pkg is not a replacement for port management tools like ports-mgmt/portmaster or ports-mgmt/portupgrade. These tools can be used to install third-party software from both binary packages and the Ports Collection, while pkg installs only binary packages.
FreeBSD 8.4 and later includes a bootstrap utility which can be used to download and install pkg, along with its manual pages.
To bootstrap the system, run:
For earlier FreeBSD versions, pkg must instead be installed from the Ports Collection or as a binary package.
To install the port, run:
cd /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/pkg
make install clean
When upgrading an existing system that originally used the older package system, the database must be converted to the new format, so that the new tools are aware of the already installed packages. Once pkg has been installed, the package database must be converted from the traditional format to the new format by running this command:
This step is not required for new installations that do not yet have any third-party software installed.
This step is not reversible. Once the package database
has been converted to the pkg
format, the traditional
pkg_* tools
should no longer be used.
The package database conversion may emit errors as the
contents are converted to the new version. Generally, these
errors can be safely ignored. However, a list of
third-party software that was not successfully converted
will be listed after
pkg2ng has finished
and these applications must be manually reinstalled.
To ensure that the FreeBSD Ports Collection registers
new software with pkg, and not
the traditional packages format, FreeBSD versions earlier than
X require this line in
WITH_PKGNG= yes
By default pkg uses the FreeBSD package mirrors. For information about building a custom package repository, see Section 5.6, "Building Packages with Poudriere"
Additional pkg configuration options are described in pkg.conf(5).
Usage information for pkg is
available in the pkg(8) manpage or by running
pkg without additional arguments.
Each pkg command argument is
documented in a command-specific manual page. To read the
manual page for
pkg install, for example,
run either of these commands:
pkg help install
man pkg-install
The rest of this section demonstrates common binary package management tasks which can be performed using pkg. Each demonstrated command provides many switches to customize its use. Refer to a command's help or man page for details and more examples.
Information about the packages installed on a system
can be viewed by running
pkg info which,
when run without any switches, will list the package version
for either all installed packages or the specified
For example, to see which version of pkg is installed, run:
pkg info pkgpkg-1.1.4_1
To install a binary package use the following command,
packagename is the name of
the package to install:
pkg install
This command uses repository data to determine which version of the software to install and if it has any uninstalled dependencies. For example, to install curl:
pkg install curlUpdating repository catalogue /usr/local/tmp/All/curl-7.31.0_1.txz 100% of 1181 kB 1380 kBps 00m01s /usr/local/tmp/All/ca_root_nss-3.15.1_1.txz 100% of 288 kB 1700 kBps 00m00s Updating repository catalogue The following 2 packages will be installed: Installing ca_root_nss: 3.15.1_1 Installing curl: 7.31.0_1 The installation will require 3 MB more space 0 B to be downloaded Proceed with installing packages [y/N]:
yChecking integrity... done [1/2] Installing ca_root_nss-3.15.5_1... done [2/2] Installing curl-7.31.0_1... done Cleaning up cache files...Done
The new package and any additional packages that were installed as dependencies can be seen in the installed packages list:
pkg infoca_root_nss-3.15.5_1 The root certificate bundle from the Mozilla Project curl-7.31.0_1 Non-interactive tool to get files from FTP, GOPHER, HTTP(S) servers pkg-1.1.4_6 New generation package manager
Packages that are no longer needed can be removed with
pkg delete. For example:
pkg delete curlThe following packages will be deleted: curl-7.31.0_1 The deletion will free 3 MB Proceed with deleting packages [y/N]:
y[1/1] Deleting curl-7.31.0_1... done
Installed packages can be upgraded to their latest versions by running:
pkg upgrade
This command will compare the installed versions with those available in the repository catalogue and upgrade them from the repository.
Occasionally, software vulnerabilities may be discovered in third-party applications. To address this, pkg includes a built-in auditing mechanism. To determine if there are any known vulnerabilities for the software installed on the system, run:
pkg audit -F
Removing a package may leave behind dependencies which are no longer required. Unneeded packages that were installed as dependencies can be automatically detected and removed using:
pkg autoremovePackages to be autoremoved: ca_root_nss-3.13.5 The autoremoval will free 723 kB Proceed with autoremoval of packages [y/N]:
yDeinstalling ca_root_nss-3.15.1_1... done
Unlike the traditional package management system, pkg includes its own package database backup mechanism. This functionality is enabled by default.
To disable the periodic script from backing up the
package database, set
daily_backup_pkgdb_enable="NO" in
To restore the contents of a previous package database
backup, run the following command replacing
/path/to/pkg.sql with the location
of the backup:
pkg backup -r
If restoring a backup taken by the periodic script, it must be decompressed prior to being restored.
To run a manual backup of the
pkg database, run the following
command, replacing
with a suitable file name and location:
pkg backup -d
By default, pkg stores
binary packages in a cache directory defined by
PKG_CACHEDIR in pkg.conf(5). Only copies
of the latest installed packages are kept. Older versions of
pkg kept all previous packages. To
remove these outdated binary packages, run:
pkg clean
The entire cache may be cleared by running:
pkg clean -a
Software within the FreeBSD Ports Collection can
undergo major version number changes. To address this,
pkg has a built-in command to
update package origins. This can be useful, for example, if
lang/php5 is renamed to
lang/php53 so that
lang/php5 can now
represent version
To change the package origin for the above example, run:
pkg set -o lang/php5:lang/php53
As another example, to update lang/ruby18 to lang/ruby19, run:
pkg set -o lang/ruby18:lang/ruby19
As a final example, to change the origin of the
libglut shared libraries from
graphics/libglut to
graphics/freeglut, run:
pkg set -o graphics/libglut:graphics/freeglut
When changing package origins, it is important to reinstall packages that are dependent on the package with the modified origin. To force a reinstallation of dependent packages, run:
pkg install -Rf
The Ports Collection is a set of
Makefiles, patches, and description files
stored in
/usr/ports. This set of files is
used to compile and install applications on FreeBSD. Before an
application can be compiled using a port, the Ports Collection
must first be installed. If it was not installed during the
installation of FreeBSD, use one of the following methods to
install it:
The base system of FreeBSD includes Portsnap. This is a fast and user-friendly tool for retrieving the Ports Collection and is the recommended choice for most users. This utility connects to a FreeBSD site, verifies the secure key, and downloads a new copy of the Ports Collection. The key is used to verify the integrity of all downloaded files.
To download a compressed snapshot of the Ports
Collection into
portsnap fetch
When running Portsnap for the
first time, extract the snapshot into
portsnap extract
After the first use of
Portsnap has been completed as
shown above,
/usr/ports can be updated
as needed by running:
portsnap fetch
portsnap update
When using
fetch, the
extract or the
operation may be run consecutively, like so:
portsnap fetch update
If more control over the ports tree is needed or if local changes need to be maintained, Subversion can be used to obtain the Ports Collection. Refer to the Subversion Primer for a detailed description of Subversion.
Subversion must be installed before it can be used to check out the ports tree. If a copy of the ports tree is already present, install Subversion like this:
cd /usr/ports/devel/subversion
make install clean
If the ports tree is not available, or pkg is being used to manage packages, Subversion can be installed as a package:
pkg install subversion
Check out a copy of the ports tree. For better
performance, replace
svn0.us-east.FreeBSD.org with a
mirror close to your geographic location:
svn checkout https://
svn0.us-east.FreeBSD.org/ports/head /usr/ports
As needed, update
/usr/ports after
the initial Subversion
svn update /usr/ports
The Ports Collection installs a series of directories representing software categories with each category having a subdirectory for each application. Each subdirectory, also referred to as a ports skeleton, contains a set of files that tell FreeBSD how to compile and install that program. Each port skeleton includes these files and directories:
Makefile: contains statements that
specify how the application should be compiled and where
its components should be installed.
distinfo: contains the names and
checksums of the files that must be downloaded to build the
files/: this directory contains
any patches needed for the program to compile and install
on FreeBSD. This directory may also contain other files used
to build the port.
pkg-descr: provides a more detailed
description of the program.
pkg-plist: a list of all the
files that will be installed by the port. It also tells
the ports system which files to remove upon
Some ports include
pkg-message or
other files to handle special situations. For more details
on these files, and on ports in general, refer to the FreeBSD
Porter's Handbook.
The port does not include the actual source code, also
known as a
distfile. The extract portion
of building a port will automatically save the downloaded
source to
This section provides basic instructions on using the
Ports Collection to install or remove software. The detailed
description of available
make targets and
environment variables is available in ports(7).
Before compiling any port, be sure to update the Ports
Collection as described in the previous section. Since
the installation of any third-party software can introduce
security vulnerabilities, it is recommended to first check
for known security issues related to the port. Alternately,
pkg audit -F before installing a new
port. This command can be configured to automatically
perform a security audit and an update of the vulnerability
database during the daily security system check. For more
information, refer to pkg-audit(8) and
Using the Ports Collection assumes a working Internet connection. It also requires superuser privilege.
To compile and install the port, change to the directory
of the port to be installed, then type
install at the prompt. Messages will indicate
the progress:
cd /usr/ports/sysutils/lsof
make install>> lsof_4.88D.freebsd.tar.gz doesn't seem to exist in /usr/ports/distfiles/. >> Attempting to fetch from ftp://lsof.itap.purdue.edu/pub/tools/unix/lsof/. ===> Extracting for lsof-4.88 ... [extraction output snipped] ... >> Checksum OK for lsof_4.88D.freebsd.tar.gz. ===> Patching for lsof-4.88.d,8 ===> Applying FreeBSD patches for lsof-4.88.d,8 ===> Configuring for lsof-4.88.d,8 ... [configure output snipped] ... ===> Building for lsof-4.88.d,8 ... [compilation output snipped] ... ===> Installing for lsof-4.88.d,8 ... [installation output snipped] ... ===> Generating temporary packing list ===> Compressing manual pages for lsof-4.88.d,8 ===> Registering installation for lsof-4.88.d,8 ===> SECURITY NOTE: This port has installed the following binaries which execute with increased privileges. /usr/local/sbin/lsof
lsof is a program that runs
with increased privileges, a security warning is displayed
as it is installed. Once the installation is complete, the
prompt will be returned.
Some shells keep a cache of the commands that are
available in the directories listed in the
PATH environment variable, to speed up lookup
operations for the executable file of these commands. Users
of the
tcsh shell should type
rehash so that a newly installed command
can be used without specifying its full path. Use
hash -r instead for the
sh shell. Refer to the documentation
for the shell for more information.
During installation, a working subdirectory is created which contains all the temporary files used during compilation. Removing this directory saves disk space and minimizes the chance of problems later when upgrading to the newer version of the port:
make clean===> Cleaning for lsof-88.d,8
To save this extra step, instead use
install clean when compiling the port.
Some ports provide build options which can be used to
enable or disable application components, provide security
options, or allow for other customizations. Examples
include www/firefox,
security/gpgme, and
If the port depends upon other ports which have configurable
options, it may pause several times for user interaction
as the default behavior is to prompt the user to select
options from a menu. To avoid this, run
config-recursive within the port skeleton to do
this configuration in one batch. Then, run
install [clean] to compile and install the
When using
config-recursive, the list of
ports to configure are gathered by the
all-depends-list target. It is
recommended to run
config-recursive until all dependent ports
options have been defined, and ports options screens no
longer appear, to be certain that all dependency options
have been configured.
There are several ways to revisit a port's build options
menu in order to add, remove, or change these options after
a port has been built. One method is to
cd into the directory containing the
port and type
make config. Another
option is to use
make showconfig.
Another option is to execute
rmconfig which will remove all selected options
and allow you to start over. All of these options, and
others, are explained in great detail in
The ports system uses fetch(1) to download the
source files, which supports various environment variables.
FTP_PROXY, and
variables may need to be set if the FreeBSD system is behind
a firewall or FTP/HTTP proxy. See fetch(3) for the
complete list of supported variables.
For users who cannot be connected to the Internet all
the time,
make fetch can be run within
/usr/ports, to fetch all distfiles, or
within a category, such as
/usr/ports/net, or within the specific
port skeleton. Note that if a port has any dependencies,
running this command in a category or ports skeleton will
not fetch the distfiles of ports from
another category. Instead, use
fetch-recursive to also fetch the distfiles for
all the dependencies of a port.
In rare cases, such as when an organization has a local
distfiles repository, the
variable can be used to override the download locations
specified in the
Makefile. When using,
specify the alternate location:
cd /usr/ports/
make MASTER_SITE_OVERRIDE= \
WRKDIRPREFIX and
PREFIX variables can override the default
working and target directories. For example:
make WRKDIRPREFIX=/usr/home/example/ports install
will compile the port in
/usr/home/example/ports and install
everything under
make PREFIX=/usr/home/example/local install
will compile the port in
and install it in
/usr/home/example/local. And:
make WRKDIRPREFIX=../ports PREFIX=../local install
will combine the two.
These can also be set as environmental variables. Refer to the manual page for your shell for instructions on how to set an environmental variable.
Installed ports can be uninstalled using
delete. Examples for using this command can be
found in the pkg-delete(8) manpage.
make deinstall can be
run in the port's directory:
cd /usr/ports/sysutils/lsof
make deinstall===> Deinstalling for sysutils/lsof ===> Deinstalling Deinstallation has been requested for the following 1 packages: lsof-4.88.d,8 The deinstallation will free 229 kB [1/1] Deleting lsof-4.88.d,8... done
It is recommended to read the messages as the port is uninstalled. If the port has any applications that depend upon it, this information will be displayed but the uninstallation will proceed. In such cases, it may be better to reinstall the application in order to prevent broken dependencies.
Over time, newer versions of software become available in the Ports Collection. This section describes how to determine which software can be upgraded and how to perform the upgrade.
To determine if newer versions of installed ports are available, ensure that the latest version of the ports tree is installed, using the updating command described in either Procedure 5.1, "Portsnap Method" or Procedure 5.2, "Subversion Method". On FreeBSD 10 and later, or if the system has been converted to pkg, the following command will list the installed ports which are out of date:
pkg version -l "<"
For FreeBSD 9.
X and lower, the
following command will list the installed ports that are out
of date:
pkg_version -l "<"
attempting an upgrade, read
/usr/ports/UPDATING from the top of
the file to the date closest to the last time ports were
upgraded or the system was installed. This file describes
various issues and additional steps users may encounter and
need to perform when updating a port, including such things
as file format changes, changes in locations of
configuration files, or any incompatibilities with previous
versions. Make note of any instructions which match any of
the ports that need upgrading and follow these instructions
when performing the upgrade.
To perform the actual upgrade, use either Portmaster or Portupgrade.
The ports-mgmt/portmaster package or
port is the recommended tool for upgrading installed ports
as it is designed to use the tools installed with FreeBSD
without depending upon other ports. It uses the
information in
/var/db/pkg/ to
determine which ports to upgrade. To install this utility
as a port:
cd /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/portmaster
make install clean
Portmaster defines four categories of ports:
Root port: has no dependencies and is not a dependency of any other ports.
Trunk port: has no dependencies, but other ports depend upon it.
Branch port: has dependencies and other ports depend upon it.
Leaf port: has dependencies but no other ports depend upon it.
To list these categories and search for updates:
portmaster -L===>>> Root ports (No dependencies, not depended on) ===>>> ispell-3.2.06_18 ===>>> screen-4.0.3 ===>>> New version available: screen-4.0.3_1 ===>>> tcpflow-0.21_1 ===>>> 7 root ports ... ===>>> Branch ports (Have dependencies, are depended on) ===>>> apache22-2.2.3 ===>>> New version available: apache22-2.2.8 ... ===>>> Leaf ports (Have dependencies, not depended on) ===>>> automake-1.9.6_2 ===>>> bash-3.1.17 ===>>> New version available: bash-3.2.33 ... ===>>> 32 leaf ports ===>>> 137 total installed ports ===>>> 83 have new versions available
This command is used to upgrade all outdated ports:
portmaster -a
By default, Portmaster will
make a backup package before deleting the existing port.
If the installation of the new version is successful,
Portmaster will delete the
backup. Using
-b will instruct
Portmaster not to automatically
delete the backup. Adding
-i will start
Portmaster in interactive mode,
prompting for confirmation before upgrading each port.
Many other options are available. Read through the
manual page for portmaster(8) for details regarding
their usage.
If errors are encountered during the upgrade process,
-f to upgrade and rebuild all
portmaster -af
Portmaster can also be used to install new ports on the system, upgrading all dependencies before building and installing the new port. To use this function, specify the location of the port in the Ports Collection:
Another utility that can be used to upgrade ports is Portupgrade, which is available as the ports-mgmt/portupgrade package or port. This utility installs a suite of applications which can be used to manage ports. However, it is dependent upon Ruby. To install the port:
cd /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/portupgrade
make install clean
Before performing an upgrade using this utility, it is
recommended to scan the list of installed ports using
pkgdb -F and to fix all the
inconsistencies it reports.
To upgrade all the outdated ports installed on the
system, use
portupgrade -a. Alternately,
-i to be asked for confirmation
of every individual upgrade:
portupgrade -ai
To upgrade only a specified application instead of all
available ports, use
. It is very
important to include
-R to first upgrade
all the ports required by the given application:
portupgrade -R firefox
-P is included,
Portupgrade searches for
available packages in the local directories listed in
PKG_PATH. If none are available locally, it
then fetches packages from a remote site. If packages can
not be found locally or fetched remotely,
Portupgrade will use ports. To
avoid using ports entirely, specify
This last set of options tells
Portupgrade to abort if no
packages are available:
portupgrade -PP gnome2
To just fetch the port distfiles, or packages, if
-P is specified, without building or
installing anything, use
-F. For further
information on all of the available switches, refer to the
manual page for
Using the Ports Collection will use up disk space over
time. After building and installing a port, running
make clean within the ports skeleton will
clean up the temporary
work directory.
If Portmaster is used to install a
port, it will automatically remove this directory unless
-K is specified. If
Portupgrade is installed, this
command will remove all
work directories
found within the local copy of the Ports Collection:
portsclean -C
In addition, a lot of out-dated source distribution files
will collect in
/usr/ports/distfiles over
time. If Portupgrade is installed,
this command will delete all the distfiles that are no longer
referenced by any ports:
portsclean -D
To use Portupgrade to remove all distfiles not referenced by any port currently installed on the system:
portsclean -DD
If Portmaster is installed, use:
portmaster --clean-distfiles
By default, this command is interactive and will prompt the user to confirm if a distfile should be deleted.
In addition to these commands, the ports-mgmt/pkg_cutleaves package or port automates the task of removing installed ports that are no longer needed.
Poudriere is a BSD-licensed utility for creating and testing FreeBSD packages. It uses FreeBSD jails to set up isolated compilation environments. These jails can be used to build packages for versions of FreeBSD that are different from the system on which it is installed, and also to build packages for i386 if the host is an amd64 system. Once the packages are built, they are in a layout identical to the official mirrors. These packages are usable by pkg(8) and other package management tools.
Poudriere is installed using
the ports-mgmt/poudriere package
or port. The installation includes a sample configuration
Copy this file to
/usr/local/etc/poudriere.conf. Edit the
copied file to suit the local configuration.
While ZFS is not required on the system
running poudriere, it is beneficial.
When ZFS is used,
ZPOOL must be specified in
/usr/local/etc/poudriere.conf and
FREEBSD_HOST should be set to a nearby
mirror. Defining
CCACHE_DIR enables the use
of devel/ccache to cache
compilation and reduce build times for frequently-compiled code.
It may be convenient to put
poudriere datasets in an isolated
tree mounted at
/poudriere. Defaults for the
other configuration values are adequate.
The number of processor cores detected is used to define how many builds should run in parallel. Supply enough virtual memory, either with RAM or swap space. If virtual memory runs out, compiling jails will stop and be torn down, resulting in weird error messages.
After configuration, initialize
poudriere so that it installs a
jail with the required FreeBSD tree and a ports tree. Specify a
name for the jail using
-j and the FreeBSD
version with
-v. On systems running
FreeBSD/amd64, the architecture can be set with
-a to either
i386 or
amd64. The default is the
architecture shown by
poudriere jail -c -j====>> Creating 10amd64 fs... done ====>> Fetching base.txz for FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE amd64 /poudriere/jails/10amd64/fromftp/base.txz 100% of 59 MB 1470 kBps 00m42s ====>> Extracting base.txz... done ====>> Fetching src.txz for FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE amd64 /poudriere/jails/10amd64/fromftp/src.txz 100% of 107 MB 1476 kBps 01m14s ====>> Extracting src.txz... done ====>> Fetching games.txz for FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE amd64 /poudriere/jails/10amd64/fromftp/games.txz 100% of 865 kB 734 kBps 00m01s ====>> Extracting games.txz... done ====>> Fetching lib32.txz for FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE amd64 /poudriere/jails/10amd64/fromftp/lib32.txz 100% of 14 MB 1316 kBps 00m12s ====>> Extracting lib32.txz... done ====>> Cleaning up... done ====>> Jail 10amd64 10.0-RELEASE amd64 is ready to be used
poudriere ports -c -p====>> Creating local fs... done ====>> Extracting portstree "local"... Looking up portsnap.FreeBSD.org mirrors... 7 mirrors found. Fetching public key from ec2-eu-west-1.portsnap.freebsd.org... done. Fetching snapshot tag from ec2-eu-west-1.portsnap.freebsd.org... done. Fetching snapshot metadata... done. Fetching snapshot generated at Tue Feb 11 01:07:15 CET 2014: 94a3431f0ce567f6452ffde4fd3d7d3c6e1da143efec76100% of 69 MB 1246 kBps 00m57s Extracting snapshot... done. Verifying snapshot integrity... done. Fetching snapshot tag from ec2-eu-west-1.portsnap.freebsd.org... done. Fetching snapshot metadata... done. Updating from Tue Feb 11 01:07:15 CET 2014 to Tue Feb 11 16:05:20 CET 2014. Fetching 4 metadata patches... done. Applying metadata patches... done. Fetching 0 metadata files... done. Fetching 48 patches. (48/48) 100.00% done. done. Applying patches... done. Fetching 1 new ports or files... done. /poudriere/ports/tester/CHANGES /poudriere/ports/tester/COPYRIGHT [...] Building new INDEX files... done.
On a single computer, poudriere can build ports with multiple configurations, in multiple jails, and from different port trees. Custom configurations for these combinations are called sets. See the CUSTOMIZATION section of poudriere(8) for details after ports-mgmt/poudriere or ports-mgmt/poudriere-devel is installed.
The basic configuration shown here puts a single jail-,
port-, and set-specific
make.conf in
The filename in this example is created by combining the jail
name, port name, and set name:
The system
make.conf and this new file
are combined at build time to create the
make.conf used by the build jail.
Packages to be built are entered in
editors/emacs devel/git ports-mgmt/pkg ...
Options and dependencies for the specified ports are configured:
poudriere options -j
Finally, packages are built and a package repository is created:
poudriere bulk -j
displays the current state of the build.
Poudriere also builds files in
that can be used with a web server to display build
Packages are now available for installation from the poudriere repository.
For more information on using poudriere, see poudriere(8) and the main web site, https://github.com/freebsd/poudriere/wiki.
While it is possible to use both a custom repository along
side of the official repository, sometimes it is useful to
disable the official repository. This is done by creating a
configuration file that overrides and disables the official
configuration file. Create
that contains the following:
FreeBSD: { enabled: no }
Usually it is easiest to serve a poudriere repository to
the client machines via HTTP. Setup a webserver to serve up
the package directory, usually something like:
10amd64 is the name of the
If the URL to the package repository is:
http://pkg.example.com/10amd64, then the
repository configuration file in
would look like:
custom: {
url: "
mirror_type: "http",
enabled: yes,
Regardless of whether the software was installed from a binary package or port, most third-party applications require some level of configuration after installation. The following commands and locations can be used to help determine what was installed with the application.
Most applications install at least one default
configuration file in
In the case where an application has a large number of
configuration files, a subdirectory will be created to hold
them. Often, sample configuration files are installed which
end with a suffix such as
.sample. The
configuration files should be reviewed and possibly
edited to meet the system's needs. To edit a sample file,
first copy it without the
Applications which provide documentation will install
it into
/usr/local/share/doc and many
applications also install manual pages. This documentation
should be consulted before continuing.
Some applications run services which must be added
/etc/rc.conf before starting the
application. These applications usually install a startup
script in
/usr/local/etc/rc.d. See
Services for more information.
Users of csh(1) should run
rehash to rebuild the known binary list
in the shells
pkg info to determine which
files, man pages, and binaries were installed with the
When a port does not build or install, try the following:
Search to see if there is a fix pending for the port in the Problem Report database. If so, implementing the proposed fix may fix the issue.
Ask the maintainer of the port for help. Type
make maintainer
in the ports skeleton or read the port's
Makefile to find the maintainer's
email address. Remember to include the
$FreeBSD: line from the port's
Makefile and the output leading up to
the error in the email to the maintainer.
Some ports are not maintained by an individual but
instead by a mailing
list. Many, but not all, of these addresses look
Take this into account when sending an email.
In particular, ports shown as maintained by
<email@example.com> are not
maintained by a specific individual. Instead, any fixes
and support come from the general community who subscribe
to that mailing list. More volunteers are always
If there is no response to the email, use Bugzilla to submit a bug report using the instructions in Writing FreeBSD Problem Reports.
Fix it! The Porter's Handbook includes detailed information on the ports infrastructure so that you can fix the occasional broken port or even submit your own!
Install the package instead of the port using the instructions in Section 5.4, "Using pkg for Binary Package Management".
An installation of FreeBSD using bsdinstall does not automatically install a graphical user interface. This chapter describes how to install and configure Xorg, which provides the open source X Window System used to provide a graphical environment. It then describes how to find and install a desktop environment or window manager.
Users who prefer an installation method that automatically configures the Xorg and offers a choice of window managers during installation should refer to the pcbsd.org website.
For more information on the video hardware that Xorg supports, refer to the x.org website.
After reading this chapter, you will know:
The various components of the X Window System, and how they interoperate.
How to install and configure Xorg.
How to install and configure several window managers and desktop environments.
How to use TrueType® fonts in Xorg.
How to set up your system for graphical logins (XDM).
Before reading this chapter, you should:
Know how to install additional third-party software as described in Chapter 5, Installing Applications: Packages and Ports.
While it is not necessary to understand all of the details of the various components in the X Window System and how they interact, some basic knowledge of these components can be useful:
X was designed from the beginning to be network-centric, and adopts a "client-server" model. In this model, the "X server" runs on the computer that has the keyboard, monitor, and mouse attached. The server's responsibility includes tasks such as managing the display, handling input from the keyboard and mouse, and handling input or output from other devices such as a tablet or a video projector. This confuses some people, because the X terminology is exactly backward to what they expect. They expect the "X server" to be the big powerful machine down the hall, and the "X client" to be the machine on their desk.
Each X application, such as XTerm or Firefox, is a "client". A client sends messages to the server such as "Please draw a window at these coordinates", and the server sends back messages such as "The user just clicked on the OK button".
In a home or small office environment, the X server and the X clients commonly run on the same computer. It is also possible to run the X server on a less powerful computer and to run the X applications on a more powerful system. In this scenario, the communication between the X client and server takes place over the network.
X does not dictate what windows should look like on
screen, how to move them around with the mouse, which
keystrokes should be used to move between windows, what
the title bars on each window should look like, whether or
not they have close buttons on them, and so on. Instead,
X delegates this responsibility to a separate window
manager application. There are dozens of window
managers available. Each window manager provides
a different look and feel: some support virtual desktops,
some allow customized keystrokes to manage the desktop,
some have a "Start" button, and some are
themeable, allowing a complete change of the desktop's
look-and-feel. Window managers are available in the
x11-wm category of the Ports
Each window manager uses a different configuration mechanism. Some expect configuration file written by hand while others provide graphical tools for most configuration tasks.
KDE and GNOME are considered to be desktop environments as they include an entire suite of applications for performing common desktop tasks. These may include office suites, web browsers, and games.
The window manager is responsible for the mouse focus policy. This policy provides some means for choosing which window is actively receiving keystrokes and it should also visibly indicate which window is currently active.
One focus policy is called "click-to-focus". In this model, a window becomes active upon receiving a mouse click. In the "focus-follows-mouse" policy, the window that is under the mouse pointer has focus and the focus is changed by pointing at another window. If the mouse is over the root window, then this window is focused. In the "sloppy-focus" model, if the mouse is moved over the root window, the most recently used window still has the focus. With sloppy-focus, focus is only changed when the cursor enters a new window, and not when exiting the current window. In the "click-to-focus" policy, the active window is selected by mouse click. The window may then be raised and appear in front of all other windows. All keystrokes will now be directed to this window, even if the cursor is moved to another window.
Different window managers support different focus models. All of them support click-to-focus, and the majority of them also support other policies. Consult the documentation for the window manager to determine which focus models are available.
Widget is a term for all of the items in the user interface that can be clicked or manipulated in some way. This includes buttons, check boxes, radio buttons, icons, and lists. A widget toolkit is a set of widgets used to create graphical applications. There are several popular widget toolkits, including Qt, used by KDE, and GTK+, used by GNOME. As a result, applications will have a different look and feel, depending upon which widget toolkit was used to create the application.
Xorg is the implementation of the open source X Window System released by the X.Org Foundation. In FreeBSD, it can be installed as a package or port. The meta-port for the complete distribution which includes X servers, clients, libraries, and fonts is located in x11/xorg. A minimal distribution is located in x11/xorg-minimal, with separate ports available for docs, libraries, and apps. The examples in this section install the complete Xorg distribution.
To build and install Xorg from the Ports Collection:
cd /usr/ports/x11/xorg
make install clean
To build Xorg in its entirety, be sure to have at least 4 GB of free disk space available.
Alternatively, Xorg can be installed directly from packages with this command:
pkg install xorg
In most cases, Xorg is self-configuring. Autoconfiguration is the preferred method, and should be tried first. When X is started without a configuration file, the video card and input devices are automatically detected and used. If the system already has a configuration file and you wish to create a new configuration, save a copy of the old one first:
mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf ~/xorg.conf.etc
mv /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf ~/xorg.conf.localetc
To generate the configuration file and start the X system, issue this command:
If a black and grey grid and an X mouse cursor appear, the
configuration was successful. Test the system by moving the
mouse and typing text into the windows. To exit the test,
switch to the virtual console used to start it by pressing
(F1 for the first virtual console) and press
If the mouse or keyboard do not work, continue with Section 6.9, "Troubleshooting".
Desktop environments like GNOME, KDE or Xfce provide graphical tools to set parameters such as video resolution. If the default configuration works, skip to Section 6.7, "Desktop Environments" for examples on how to install a desktop environment.
The Ctrl+Alt+Backspace key combination may also be used to break out of Xorg. To enable it, you can either type the following command from any X terminal emulator:
setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp
or create a keyboard configuration file for
hald called
x11-input.fdi and saved in the
/usr/local/etc/hal/fdi/policy directory.
This file should contain the following lines:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?> <deviceinfo version="0.2"> <device> <match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.keyboard"> <merge key="input.x11_options.XkbOptions" type="string">terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp</merge> </match> </device> </deviceinfo>
The following line will also have to be added to
xorg.conf.new, in the
ServerLayout or
ServerFlags section:
Option "DontZap" "off"
The ability to configure optimal resolution is dependent upon the video hardware and the support provided by its driver. At this time, driver support includes:
Intel: as of FreeBSD 9.3 and FreeBSD 10.1, 3D acceleration on most Intel graphics, including IronLake, SandyBridge, and IvyBridge, is supported. Support for switching between X and virtual consoles is provided by vt(4).
ATI/Radeon: 2D and 3D acceleration is supported on most Radeon cards up to the HD6000 series.
NVIDIA: several NVIDIA drivers are available in the
x11 category of the Ports Collection.
Install the driver that matches the video card.
Optimus: currently there is no switching support between the two graphics adapters provided by Optimus. Optimus implementations vary, and FreeBSD will not be able to drive all versions of the hardware. Some computers provide a BIOS option to disable one of the graphics adapters or select a discrete mode.
The default fonts that ship with Xorg are less than ideal for typical desktop publishing applications. Large presentation fonts show up jagged and unprofessional looking, and small fonts are almost completely unintelligible. However, there are several free, high quality Type1 (PostScript®) fonts available which can be readily used with Xorg. For instance, the URW font collection (x11-fonts/urwfonts) includes high quality versions of standard type1 fonts (Times Roman®, Helvetica®, Palatino® and others). The Freefonts collection (x11-fonts/freefonts) includes many more fonts, but most of them are intended for use in graphics software such as the Gimp, and are not complete enough to serve as screen fonts. In addition, Xorg can be configured to use TrueType® fonts with a minimum of effort. For more details on this, see the X(7) manual page or Section 6.5.2, "TrueType® Fonts".
To install the above Type1 font collections from the Ports Collection, run the following commands:
cd /usr/ports/x11-fonts/urwfonts
make install clean
And likewise with the freefont or other collections. To
have the X server detect these fonts, add an appropriate line
to the X server configuration file
/etc/X11/xorg.conf), which reads:
FontPath "/usr/local/share/fonts/urwfonts/"
Alternatively, at the command line in the X session run:
xset fp+ /usr/local/share/fonts/urwfonts
xset fp rehash
This will work but will be lost when the X session is
closed, unless it is added to the startup file
~/.xinitrc for a normal
startx session, or
~/.xsession when logging in through a
graphical login manager like XDM).
A third way is to use the new
/usr/local/etc/fonts/local.conf as
demonstrated in Section 6.5.3, "Anti-Aliased Fonts".
Xorg has built in support for
rendering TrueType® fonts. There are two different modules
that can enable this functionality. The freetype module is
used in this example because it is more consistent with the
other font rendering back-ends. To enable the freetype module
just add the following line to the
section of
Load "freetype"
Now make a directory for the TrueType® fonts (for
/usr/local/share/fonts/TrueType) and
copy all of the TrueType® fonts into this directory. Keep in
mind that TrueType® fonts cannot be directly taken from an
Apple® Mac®; they must be in UNIX®/MS-DOS®/Windows®
format for use by Xorg. Once the
files have been copied into this directory, use
ttmkfdir to create a
fonts.dir, so that the X font renderer
knows that these new files have been installed.
ttmkfdir is available from the FreeBSD
Ports Collection as
cd /usr/local/share/fonts/TrueType
ttmkfdir -o fonts.dir
Now add the TrueType® directory to the font path. This is just the same as described in Section 6.5.1, "Type1 Fonts":
xset fp+ /usr/local/share/fonts/TrueType
xset fp rehash
or add a
FontPath line to
Now Gimp, OpenOffice, and all of the other X applications should now recognize the installed TrueType® fonts. Extremely small fonts (as with text in a high resolution display on a web page) and extremely large fonts (within StarOffice™) will look much better now.
All fonts in Xorg that are
found in
/usr/local/share/fonts/ and
~/.fonts/ are automatically made
available for anti-aliasing to Xft-aware applications. Most
recent applications are Xft-aware, including
GNOME, and
In order to control which fonts are anti-aliased, or to
configure anti-aliasing properties, create (or edit, if it
already exists) the file
/usr/local/etc/fonts/local.conf. Several
advanced features of the Xft font system can be tuned using
this file; this section describes only some simple
possibilities. For more details, please see
This file must be in XML format. Pay careful attention to
case, and make sure all tags are properly closed. The file
begins with the usual XML header followed by a DOCTYPE
definition, and then the
<?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd"> <fontconfig>
As previously stated, all fonts in
/usr/local/share/fonts/ as well as
~/.fonts/ are already made available to
Xft-aware applications. If you wish to add another directory
outside of these two directory trees, add a line similar to
the following to
After adding new fonts, and especially new font directories, you should run the following command to rebuild the font caches:
fc-cache -f
Anti-aliasing makes borders slightly fuzzy, which makes very small text more readable and removes "staircases" from large text, but can cause eyestrain if applied to normal text. To exclude font sizes smaller than 14 point from anti-aliasing, include these lines:
<match target="font"> <test name="size" compare="less"> <double>14</double> </test> <edit name="antialias" mode="assign"> <bool>false</bool> </edit> </match> <match target="font"> <test name="pixelsize" compare="less" qual="any"> <double>14</double> </test> <edit mode="assign" name="antialias"> <bool>false</bool> </edit> </match>
Spacing for some monospaced fonts may also be inappropriate with anti-aliasing. This seems to be an issue with KDE, in particular. One possible fix for this is to force the spacing for such fonts to be 100. Add the following lines:
<match target="pattern" name="family"> <test qual="any" name="family"> <string>fixed</string> </test> <edit name="family" mode="assign"> <string>mono</string> </edit> </match> <match target="pattern" name="family"> <test qual="any" name="family"> <string>console</string> </test> <edit name="family" mode="assign"> <string>mono</string> </edit> </match>
(this aliases the other common names for fixed fonts as
"mono"), and then add:
<match target="pattern" name="family"> <test qual="any" name="family"> <string>mono</string> </test> <edit name="spacing" mode="assign"> <int>100</int> </edit> </match>
Certain fonts, such as Helvetica, may have a problem when
anti-aliased. Usually this manifests itself as a font that
seems cut in half vertically. At worst, it may cause
applications to crash. To avoid this, consider adding the
following to
<match target="pattern" name="family"> <test qual="any" name="family"> <string>Helvetica</string> </test> <edit name="family" mode="assign"> <string>sans-serif</string> </edit> </match>
Once you have finished editing
local.conf make sure you end the file
with the
</fontconfig> tag. Not
doing this will cause your changes to be ignored.
Finally, users can add their own settings via their
.fonts.conf files. To do this,
each user should simply create a
~/.fonts.conf. This file must also be in
XML format.
One last point: with an LCD screen, sub-pixel sampling may
be desired. This basically treats the (horizontally
separated) red, green and blue components separately to
improve the horizontal resolution; the results can be
dramatic. To enable this, add the line somewhere in
<match target="font"> <test qual="all" name="rgba"> <const>unknown</const> </test> <edit name="rgba" mode="assign"> <const>rgb</const> </edit> </match>
Depending on the sort of display,
rgb may need to be changed to
vrgb or
vbgr: experiment and see which works
Xorg provides an X Display Manager, XDM, which can be used for login session management. XDM provides a graphical interface for choosing which display server to connect to and for entering authorization information such as a login and password combination.
This section demonstrates how to configure the X Display Manager on FreeBSD. Some desktop environments provide their own graphical login manager. Refer to Section 6.7.1, "GNOME" for instructions on how to configure the GNOME Display Manager and Section 6.7.2, "KDE" for instructions on how to configure the KDE Display Manager.
To install XDM, use the
x11/xdm package or port. Once installed,
XDM can be configured to run when
the machine boots up by editing this entry in
ttyv8 "/usr/local/bin/xdm -nodaemon" xterm off secure
Change the
off to
and save the edit. The
ttyv8 in this entry
indicates that XDM will run on the
ninth virtual terminal.
The XDM configuration directory
is located in
This directory contains several files used to change the
behavior and appearance of XDM, as
well as a few scripts and programs used to set up the desktop
when XDM is running. Table 6.1, "XDM Configuration Files" summarizes the function of each
of these files. The exact syntax and usage of these files is
described in xdm(1).
|The protocol for connecting to XDM is called the X Display Manager Connection Protocol (XDMCP) This file is a client authorization ruleset for controlling XDMCP connections from remote machines. By default, this file does not allow any remote clients to connect.
|This file controls the look and feel of the XDM display chooser and login screens. The default configuration is a simple rectangular login window with the hostname of the machine displayed at the top in a large font and "Login:" and "Password:" prompts below. The format of this file is identical to the app-defaults file described in the Xorg documentation.
|The list of local and remote displays the chooser should provide as login choices.
|Default session script for logins which is run by
XDM after a user has logged
in. Normally each user will have a customized session
script in
~/.xsession that
overrides this script
|Script to automatically launch applications
before displaying the chooser or login interfaces.
There is a script for each display being used, named
Xsetup_*, where
* is the local display number.
Typically these scripts run one or two programs in the
background such as
|Global configuration for all displays running on this machine.
|Contains errors generated by the server program.
If a display that XDM is
trying to start hangs, look at this file for error
messages. These messages are also written to the
~/.xsession-errors on a
per-session basis.
|The running process ID of XDM.
By default, only users on the same system can login using XDM. To enable users on other systems to connect to the display server, edit the access control rules and enable the connection listener.
To configure XDM to listen for
any remote connection, comment out the
DisplayManager.requestPort line in
/usr/local/lib/X11/xdm/xdm-config by
putting a
! in front of it:
! SECURITY: do not listen for XDMCP or Chooser requests ! Comment out this line if you want to manage X terminals with xdm DisplayManager.requestPort: 0
Save the edits and restart XDM.
To restrict remote access, look at the example entries in
/usr/local/lib/X11/xdm/Xaccess and refer
to xdm(1) for further information.
This section describes how to install three popular desktop
environments on a FreeBSD system. A desktop environment can range
from a simple window manager to a complete suite of desktop
applications. Over a hundred desktop environments are available
in the
x11-wm category of the Ports
GNOME is a user-friendly desktop environment. It includes a panel for starting applications and displaying status, a desktop, a set of tools and applications, and a set of conventions that make it easy for applications to cooperate and be consistent with each other. More information regarding GNOME on FreeBSD can be found at http://www.FreeBSD.org/gnome. That web site contains additional documentation about installing, configuring, and managing GNOME on FreeBSD.
This desktop environment can be installed from a package:
pkg install gnome2
To instead build GNOME from ports, use the following command. GNOME is a large application and will take some time to compile, even on a fast computer.
cd /usr/ports/x11/gnome2
make install clean
For proper operation, GNOME
/proc to be mounted. Add this
line to
/etc/fstab to mount this file
system automatically during system startup:
proc /proc procfs rw 0 0
Once GNOME is installed,
configure Xorg to start
GNOME. The easiest way to do this
is to enable the GNOME Display Manager,
GDM, which is installed as part of
the GNOME package or port. It can
be enabled by adding this line to
It is often desirable to also start all
GNOME services. To achieve this,
add a second line to
GDM will now start automatically when the system boots.
A second method for starting
GNOME is to type
startx from the command-line after
~/.xinitrc. If this file
already exists, replace the line that starts the current
window manager with one that starts
/usr/local/bin/gnome-session. If this
file does not exist, create it with this command:
echo "exec /usr/local/bin/gnome-session" > ~/.xinitrc
A third method is to use XDM as
the display manager. In this case, create an executable
echo "#!/bin/sh" > ~/.xsession
echo "exec /usr/local/bin/gnome-session" >> ~/.xsession
chmod +x ~/.xsession
KDE is another easy-to-use desktop environment. This desktop provides a suite of applications with a consistent look and feel, a standardized menu and toolbars, keybindings, color-schemes, internationalization, and a centralized, dialog-driven desktop configuration. More information on KDE can be found at http://www.kde.org/. For FreeBSD-specific information, consult http://freebsd.kde.org.
To install the KDE package, type:
pkg install x11/kde4
To instead build the KDE port, use the following command. Installing the port will provide a menu for selecting which components to install. KDE is a large application and will take some time to compile, even on a fast computer.
cd /usr/ports/x11/kde4
make install clean
KDE requires
/proc to be mounted. Add this line to
/etc/fstab to mount this file system
automatically during system startup:
proc /proc procfs rw 0 0
The installation of KDE
includes the KDE Display Manager,
KDM. To enable this display
manager, add this line to
A second method for launching
KDE is to type
startx from the command line. For this to
work, the following line is needed in
exec /usr/local/bin/startkde
A third method for starting KDE
is through XDM. To do so, create
an executable
~/.xsession as
echo "#!/bin/sh" > ~/.xsession
echo "exec /usr/local/bin/startkde" >> ~/.xsession
chmod +x ~/.xsession
Once KDE is started, refer to its built-in help system for more information on how to use its various menus and applications.
Xfce is a desktop environment based on the GTK+ toolkit used by GNOME. However, it is more lightweight and provides a simple, efficient, easy-to-use desktop. It is fully configurable, has a main panel with menus, applets, and application launchers, provides a file manager and sound manager, and is themeable. Since it is fast, light, and efficient, it is ideal for older or slower machines with memory limitations. More information on Xfce can be found at http://www.xfce.org.
To install the Xfce package:
pkg install xfce
Alternatively, to build the port:
cd /usr/ports/x11-wm/xfce4
make install clean
Unlike GNOME or
Xfce does not provide its own login
manager. In order to start Xfce
from the command line by typing
first add its entry to
echo "exec /usr/local/bin/startxfce4" > ~/.xinitrc
An alternate method is to use
XDM. To configure this method,
create an executable
echo "#!/bin/sh" > ~/.xsession
echo "exec /usr/local/bin/startxfce4" >> ~/.xsession
chmod +x ~/.xsession
One way to increase the pleasantness of using a desktop computer is by having nice 3D effects.
Installing the Compiz Fusion package is easy, but configuring it requires a few steps that are not described in the port's documentation.
Desktop effects can cause quite a load on the graphics
card. For an nVidia-based graphics card, the proprietary
driver is required for good performance. Users of other
graphics cards can skip this section and continue with the
xorg.conf configuration.
To determine which nVidia driver is needed see the FAQ question on the subject.
Having determined the correct driver to use for your card, installation is as simple as installing any other package.
For example, to install the latest driver:
pkg install x11/nvidia-driver
The driver will create a kernel module, which needs to be
loaded at system startup. Add the following line to
To immediately load the kernel module into the running
kernel by issuing a command like
nvidia, however it has been noted that the some
versions of Xorg will not
function properly if the driver is not loaded at boot time.
After editing
/boot/loader.conf, a
reboot is recommended.
With the kernel module loaded, you normally only need to
change a single line in
to enable the proprietary driver:
Find the following line in
Driver "nv"
and change it to:
Driver "nvidia"
Start the GUI as usual, and you should be greeted by the nVidia splash. Everything should work as usual.
To enable Compiz Fusion,
/etc/X11/xorg.conf needs to be
Add the following section to enable composite effects:
Section "Extensions" Option "Composite" "Enable" EndSection
Locate the "Screen" section which should look similar to the one below:
Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen0" Device "Card0" Monitor "Monitor0" ...
and add the following two lines (after "Monitor" will do):
DefaultDepth 24 Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
Locate the "Subsection" that refers to the screen resolution that you wish to use. For example, if you wish to use 1280x1024, locate the section that follows. If the desired resolution does not appear in any subsection, you may add the relevant entry by hand:
SubSection "Display" Viewport 0 0 Modes "1280x1024" EndSubSection
A color depth of 24 bits is needed for desktop composition, change the above subsection to:
SubSection "Display" Viewport 0 0 Depth 24 Modes "1280x1024" EndSubSection
Finally, confirm that the "glx" and "extmod" modules are loaded in the "Module" section:
Section "Module" Load "extmod" Load "glx" ...
The preceding can be done automatically with x11/nvidia-xconfig by running (as root):
nvidia-xconfig --add-argb-glx-visuals
nvidia-xconfig --composite
nvidia-xconfig --depth=24
Installing Compiz Fusion is as simple as any other package:
pkg install x11-wm/compiz-fusion
When the installation is finished, start your graphic desktop and at a terminal, enter the following commands (as a normal user):
compiz --replace --sm-disable --ignore-desktop-hints ccp &
emerald --replace &
Your screen will flicker for a few seconds, as your window manager (e.g. Metacity if you are using GNOME) is replaced by Compiz Fusion. Emerald takes care of the window decorations (i.e. close, minimize, maximize buttons, title bars and so on).
You may convert this to a trivial script and have it run at startup automatically (e.g. by adding to "Sessions" in a GNOME desktop):
#! /bin/sh compiz --replace --sm-disable --ignore-desktop-hints ccp & emerald --replace &
Save this in your home directory as, for example,
start-compiz and make it
chmod +x ~/start-compiz
Then use the GUI to add it to GNOME desktop).(located in , , on a
To actually select all the desired effects and their settings, execute (again as a normal user) the Compiz Config Settings Manager:
In GNOME, this can also be found in the , menu.
If you have selected "gconf support" during
the build, you will also be able to view these settings using
gconf-editor under
If the mouse does not work, you will need to first configure
it before proceeding. See Section 3.10.9, "Mouse Settings" in the FreeBSD
install chapter. In recent Xorg
versions, the
InputDevice sections in
xorg.conf are ignored in favor of the
autodetected devices. To restore the old behavior, add the
following line to the
ServerLayout or
ServerFlags section of this file:
Option "AutoAddDevices" "false"
Input devices may then be configured as in previous versions, along with any other options needed (e.g., keyboard layout switching).
As previously explained the hald daemon will, by default, automatically detect your keyboard. There are chances that your keyboard layout or model will not be correct, desktop environments like GNOME, KDE or Xfce provide tools to configure the keyboard. However, it is possible to set the keyboard properties directly either with the help of the setxkbmap(1) utility or with a hald's configuration rule.
For example if, one wants to use a PC 102 keys keyboard
coming with a french layout, we have to create a keyboard
configuration file for hald
x11-input.fdi and saved in the
directory. This file should contain the following
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?> <deviceinfo version="0.2"> <device> <match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.keyboard"> <merge key="input.x11_options.XkbModel" type="string">pc102</merge> <merge key="input.x11_options.XkbLayout" type="string">fr</merge> </match> </device> </deviceinfo>
If this file already exists, just copy and add to your file the lines regarding the keyboard configuration.
You will have to reboot your machine to force hald to read this file.
It is possible to do the same configuration from an X terminal or a script with this command line:
setxkbmap -model pc102 -layout fr
lists the various keyboard, layouts and options
xorg.conf.new configuration file
may now be tuned to taste. Open the file in a text editor
such as emacs(1) or ee(1). If the monitor is an
older or unusual model that does not support autodetection of
sync frequencies, those settings can be added to
xorg.conf.new under the
"Monitor" section:
Section "Monitor" Identifier "Monitor0" VendorName "Monitor Vendor" ModelName "Monitor Model" HorizSync 30-107 VertRefresh 48-120 EndSection
Most monitors support sync frequency autodetection, making manual entry of these values unnecessary. For the few monitors that do not support autodetection, avoid potential damage by only entering values provided by the manufacturer.
X allows DPMS (Energy Star) features to be used with capable monitors. The xset(1) program controls the time-outs and can force standby, suspend, or off modes. If you wish to enable DPMS features for your monitor, you must add the following line to the monitor section:
Option "DPMS"
While the
xorg.conf.new configuration
file is still open in an editor, select the default resolution
and color depth desired. This is defined in the
"Screen" section:
Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen0" Device "Card0" Monitor "Monitor0" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Viewport 0 0 Depth 24 Modes "1024x768" EndSubSection EndSection
DefaultDepth keyword describes the
color depth to run at by default. This can be overridden with
-depth command line switch to
Xorg(1). The
Modes keyword describes
the resolution to run at for the given color depth. Note that
only VESA standard modes are supported as defined by the
target system's graphics hardware. In the example above, the
default color depth is twenty-four bits per pixel. At this
color depth, the accepted resolution is 1024 by 768
Finally, write the configuration file and test it using the test mode given above.
One of the tools available to assist you during
troubleshooting process are the
Xorg log files, which contain
information on each device that the
Xorg server attaches to.
Xorg log file names are in the
format of
/var/log/Xorg.0.log. The
exact name of the log can vary from
Xorg.0.log to
Xorg.8.log and so forth.
If all is well, the configuration file needs to be
installed in a common location where Xorg(1) can find it.
This is typically
/etc/X11/xorg.conf or
cp xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf
The Xorg configuration process is now complete. Xorg may be now started with the startx(1) utility. The Xorg server may also be started with the use of xdm(1).
Configuration with Intel® i810 integrated chipsets
requires the
agpgart AGP programming
interface for Xorg to drive the
card. See the agp(4) driver manual page for more
This will allow configuration of the hardware as any
other graphics board. Note on systems without the
agp(4) driver compiled in the kernel, trying to load
the module with kldload(8) will not work. This driver
has to be in the kernel at boot time through being compiled
in or using
This section assumes a bit of advanced configuration knowledge. If attempts to use the standard configuration tools above have not resulted in a working configuration, there is information enough in the log files to be of use in getting the setup working. Use of a text editor will be necessary.
Current widescreen (WSXGA, WSXGA+, WUXGA, WXGA, WXGA+, et.al.) formats support 16:10 and 10:9 formats or aspect ratios that can be problematic. Examples of some common screen resolutions for 16:10 aspect ratios are:
At some point, it will be as easy as adding one of these
resolutions as a possible
Mode in the
Section "Screen" as such:
Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen0" Device "Card0" Monitor "Monitor0" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Viewport 0 0 Depth 24 Modes "1680x1050" EndSubSection EndSection
Xorg is smart enough to pull the resolution information from the widescreen via I2C/DDC information so it knows what the monitor can handle as far as frequencies and resolutions.
If those
ModeLines do not exist in
the drivers, one might need to give
Xorg a little hint. Using
/var/log/Xorg.0.log one can extract
enough information to manually create a
ModeLine that will work. Simply look for
information resembling this:
(II) MGA(0): Supported additional Video Mode: (II) MGA(0): clock: 146.2 MHz Image Size: 433 x 271 mm (II) MGA(0): h_active: 1680 h_sync: 1784 h_sync_end 1960 h_blank_end 2240 h_border: 0 (II) MGA(0): v_active: 1050 v_sync: 1053 v_sync_end 1059 v_blanking: 1089 v_border: 0 (II) MGA(0): Ranges: V min: 48 V max: 85 Hz, H min: 30 H max: 94 kHz, PixClock max 170 MHz
This information is called EDID information. Creating a
ModeLine from this is just a matter of
putting the numbers in the correct order:
ModeLine <name> <clock> <4 horiz. timings> <4 vert. timings>
So that the
ModeLine in
Section "Monitor" for this example would
look like this:
Section "Monitor" Identifier "Monitor1" VendorName "Bigname" ModelName "BestModel" ModeLine "1680x1050" 146.2 1680 1784 1960 2240 1050 1053 1059 1089 Option "DPMS" EndSection
Now having completed these simple editing steps, X should start on your new widescreen monitor.
I have installed Compiz Fusion, and after running the commands you mention, my windows are left without title bars and buttons. What is wrong?
You are probably missing a setting in
When I run the command to start Compiz Fusion, the X server crashes and I am back at the console. What is wrong?
If you check
(EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to initialize the GLX module; please check in your X (EE) NVIDIA(0): log file that the GLX module has been loaded in your X (EE) NVIDIA(0): server, and that the module is the NVIDIA GLX module. If (EE) NVIDIA(0): you continue to encounter problems, Please try (EE) NVIDIA(0): reinstalling the NVIDIA driver.
This is usually the case when you upgrade Xorg. You will need to reinstall the x11/nvidia-driver package so glx is built again.
Now that the basics have been covered, this part of the FreeBSD Handbook will discuss some frequently used features of FreeBSD. These chapters:
Introduce you to popular and useful desktop applications: browsers, productivity tools, document viewers, etc.
Introduce you to a number of multimedia tools available for FreeBSD.
Explain the process of building a customized FreeBSD kernel, to enable extra functionality on your system.
Describe the print system in detail, both for desktop and network-connected printer setups.
Show you how to run Linux applications on your FreeBSD system.
Some of these chapters recommend that you do some prior reading, and this is noted in the synopsis at the beginning of each chapter.
While FreeBSD is popular as a server for its performance and stability, it is also suited for day-to-day use as a desktop. With over 24,000 applications available as FreeBSD packages or ports, it is easy to build a customized desktop that runs a wide variety of desktop applications. This chapter demonstrates how to install numerous desktop applications, including web browsers, productivity software, document viewers, and financial software.
Users who prefer to install a pre-built desktop version of FreeBSD rather than configuring one from scratch should refer to the pcbsd.org website.
Readers of this chapter should know how to:
Install additional software using packages or ports as described in Chapter 5, Installing Applications: Packages and Ports.
Install X and a window manager as described in Chapter 6, The X Window System.
For information on how to configure a multimedia environment, refer to Chapter 8, Multimedia.
FreeBSD does not come with a pre-installed web browser. Instead, the www category of the Ports Collection contains many browsers which can be installed as a package or compiled from the Ports Collection.
The KDE and GNOME desktop environments include their own HTML browser. Refer to Section 6.7, "Desktop Environments" for more information on how to set up these complete desktops.
Some light-weight browsers include www/dillo2, www/links, and www/w3m.
This section demonstrates how to install the following popular web browsers and indicates if the application is resource-heavy, takes time to compile from ports, or has any major dependencies.
|Application Name
|Resources Needed
|Installation from Ports
|FreeBSD, Linux®, and localized versions are available
|FreeBSD and Linux® versions are available
|Requires KDE libraries
|Requires Gtk+
Firefox is an open source browser that is fully ported to FreeBSD. It features a standards-compliant HTML display engine, tabbed browsing, popup blocking, extensions, improved security, and more. Firefox is based on the Mozilla codebase.
To install the package of the latest release version of Firefox, type:
pkg install firefox
To instead install Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) version, use:
pkg install firefox-esr
Localized versions are available in www/firefox-i18n and www/firefox-esr-i18n.
The Ports Collection can instead be used to compile the
desired version of Firefox from
source code. This example builds
www/firefox, where
firefox can be replaced with the ESR or
localized version to install.
cd /usr/ports/www/firefox
make install clean
The installation of Firefox does not include Java™ support. However, java/icedtea-web provides a free software web browser plugin for running Java applets. It can be installed as a package. To alternately compile the port:
cd /usr/ports/java/icedtea-web
make install clean
Keep the default configuration options when compiling the port.
Once installed, start firefox,
about:plugins in the location bar and
press Enter. A page listing the installed
plugins will be displayed. The
Java™ plugin should be
If the browser is unable to find the plugin, each user will have to run the following command and relaunch the browser:
ln -s /usr/local/lib/IcedTeaPlugin.so \ $HOME/.mozilla/plugins/
A native Adobe® Flash® plugin is not available for FreeBSD. However, a software wrapper for running the Linux® version of the plugin is available. This wrapper also provides support for other browser plugins such as RealPlayer®.
To install and enable this plugin, perform these steps:
Install www/nspluginwrapper from the port. Due to licensing restrictions, a package is not available. This port requires emulators/linux_base-c6.
Install www/linux-c6-flashplugin11 from the port. Due to licensing restrictions, a package is not available.
Before the plugin is first used, each user must run:
nspluginwrapper -v -a -i
When the plugin port has been updated and reinstalled, each user must run:
nspluginwrapper -v -a -u
Start the browser, enter
about:plugins in the location bar and
press Enter. A list of all the currently
available plugins will be shown.
Swfdec is a decoder and renderer for Flash® animations. Swfdec-Mozilla is a plugin for Firefox browsers that uses the Swfdec library for playing SWF files.
To install the package:
pkg install swfdec-plugin
If the package is not available, compile and install it from the Ports Collection:
cd /usr/ports/www/swfdec-plugin
make install clean
Restart the browser to activate this plugin.
Opera is a full-featured and standards-compliant browser which is still lightweight and fast. It comes with a built-in mail and news reader, an IRC client, an RSS/Atom feeds reader, and more. It is available as a native FreeBSD version and as a version that runs under Linux® emulation.
This command installs the package of the FreeBSD version of
Opera. Replace
opera with
to instead install the Linux® version.
pkg install opera
Alternately, install either version through the Ports Collection. This example compiles the native version:
cd /usr/ports/www/opera
make install clean
To install the Linux® version, substitute
linux-opera in place of
To install Adobe® Flash® plugin support, first compile the www/linux-c6-flashplugin11 port. Licensing restrictions prevent making a package available. Then install www/opera-linuxplugins. This example compiles both applications from ports:
cd /usr/ports/www/linux-c6-flashplugin11
make install clean
cd /usr/ports/www/opera-linuxplugins
make install clean
Once installed, check the presence of the plugin by
starting the browser, entering
opera:plugins in the location bar and
pressing Enter. A list should appear with
all the currently available plugins.
To add the Java™ plugin, follow the instructions in Section 22.214.171.124, "Firefox and Java™ Plugin".
Konqueror is more than a web browser as it is also a file manager and a multimedia viewer. It is included in the x11/kde4-baseapps package or port.
Konqueror supports WebKit as well as its own KHTML. WebKit is a rendering engine used by many modern browsers including Chromium. To use WebKit with Konqueror on FreeBSD, install the www/kwebkitpart package or port. This example compiles the port:
cd /usr/ports/www/kwebkitpart
make install clean
To enable WebKit within Konqueror, click "Settings", "Configure Konqueror". In the "General" settings page, click the drop-down menu next to "Default web browser engine" and change "KHTML" to "WebKit".
Konqueror also supports
Flash®. A "How To"
guide for getting Flash® support
on Konqueror is available at
Chromium is an open source browser project that aims to build a safer, faster, and more stable web browsing experience. Chromium features tabbed browsing, popup blocking, extensions, and much more. Chromium is the open source project upon which the Google Chrome web browser is based.
Chromium can be installed as a package by typing:
pkg install chromium
Alternatively, Chromium can be compiled from source using the Ports Collection:
cd /usr/ports/www/chromium
make install clean
The executable for Chromium
/usr/local/bin/chrome, not
The installation of Chromium does not include Java™ support. To install Java™ plugin support, follow the instructions in Section 126.96.36.199, "Firefox and Java™ Plugin".
Once Java™ support is installed, start
Chromium and enter
about:plugins in the address bar.
IcedTea-Web should be listed as one of the installed
If Chromium does not display the IcedTea-Web plugin, run the following commands and restart the web browser:
mkdir -p /usr/local/share/chromium/plugins
#ln -s /usr/local/lib/IcedTeaPlugin.so \ /usr/local/share/chromium/plugins/
Configuring Chromium and Adobe® Flash® is similar to the instructions in Section 18.104.22.168, "Firefox and Adobe® Flash® Plugin". No additional configuration should be necessary, since Chromium is able to use some plugins from other browsers.
When it comes to productivity, new users often look for an office suite or an easy-to-use word processor. While some desktop environments like KDE provide an office suite, there is no default productivity package. Several office suites and graphical word processors are available for FreeBSD, regardless of the installed window manager.
This section demonstrates how to install the following popular productivity software and indicates if the application is resource-heavy, takes time to compile from ports, or has any major dependencies.
|Application Name
|Resources Needed
|Installation from Ports
|Major Dependencies
|Gtk+ or GNOME
|The Gimp
|Apache OpenOffice
|JDK™ and Mozilla
|somewhat heavy
|Gtk+, or KDE/ GNOME, or JDK™
The KDE desktop environment includes an office suite which can be installed separately from KDE. Calligra includes standard components that can be found in other office suites. Words is the word processor, Sheets is the spreadsheet program, Stage manages slide presentations, and Karbon is used to draw graphical documents.
In FreeBSD, editors/calligra can be installed as a package or a port. To install the package:
pkg install calligra
If the package is not available, use the Ports Collection instead:
cd /usr/ports/editors/calligra
make install clean
AbiWord is a free word processing program similar in look and feel to Microsoft® Word. It is fast, contains many features, and is user-friendly.
AbiWord can import or export
many file formats, including some proprietary ones like
To install the AbiWord package:
pkg install abiword
If the package is not available, it can be compiled from the Ports Collection:
cd /usr/ports/editors/abiword
make install clean
For image authoring or picture retouching, The GIMP provides a sophisticated image manipulation program. It can be used as a simple paint program or as a quality photo retouching suite. It supports a large number of plugins and features a scripting interface. The GIMP can read and write a wide range of file formats and supports interfaces with scanners and tablets.
To install the package:
pkg install gimp
Alternately, use the Ports Collection:
cd /usr/ports/graphics/gimp
make install clean
The graphics category (freebsd.org/ports/graphics.html) of the Ports Collection contains several GIMP-related plugins, help files, and user manuals.
Apache OpenOffice is an open source office suite which is developed under the wing of the Apache Software Foundation's Incubator. It includes all of the applications found in a complete office productivity suite: a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program. Its user interface is similar to other office suites, and it can import and export in various popular file formats. It is available in a number of different languages and internationalization has been extended to interfaces, spell checkers, and dictionaries.
The word processor of Apache OpenOffice uses a native XML file format for increased portability and flexibility. The spreadsheet program features a macro language which can be interfaced with external databases. Apache OpenOffice is stable and runs natively on Windows®, Solaris™, Linux®, FreeBSD, and Mac OS® X. More information about Apache OpenOffice can be found at openoffice.org. For FreeBSD specific information refer to porting.openoffice.org/freebsd/.
To install the Apache OpenOffice package:
pkg install apache-openoffice
Once the package is installed, type the following command to launch Apache OpenOffice:
X.Y.Z is the version
number of the installed version of Apache
OpenOffice. The first time
Apache OpenOffice launches, some
questions will be asked and a
.openoffice.org folder will be created in
the user's home directory.
If the desired Apache OpenOffice package is not available, compiling the port is still an option. However, this requires a lot of disk space and a fairly long time to compile:
cd /usr/ports/editors/openoffice-4
make install clean
To build a localized version, replace the previous command with:
make LOCALIZED_LANG=
your_languageinstall clean
your_language with the correct
language ISO-code. A list of supported language codes is
available in
files/Makefile.localized, located in
the port's directory.
LibreOffice is a free software office suite developed by documentfoundation.org. It is compatible with other major office suites and available on a variety of platforms. It is a rebranded fork of OpenOffice.org and includes applications found in a complete office productivity suite: a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, drawing program, database management program, and a tool for creating and editing mathematical formulæ. It is available in a number of different languages and internationalization has been extended to interfaces, spell checkers, and dictionaries.
The word processor of LibreOffice uses a native XML file format for increased portability and flexibility. The spreadsheet program features a macro language which can be interfaced with external databases. LibreOffice is stable and runs natively on Windows®, Linux®, FreeBSD, and Mac OS® X. More information about LibreOffice can be found at libreoffice.org.
To install the English version of the LibreOffice package:
pkg install libreoffice
The editors category (freebsd.org/ports/editors.html)
of the Ports Collection contains several localizations for
LibreOffice. When installing a
localized package, replace
with the name of the localized package.
Once the package is installed, type the following command to run LibreOffice:
During the first launch, some questions will be asked
and a
.libreoffice folder will be created
in the user's home directory.
If the desired LibreOffice package is not available, compiling the port is still an option. However, this requires a lot of disk space and a fairly long time to compile. This example compiles the English version:
cd /usr/ports/editors/libreoffice
make install clean
To build a localized version,
cd into the port directory of
the desired language. Supported languages can be found
in the editors category (freebsd.org/ports/editors.html)
of the Ports Collection.
Some new document formats have gained popularity since the advent of UNIX® and the viewers they require may not be available in the base system. This section demonstrates how to install the following document viewers:
|Application Name
|Resources Needed
|Installation from Ports
|Major Dependencies
|Gtk+ or GNOME
For users that prefer a small FreeBSD PDF viewer, Xpdf provides a light-weight and efficient viewer which requires few resources. It uses the standard X fonts and does not require any additional toolkits.
To install the Xpdf package:
pkg install xpdf
If the package is not available, use the Ports Collection:
cd /usr/ports/graphics/xpdf
make install clean
Once the installation is complete, launch
xpdf and use the right mouse button to
activate the menu.
gv is a PostScript® and PDF viewer. It is based on ghostview, but has a nicer look as it is based on the Xaw3d widget toolkit. gv has many configurable features, such as orientation, paper size, scale, and anti-aliasing. Almost any operation can be performed with either the keyboard or the mouse.
To install gv as a package:
pkg install gv
If a package is unavailable, use the Ports Collection:
cd /usr/ports/print/gv
make install clean
GQview is an image manager which supports viewing a file with a single click, launching an external editor, and thumbnail previews. It also features a slideshow mode and some basic file operations, making it easy to manage image collections and to find duplicate files. GQview supports full screen viewing and internationalization.
To install the GQview package:
pkg install gqview
If the package is not available, use the Ports Collection:
cd /usr/ports/graphics/gqview
make install clean
ePDFView is a lightweight PDF document viewer that only uses the Gtk+ and Poppler libraries. It is currently under development, but already opens most PDF files (even encrypted), save copies of documents, and has support for printing using CUPS.
To install ePDFView as a package:
pkg install epdfview
If a package is unavailable, use the Ports Collection:
cd /usr/ports/graphics/epdfview
make install clean
Okular is a universal document viewer based on KPDF for KDE. It can open many document formats, including PDF, PostScript®, DjVu, CHM, XPS, and ePub.
To install Okular as a package:
pkg install okular
If a package is unavailable, use the Ports Collection:
cd /usr/ports/graphics/okular
make install clean
For managing personal finances on a FreeBSD desktop, some powerful and easy-to-use applications can be installed. Some are compatible with widespread file formats, such as the formats used by Quicken and Excel.
This section covers these programs:
|Application Name
|Resources Needed
|Installation from Ports
|Major Dependencies
GnuCash is part of the GNOME effort to provide user-friendly, yet powerful, applications to end-users. GnuCash can be used to keep track of income and expenses, bank accounts, and stocks. It features an intuitive interface while remaining professional.
GnuCash provides a smart register, a hierarchical system of accounts, and many keyboard accelerators and auto-completion methods. It can split a single transaction into several more detailed pieces. GnuCash can import and merge Quicken QIF files. It also handles most international date and currency formats.
To install the GnuCash package:
pkg install gnucash
If the package is not available, use the Ports Collection:
cd /usr/ports/finance/gnucash
make install clean
Gnumeric is a spreadsheet program developed by the GNOME community. It features convenient automatic guessing of user input according to the cell format with an autofill system for many sequences. It can import files in a number of popular formats, including Excel, Lotus 1-2-3, and Quattro Pro. It has a large number of built-in functions and allows all of the usual cell formats such as number, currency, date, time, and much more.
To install Gnumeric as a package:
pkg install gnumeric
If the package is not available, use the Ports Collection:
cd /usr/ports/math/gnumeric
make install clean
KMyMoney is a personal finance application created by the KDE community. KMyMoney aims to provide the important features found in commercial personal finance manager applications. It also highlights ease-of-use and proper double-entry accounting among its features. KMyMoney imports from standard Quicken QIF files, tracks investments, handles multiple currencies, and provides a wealth of reports.
To install KMyMoney as a package:
pkg install kmymoney-kde4
If the package is not available, use the Ports Collection:
cd /usr/ports/finance/kmymoney-kde4
make install clean
FreeBSD supports a wide variety of sound cards, allowing users to enjoy high fidelity output from a FreeBSD system. This includes the ability to record and playback audio in the MPEG Audio Layer 3 (MP3), Waveform Audio File (WAV), Ogg Vorbis, and other formats. The FreeBSD Ports Collection contains many applications for editing recorded audio, adding sound effects, and controlling attached MIDI devices.
FreeBSD also supports the playback of video files and DVDs. The FreeBSD Ports Collection contains applications to encode, convert, and playback various video media.
This chapter describes how to configure sound cards, video playback, TV tuner cards, and scanners on FreeBSD. It also describes some of the applications which are available for using these devices.
After reading this chapter, you will know how to:
Configure a sound card on FreeBSD.
Troubleshoot the sound setup.
Playback and encode MP3s and other audio.
Prepare a FreeBSD system for video playback.
Play DVDs,
.avi files.
Rip CD and DVD content into files.
Configure a TV card.
Install and setup MythTV on FreeBSD
Configure an image scanner.
Before reading this chapter, you should:
Know how to install applications as described in Chapter 5, Installing Applications: Packages and Ports.
Before beginning the configuration, determine the model of the sound card and the chip it uses. FreeBSD supports a wide variety of sound cards. Check the supported audio devices list of the Hardware Notes to see if the card is supported and which FreeBSD driver it uses.
In order to use the sound device, its device driver must be loaded. The easiest way is to load a kernel module for the sound card with kldload(8). This example loads the driver for a built-in audio chipset based on the Intel specification:
kldload snd_hda
To automate the loading of this driver at boot time, add the
driver to
/boot/loader.conf. The line for
this driver is:
Other available sound modules are listed in
/boot/defaults/loader.conf. When unsure
which driver to use, load the
kldload snd_driver
This is a metadriver which loads all of the most common
sound drivers and can be used to speed up the search for the
correct driver. It is also possible to load all sound drivers
by adding the metadriver to
To determine which driver was selected for the sound card
after loading the
snd_driver metadriver,
cat /dev/sndstat.
This section is for users who prefer to statically compile in support for the sound card in a custom kernel. For more information about recompiling a kernel, refer to Chapter 9, Configuring the FreeBSD Kernel.
When using a custom kernel to provide sound support, make sure that the audio framework driver exists in the custom kernel configuration file:
device sound
Next, add support for the sound card. To continue the example of the built-in audio chipset based on the Intel specification from the previous section, use the following line in the custom kernel configuration file:
device snd_hda
Be sure to read the manual page of the driver for the device name to use for the driver.
Non-PnP ISA sound cards may require the IRQ and I/O port
settings of the card to be added to
/boot/device.hints. During the boot
process, loader(8) reads this file and passes the
settings to the kernel. For example, an old Creative
SoundBlaster® 16 ISA non-PnP card will use the
snd_sbc(4) driver in conjunction with
snd_sb16. For this card, the following
lines must be added to the kernel configuration file:
device snd_sbc device snd_sb16
If the card uses the
0x220 I/O port and
5, these lines must also be added to
hint.sbc.0.at="isa" hint.sbc.0.port="0x220" hint.sbc.0.irq="5" hint.sbc.0.drq="1" hint.sbc.0.flags="0x15"
In this case, the card uses the
I/O port and the IRQ
The syntax used in
is described in sound(4) and the manual page for the
driver of the sound card.
The settings shown above are the defaults. In some cases, the IRQ or other settings may need to be changed to match the card. Refer to snd_sbc(4) for more information about this card.
After loading the required module or rebooting into the
custom kernel, the sound card should be detected. To confirm,
dmesg | grep pcm. This example is
from a system with a built-in Conexant CX20590 chipset:
pcm0: <NVIDIA (0x001c) (HDMI/DP 8ch)> at nid 5 on hdaa0 pcm1: <NVIDIA (0x001c) (HDMI/DP 8ch)> at nid 6 on hdaa0 pcm2: <Conexant CX20590 (Analog 2.0+HP/2.0)> at nid 31,25 and 35,27 on hdaa1
The status of the sound card may also be checked using this command:
cat /dev/sndstatFreeBSD Audio Driver (newpcm: 64bit 2009061500/amd64) Installed devices: pcm0: <NVIDIA (0x001c) (HDMI/DP 8ch)> (play) pcm1: <NVIDIA (0x001c) (HDMI/DP 8ch)> (play) pcm2: <Conexant CX20590 (Analog 2.0+HP/2.0)> (play/rec) default
The output will vary depending upon the sound card. If no
pcm devices are listed, double-check
that the correct device driver was loaded or compiled into the
kernel. The next section lists some common problems and their
If all goes well, the sound card should now work in os;. If the CD or DVD drive is properly connected to the sound card, one can insert an audio CD in the drive and play it with cdcontrol(1):
cdcontrol -f /dev/acd0 play 1
Audio CDs have specialized encodings which means that they should not be mounted using mount(8).
Various applications, such as audio/workman, provide a friendlier interface. The audio/mpg123 port can be installed to listen to MP3 audio files.
Another quick way to test the card is to send data to
filename> /dev/dsp
be any type of file. This command should produce some noise,
confirming that the sound card is working.
/dev/dsp* device nodes will
be created automatically as needed. When not in use, they
do not exist and will not appear in the output of
Table 8.1 lists some common error messages and their solutions:
|sb_dspwr(XX) timed out
The I/O port is not set correctly.
|bad irq XX
The IRQ is set incorrectly. Make sure that the set IRQ and the sound IRQ are the same.
|xxx: gus pcm not attached, out of memory
There is not enough available memory to use the device.
|xxx: can't open /dev/dsp!
Modern graphics cards often come with their own sound
driver for use with HDMI. This sound
device is sometimes enumerated before the sound card meaning
that the sound card will not be used as the default playback
device. To check if this is the case, run
dmesg and look for
pcm. The output looks something like
... hdac0: HDA Driver Revision: 20100226_0142 hdac1: HDA Driver Revision: 20100226_0142 hdac0: HDA Codec #0: NVidia (Unknown) hdac0: HDA Codec #1: NVidia (Unknown) hdac0: HDA Codec #2: NVidia (Unknown) hdac0: HDA Codec #3: NVidia (Unknown) pcm0: <HDA NVidia (Unknown) PCM #0 DisplayPort> at cad 0 nid 1 on hdac0 pcm1: <HDA NVidia (Unknown) PCM #0 DisplayPort> at cad 1 nid 1 on hdac0 pcm2: <HDA NVidia (Unknown) PCM #0 DisplayPort> at cad 2 nid 1 on hdac0 pcm3: <HDA NVidia (Unknown) PCM #0 DisplayPort> at cad 3 nid 1 on hdac0 hdac1: HDA Codec #2: Realtek ALC889 pcm4: <HDA Realtek ALC889 PCM #0 Analog> at cad 2 nid 1 on hdac1 pcm5: <HDA Realtek ALC889 PCM #1 Analog> at cad 2 nid 1 on hdac1 pcm6: <HDA Realtek ALC889 PCM #2 Digital> at cad 2 nid 1 on hdac1 pcm7: <HDA Realtek ALC889 PCM #3 Digital> at cad 2 nid 1 on hdac1 ...
In this example, the graphics card
NVidia) has been enumerated before the
sound card (
Realtek ALC889). To use the
sound card as the default playback device, change
hw.snd.default_unit to the unit that should
be used for playback:
sysctl hw.snd.default_unit=
n is the number of the sound
device to use. In this example, it should be
4. Make this change permanent by adding
the following line to
It is often desirable to have multiple sources of sound that are able to play simultaneously. FreeBSD uses "Virtual Sound Channels" to multiplex the sound card's playback by mixing sound in the kernel.
Three sysctl(8) knobs are available for configuring virtual channels:
sysctl dev.pcm.0.play.vchans=4
sysctl dev.pcm.0.rec.vchans=4
sysctl hw.snd.maxautovchans=4
This example allocates four virtual channels, which is a
practical number for everyday use. Both
dev.pcm.0.play.vchans=4 and
dev.pcm.0.rec.vchans=4 are configurable after
a device has been attached and represent the number of virtual
pcm0 has for playback and
recording. Since the
pcm module can be
loaded independently of the hardware drivers,
hw.snd.maxautovchans indicates how many
virtual channels will be given to an audio device when it is
attached. Refer to pcm(4) for more information.
The number of virtual channels for a device cannot be changed while it is in use. First, close any programs using the device, such as music players or sound daemons.
The correct
pcm device will
automatically be allocated transparently to a program that
The default values for the different mixer channels are
hardcoded in the source code of the pcm(4) driver. While
sound card mixer levels can be changed using mixer(8) or
third-party applications and daemons, this is not a permanent
solution. To instead set default mixer values at the driver
level, define the appropriate values in
/boot/device.hints, as seen in this
This will set the volume channel to a default value of
50 when the pcm(4) module is
This section describes some MP3 players available for FreeBSD, how to rip audio CD tracks, and how to encode and decode MP3s.
A popular graphical MP3 player is XMMS. It supports Winamp skins and additional plugins. The interface is intuitive, with a playlist, graphic equalizer, and more. Those familiar with Winamp will find XMMS simple to use. On FreeBSD, XMMS can be installed from the multimedia/xmms port or package.
The audio/mpg123 package or port provides an alternative, command-line MP3 player. Once installed, specify the MP3 file to play on the command line. If the system has multiple audio devices, the sound device can also be specifed:
mpg123High Performance MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 Audio Player for Layers 1, 2 and 3 version 1.18.1; written and copyright by Michael Hipp and others free software (LGPL) without any warranty but with best wishes Playing MPEG stream from Foobar-GreatestHits.mp3 ... MPEG 1.0 layer III, 128 kbit/s, 44100 Hz joint-stereo
-a /dev/dsp1.0 Foobar-GreatestHits.mp3
Additional MP3 players are available in the FreeBSD Ports Collection.
Before encoding a CD or CD track to MP3, the audio data on the CD must be ripped to the hard drive. This is done by copying the raw CD Digital Audio (CDDA) data to WAV files.
cdda2wav tool, which is installed
with the sysutils/cdrtools suite, can be
used to rip audio information from
With the audio CD in the drive, the
following command can be issued as
root to rip an entire
CD into individual, per track,
WAV files:
cdda2wav -D
In this example, the
indicates the
SCSI device
containing the CD to rip. Use
cdrecord -scanbus to determine the correct
device parameters for the system.
To rip individual tracks, use
-t to
specify the track:
cdda2wav -D
0,1,0-t 7
To rip a range of tracks, such as track one to seven, specify a range:
cdda2wav -D
0,1,0-t 1+7
To rip from an ATAPI (IDE) CDROM drive, specify the device name in place of the SCSI unit numbers. For example, to rip track 7 from an IDE drive:
cdda2wav -D
/dev/acd0 -t 7
dd can be used to extract
audio tracks on ATAPI drives, as described
in Section 18.5.5, "Duplicating Audio CDs".
Lame is a popular MP3 encoder which can be installed from the audio/lame port. Due to patent issues, a package is not available.
The following command will convert the ripped
WAV file
lame -h -b
128--tt "
Foo Song Title" --ta "
FooBar Artist" --tl "
FooBar Album" \ --ty "
2014" --tc "
Ripped and encoded by Foo" --tg "
audio01.wav audio01.mp3
The specified 128 kbits is a standard
MP3 bitrate while the 160 and 192 bitrates
provide higher quality. The higher the bitrate, the larger
the size of the resulting MP3. The
-h turns on the "higher quality but a
little slower" mode. The options beginning with
--t indicate ID3 tags,
which usually contain song information, to be embedded within
the MP3 file. Additional encoding options
can be found in the lame manual
In order to burn an audio CD from MP3s, they must first be converted to a non-compressed file format. XMMS can be used to convert to the WAV format, while mpg123 can be used to convert to the raw Pulse-Code Modulation (PCM) audio data format.
To convert
audio01.mp3 using
mpg123, specify the name of the
PCM file:
mpg123 -s
To use XMMS to convert a MP3 to WAV format, use these steps:
Launch XMMS.
Right-click the window to bring up the XMMS menu.
Preferences under
Change the Output Plugin to "Disk Writer Plugin".
Enter or browse to a directory to write the uncompressed files to.
Load the MP3 file into XMMS as usual, with volume at 100% and EQ settings turned off.
Play. The
XMMS will appear as if it is
playing the MP3, but no music will be
heard. It is actually playing the MP3
to a file.
When finished, be sure to set the default Output Plugin back to what it was before in order to listen to MP3s again.
Both the WAV and PCM formats can be used with cdrecord. When using WAV files, there will be a small tick sound at the beginning of each track. This sound is the header of the WAV file. The audio/sox port or package can be used to remove the header:
sox -t wav -r 44100 -s -w -c 2
track.wav track.raw
Refer to Section 18.5, "Creating and Using CD Media" for more information on using a CD burner in FreeBSD.
Before configuring video playback, determine the model and
chipset of the video card. While
Xorg supports a wide variety of
video cards, not all provide good playback performance. To
obtain a list of extensions supported by the
Xorg server using the card, run
xdpyinfo while
Xorg is running.
It is a good idea to have a short MPEG test file for
evaluating various players and options. Since some
DVD applications look for
DVD media in
/dev/dvd by
default, or have this device name hardcoded in them, it might be
useful to make a symbolic link to the proper device:
ln -sf /dev/cd0 /dev/dvd
Due to the nature of devfs(5), manually created links
will not persist after a system reboot. In order to recreate
the symbolic link automatically when the system boots, add the
following line to
link cd0 dvd
DVD decryption invokes certain functions that require write permission to the DVD device.
To enhance the shared memory Xorg interface, it is recommended to increase the values of these sysctl(8) variables:
kern.ipc.shmmax=67108864 kern.ipc.shmall=32768
There are several possible ways to display video under Xorg and what works is largely hardware dependent. Each method described below will have varying quality across different hardware.
Common video interfaces include:
Xorg: normal output using shared memory.
XVideo: an extension to the Xorg interface which allows video to be directly displayed in drawable objects through a special acceleration. This extension provides good quality playback even on low-end machines. The next section describes how to determine if this extension is running.
SDL: the Simple Directmedia Layer is a porting layer for many operating systems, allowing cross-platform applications to be developed which make efficient use of sound and graphics. SDL provides a low-level abstraction to the hardware which can sometimes be more efficient than the Xorg interface. On FreeBSD, SDL can be installed using the devel/sdl20 package or port.
DGA: the Direct Graphics Access is
an Xorg extension which
allows a program to bypass the
Xorg server and directly
alter the framebuffer. Because it relies on a low level
memory mapping, programs using it must be run as
root. The
DGA extension can be tested and
benchmarked using dga(1). When
dga is running, it changes the colors
of the display whenever a key is pressed. To quit, press
SVGAlib: a low level console graphics layer.
To check whether this extension is running, use
XVideo is supported for the card if the result is similar to:
X-Video Extension version 2.2 screen #0 Adaptor #0: "Savage Streams Engine" number of ports: 1 port base: 43 operations supported: PutImage supported visuals: depth 16, visualID 0x22 depth 16, visualID 0x23 number of attributes: 5 "XV_COLORKEY" (range 0 to 16777215) client settable attribute client gettable attribute (current value is 2110) "XV_BRIGHTNESS" (range -128 to 127) client settable attribute client gettable attribute (current value is 0) "XV_CONTRAST" (range 0 to 255) client settable attribute client gettable attribute (current value is 128) "XV_SATURATION" (range 0 to 255) client settable attribute client gettable attribute (current value is 128) "XV_HUE" (range -180 to 180) client settable attribute client gettable attribute (current value is 0) maximum XvImage size: 1024 x 1024 Number of image formats: 7 id: 0x32595559 (YUY2) guid: 59555932-0000-0010-8000-00aa00389b71 bits per pixel: 16 number of planes: 1 type: YUV (packed) id: 0x32315659 (YV12) guid: 59563132-0000-0010-8000-00aa00389b71 bits per pixel: 12 number of planes: 3 type: YUV (planar) id: 0x30323449 (I420) guid: 49343230-0000-0010-8000-00aa00389b71 bits per pixel: 12 number of planes: 3 type: YUV (planar) id: 0x36315652 (RV16) guid: 52563135-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 bits per pixel: 16 number of planes: 1 type: RGB (packed) depth: 0 red, green, blue masks: 0x1f, 0x3e0, 0x7c00 id: 0x35315652 (RV15) guid: 52563136-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 bits per pixel: 16 number of planes: 1 type: RGB (packed) depth: 0 red, green, blue masks: 0x1f, 0x7e0, 0xf800 id: 0x31313259 (Y211) guid: 59323131-0000-0010-8000-00aa00389b71 bits per pixel: 6 number of planes: 3 type: YUV (packed) id: 0x0 guid: 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 bits per pixel: 0 number of planes: 0 type: RGB (packed) depth: 1 red, green, blue masks: 0x0, 0x0, 0x0
The formats listed, such as YUV2 and YUV12, are not present with every implementation of XVideo and their absence may hinder some players.
If the result instead looks like:
X-Video Extension version 2.2 screen #0 no adaptors present
XVideo is probably not supported for the card. This means that it will be more difficult for the display to meet the computational demands of rendering video, depending on the video card and processor.
This section introduces some of the software available from the FreeBSD Ports Collection which can be used for video playback.
MPlayer is a command-line video player with an optional graphical interface which aims to provide speed and flexibility. Other graphical front-ends to MPlayer are available from the FreeBSD Ports Collection.
MPlayer can be installed using the multimedia/mplayer package or port. Several compile options are available and a variety of hardware checks occur during the build process. For these reasons, some users prefer to build the port rather than install the package.
When compiling the port, the menu options should be reviewed to determine the type of support to compile into the port. If an option is not selected, MPlayer will not be able to display that type of video format. Use the arrow keys and spacebar to select the required formats. When finished, press Enter to continue the port compile and installation.
By default, the package or port will build the
mplayer command line utility and the
gmplayer graphical utility. To encode
videos, compile the multimedia/mencoder
port. Due to licensing restrictions, a package is not
available for MEncoder.
The first time MPlayer is
run, it will create
~/.mplayer in the
user's home directory. This subdirectory contains default
versions of the user-specific configuration files.
This section describes only a few common uses. Refer to mplayer(1) for a complete description of its numerous options.
To play the file
specify the video interfaces with
-vo, as
seen in the following examples:
mplayer -vo xv
mplayer -vo sdl
mplayer -vo x11
mplayer -vo dga
mplayer -vo 'sdl:dga'
It is worth trying all of these options, as their relative performance depends on many factors and will vary significantly with hardware.
To play a DVD, replace
dvd://, where
N -dvd-device
N is the title number to play and
DEVICE is the device node for the
DVD. For example, to play title 3 from
mplayer -vo xv dvd://3 -dvd-device /dev/dvd
The default DVD device can be
defined during the build of the
MPlayer port by including the
option. By default, the device is
/dev/cd0. More details can be found
in the port's
To stop, pause, advance, and so on, use a keybinding.
To see the list of keybindings, run
-h or read mplayer(1).
Additional playback options include
-zoom, which engages fullscreen mode, and
-framedrop, which helps performance.
Each user can add commonly used options to their
~/.mplayer/config like so:
vo=xv fs=yes zoom=yes
mplayer can be used to rip a
DVD title to a
To dump the second title from a
mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile out.vob dvd://2 -dvd-device /dev/dvd
The output file,
out.vob, will be
in MPEG format.
Anyone wishing to obtain a high level of expertise with UNIX® video should consult mplayerhq.hu/DOCS as it is technically informative. This documentation should be considered as required reading before submitting any bug reports.
Before using
mencoder, it is a good
idea to become familiar with the options described at mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/mencoder.html.
There are innumerable ways to improve quality, lower
bitrate, and change formats, and some of these options may
make the difference between good or bad performance.
Improper combinations of command line options can yield
output files that are unplayable even by
Here is an example of a simple copy:
input.avi-oac copy -ovc copy -o
To rip to a file, use
-dumpfile with
To convert
the MPEG4 codec with MPEG3 audio encoding, first install the
audio/lame port. Due to licensing
restrictions, a package is not available. Once installed,
input.avi-oac mp3lame -lameopts br=192 \ -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq -o
This will produce output playable by applications such
mplayer and
can be replaced with
dvd://1 -dvd-device
/dev/dvd and run as
root to re-encode a
DVD title directly. Since it may take a
few tries to get the desired result, it is recommended to
instead dump the title to a file and to work on the
xine is a video player with a reusable base library and a modular executable which can be extended with plugins. It can be installed using the multimedia/xine package or port.
In practice, xine requires either a fast CPU with a fast video card, or support for the XVideo extension. The xine video player performs best on XVideo interfaces.
By default, the xine player starts a graphical user interface. The menus can then be used to open a specific file.
Alternatively, xine may be invoked from the command line by specifying the name of the file to play:
xine -g -p
Refer to xine-project.org/faq for more information and troubleshooting tips.
Transcode provides a suite of tools for re-encoding video and audio files. Transcode can be used to merge video files or repair broken files using command line tools with stdin/stdout stream interfaces.
In FreeBSD, Transcode can be installed using the multimedia/transcode package or port. Many users prefer to compile the port as it provides a menu of compile options for specifying the support and codecs to compile in. If an option is not selected, Transcode will not be able to encode that format. Use the arrow keys and spacebar to select the required formats. When finished, press Enter to continue the port compile and installation.
This example demonstrates how to convert a DivX file into a PAL MPEG-1 file (PAL VCD):
transcode -i
input.avi-V --export_prof vcd-pal -o output_vcd
mplex -f 1 -o
output_vcd.mpg output_vcd.m1v output_vcd.mpa
The resulting MPEG file,
is ready to be played with
MPlayer. The file can be burned
on a CD media to create a video
CD using a utility such as
multimedia/vcdimager or
In addition to the manual page for
transcode, refer to transcoding.org/cgi-bin/transcode
for further information and examples.
TV cards can be used to watch broadcast or cable TV on a computer. Most cards accept composite video via an RCA or S-video input and some cards include a FM radio tuner.
FreeBSD provides support for PCI-based TV cards using a Brooktree Bt848/849/878/879 video capture chip with the bktr(4) driver. This driver supports most Pinnacle PCTV video cards. Before purchasing a TV card, consult bktr(4) for a list of supported tuners.
In order to use the card, the bktr(4) driver must be
loaded. To automate this at boot time, add the following line
Alternatively, one can statically compile support for the TV card into a custom kernel. In that case, add the following lines to the custom kernel configuration file:
device bktr device iicbus device iicbb device smbus
These additional devices are necessary as the card components are interconnected via an I2C bus. Then, build and install a new kernel.
To test that the tuner is correctly detected, reboot the system. The TV card should appear in the boot messages, as seen in this example:
bktr0: <BrookTree 848A> mem 0xd7000000-0xd7000fff irq 10 at device 10.0 on pci0 iicbb0: <I2C bit-banging driver> on bti2c0 iicbus0: <Philips I2C bus> on iicbb0 master-only iicbus1: <Philips I2C bus> on iicbb0 master-only smbus0: <System Management Bus> on bti2c0 bktr0: Pinnacle/Miro TV, Philips SECAM tuner.
The messages will differ according to the hardware. If necessary, it is possible to override some of the detected parameters using sysctl(8) or custom kernel configuration options. For example, to force the tuner to a Philips SECAM tuner, add the following line to a custom kernel configuration file:
options OVERRIDE_TUNER=6
or, use sysctl(8):
sysctl hw.bt848.tuner=6
Refer to bktr(4) for a description of the available sysctl(8) parameters and kernel options.
To use the TV card, install one of the following applications:
multimedia/fxtv provides TV-in-a-window and image/audio/video capture capabilities.
multimedia/xawtv is another TV application with similar features.
audio/xmradio provides an application for using the FM radio tuner of a TV card.
More applications are available in the FreeBSD Ports Collection.
If any problems are encountered with the TV card, check that the video capture chip and the tuner are supported by bktr(4) and that the right configuration options were used. For more support or to ask questions about supported TV cards, refer to the freebsd-multimedia mailing list.
MythTV is a popular, open source Personal Video Recorder (PVR) application. This section demonstrates how to install and setup MythTV on FreeBSD. Refer to mythtv.org/wiki for more information on how to use MythTV.
MythTV requires a frontend and a backend. These components can either be installed on the same system or on different machines.
The frontend can be installed on FreeBSD using the multimedia/mythtv-frontend package or port. Xorg must also be installed and configured as described in Chapter 6, The X Window System. Ideally, this system has a video card that supports X-Video Motion Compensation (XvMC) and, optionally, a Linux Infrared Remote Control (LIRC)-compatible remote.
To install both the backend and the frontend on FreeBSD, use the multimedia/mythtv package or port. A MySQL™ database server is also required and should automatically be installed as a dependency. Optionally, this system should have a tuner card and sufficient storage to hold recorded data.
MythTV uses Video for Linux (V4L) to access video input devices such as encoders and tuners. In FreeBSD, MythTV works best with USB DVB-S/C/T cards as they are well supported by the multimedia/webcamd package or port which provides a V4L userland application. Any Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) card supported by webcamd should work with MythTV. A list of known working cards can be found at wiki.freebsd.org/WebcamCompat. Drivers are also available for Hauppauge cards in the multimedia/pvr250 and multimedia/pvrxxx ports, but they provide a non-standard driver interface that does not work with versions of MythTV greater than 0.23. Due to licensing restrictions, no packages are available and these two ports must be compiled.
The wiki.freebsd.org/HTPC page contains a list of all available DVB drivers.
To install MythTV using the port:
cd /usr/ports/multimedia/mythtv
make install
Once installed, set up the MythTV database:
mysql -uroot -p < /usr/local/share/mythtv/database/mc.sql
Then, configure the backend:
Finally, start the backend:
echo 'mythbackend_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf
service mythbackend start
In FreeBSD, access to image scanners is provided by SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy), which is available in the FreeBSD Ports Collection. SANE will also use some FreeBSD device drivers to provide access to the scanner hardware.
FreeBSD supports both SCSI and USB scanners. Depending upon the scanner interface, different device drivers are required. Be sure the scanner is supported by SANE prior to performing any configuration. Refer to http://www.sane-project.org/sane-supported-devices.html for more information about supported scanners.
This chapter describes how to determine if the scanner has been detected by FreeBSD. It then provides an overview of how to configure and use SANE on a FreeBSD system.
GENERIC kernel includes the
device drivers needed to support USB
scanners. Users with a custom kernel should ensure that the
following lines are present in the custom kernel configuration
device usb device uhci device ohci device ehci
To determine if the USB scanner is
detected, plug it in and use
dmesg to
determine whether the scanner appears in the system message
buffer. If it does, it should display a message similar to
ugen0.2: <EPSON> at usbus0
In this example, an EPSON
Perfection® 1650
USB scanner was detected on
If the scanner uses a SCSI interface,
it is important to know which SCSI
controller board it will use. Depending upon the
SCSI chipset, a custom kernel configuration
file may be needed. The
GENERIC kernel
supports the most common SCSI controllers.
Refer to
/usr/src/sys/conf/NOTES to
determine the correct line to add to a custom kernel
configuration file. In addition to the
SCSI adapter driver, the following lines
are needed in a custom kernel configuration file:
device scbus device pass
Verify that the device is displayed in the system message buffer:
pass2 at aic0 bus 0 target 2 lun 0 pass2: <AGFA SNAPSCAN 600 1.10> Fixed Scanner SCSI-2 device pass2: 3.300MB/s transfers
If the scanner was not powered-on at system boot, it is
still possible to manually force detection by performing a
SCSI bus scan with
camcontrol rescan allRe-scan of bus 0 was successful Re-scan of bus 1 was successful Re-scan of bus 2 was successful Re-scan of bus 3 was successful
The scanner should now appear in the SCSI devices list:
camcontrol devlist<IBM DDRS-34560 S97B> at scbus0 target 5 lun 0 (pass0,da0) <IBM DDRS-34560 S97B> at scbus0 target 6 lun 0 (pass1,da1) <AGFA SNAPSCAN 600 1.10> at scbus1 target 2 lun 0 (pass3) <PHILIPS CDD3610 CD-R/RW 1.00> at scbus2 target 0 lun 0 (pass2,cd0)
Refer to scsi(4) and camcontrol(8) for more details about SCSI devices on FreeBSD.
The SANE system is split in two parts: the backends (graphics/sane-backends) and the frontends (graphics/sane-frontends or graphics/xsane). The backends provide access to the scanner. Refer to http://www.sane-project.org/sane-supported-devices.html to determine which backend supports the scanner. The frontends provide the graphical scanning interface. graphics/sane-frontends installs xscanimage while graphics/xsane installs xsane.
After installing the
graphics/sane-backends port or package, use
sane-find-scanner to check the scanner
detection by the SANE
sane-find-scanner -qfound SCSI scanner "AGFA SNAPSCAN 600 1.10" at /dev/pass3
The output should show the interface type of the scanner and the device node used to attach the scanner to the system. The vendor and the product model may or may not appear.
Some USB scanners require firmware to be loaded. Refer to sane-find-scanner(1) and sane(7) for details.
Next, check if the scanner will be identified by a
scanning frontend. The SANE
backends include
scanimage which can be
used to list the devices and perform an image acquisition.
-L to list the scanner devices. The
first example is for a SCSI scanner and the
second is for a USB scanner:
scanimage -Ldevice `snapscan:/dev/pass3' is a AGFA SNAPSCAN 600 flatbed scanner
scanimage -Ldevice 'epson2:libusb:/dev/usb:/dev/ugen0.2' is a Epson GT-8200 flatbed scanner
In this second example,
'epson2:libusb:/dev/usb:/dev/ugen0.2' is
the backend name (
epson2) and
/dev/ugen0.2 is the device node used by the
scanimage is unable to identify the
scanner, this message will appear:
scanimage -LNo scanners were identified. If you were expecting something different, check that the scanner is plugged in, turned on and detected by the sane-find-scanner tool (if appropriate). Please read the documentation which came with this software (README, FAQ, manpages).
If this happens, edit the backend configuration file in
/usr/local/etc/sane.d/ and define the
scanner device used. For example, if the undetected scanner
model is an EPSON
Perfection® 1650 and it uses the
epson2 backend, edit
/usr/local/etc/sane.d/epson2.conf. When
editing, add a line specifying the interface and the device
node used. In this case, add the following line:
usb /dev/ugen0.2
Save the edits and verify that the scanner is identified with the right backend name and the device node:
scanimage -Ldevice 'epson2:libusb:/dev/usb:/dev/ugen0.2' is a Epson GT-8200 flatbed scanner
scanimage -L sees the scanner, the
configuration is complete and the scanner is now ready to
scanimage can be used to perform
an image acquisition from the command line, it is often
preferable to use a graphical interface to perform image
scanning. The graphics/sane-frontends
package or port installs a simple but efficient graphical
interface, xscanimage.
Alternately, xsane, which is installed with the graphics/xsane package or port, is another popular graphical scanning frontend. It offers advanced features such as various scanning modes, color correction, and batch scans. Both of these applications are usable as a GIMP plugin.
In order to have access to the scanner, a user needs read
and write permissions to the device node used by the scanner.
In the previous example, the USB scanner
uses the device node
/dev/ugen0.2 which
is really a symlink to the real device node
/dev/usb/0.2.0. The symlink and the
device node are owned, respectively, by the
wheel and
operator groups. While
adding the user to these groups will allow access to the
scanner, it is considered insecure to add a user to
wheel. A better
solution is to create a group and make the scanner device
accessible to members of this group.
This example creates a group called
pw groupadd usb
Then, make the
/dev/ugen0.2 symlink
and the
/dev/usb/0.2.0 device node
accessible to the
usb group with write
permissions of
0660 or
0664 by adding the following lines to
[system=5] add path ugen0.2 mode 0660 group usb add path usb/0.2.0 mode 0666 group usb
Finally, add the users to
in order to allow access to the scanner:
pw groupmod usb -m
For more details refer to pw(8).
The kernel is the core of the FreeBSD operating system. It is responsible for managing memory, enforcing security controls, networking, disk access, and much more. While much of FreeBSD is dynamically configurable, it is still occasionally necessary to configure and compile a custom kernel.
After reading this chapter, you will know:
When to build a custom kernel.
How to take a hardware inventory.
How to customize a kernel configuration file.
How to use the kernel configuration file to create and build a new kernel.
How to install the new kernel.
How to troubleshoot if things go wrong.
All of the commands listed in the examples in this chapter
should be executed as
Traditionally, FreeBSD used a monolithic kernel. The kernel was one large program, supported a fixed list of devices, and in order to change the kernel's behavior, one had to compile and then reboot into a new kernel.
Today, most of the functionality in the FreeBSD kernel is contained in modules which can be dynamically loaded and unloaded from the kernel as necessary. This allows the running kernel to adapt immediately to new hardware or for new functionality to be brought into the kernel. This is known as a modular kernel.
Occasionally, it is still necessary to perform static kernel configuration. Sometimes the needed functionality is so tied to the kernel that it can not be made dynamically loadable. Some security environments prevent the loading and unloading of kernel modules and require that only needed functionality is statically compiled into the kernel.
Building a custom kernel is often a rite of passage for
advanced BSD users. This process, while time consuming, can
provide benefits to the FreeBSD system. Unlike the
GENERIC kernel, which must support a wide
range of hardware, a custom kernel can be stripped down to only
provide support for that computer's hardware. This has a number
of benefits, such as:
Faster boot time. Since the kernel will only probe the hardware on the system, the time it takes the system to boot can decrease.
Lower memory usage. A custom kernel often uses less
memory than the
GENERIC kernel by
omitting unused features and device drivers. This is
important because the kernel code remains resident in
physical memory at all times, preventing that memory from
being used by applications. For this reason, a custom
kernel is useful on a system with a small amount of
Additional hardware support. A custom kernel can add
support for devices which are not present in the
GENERIC kernel.
Before building a custom kernel, consider the reason for doing so. If there is a need for specific hardware support, it may already exist as a module.
Kernel modules exist in
and may be dynamically loaded into the running kernel using
kldload(8). Most kernel drivers have a loadable module and
manual page. For example, the ath(4) wireless Ethernet
driver has the following information in its manual page:
Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the following line in loader.conf(5): if_ath_load="YES"
if_ath_load="YES" to
/boot/loader.conf will load this module
dynamically at boot time.
In some cases, there is no associated module in
/boot/kernel. This is mostly true for
certain subsystems.
Before editing the kernel configuration file, it is recommended to perform an inventory of the machine's hardware. On a dual-boot system, the inventory can be created from the other operating system. For example, Microsoft®'s Device Manager contains information about installed devices.
Some versions of Microsoft® Windows® have a System icon which can be used to access Device Manager.
If FreeBSD is the only installed operating system, use dmesg(8) to determine the hardware that was found and listed during the boot probe. Most device drivers on FreeBSD have a manual page which lists the hardware supported by that driver. For example, the following lines indicate that the psm(4) driver found a mouse:
psm0: <PS/2 Mouse> irq 12 on atkbdc0 psm0: [GIANT-LOCKED] psm0: [ITHREAD] psm0: model Generic PS/2 mouse, device ID 0
Since this hardware exists, this driver should not be removed from a custom kernel configuration file.
If the output of
dmesg does not display
the results of the boot probe output, instead read the contents
Another tool for finding hardware is pciconf(8), which provides more verbose output. For example:
pciconf -lvath0@pci0:3:0:0: class=0x020000 card=0x058a1014 chip=0x1014168c rev=0x01 hdr=0x00 vendor = 'Atheros Communications Inc.' device = 'AR5212 Atheros AR5212 802.11abg wireless' class = network subclass = ethernet
This output shows that the
ath driver
located a wireless Ethernet device.
-k flag of man(1) can be used to
provide useful information. For example, to display a list of
manual pages which contain the specified word:
man -k
ath(4) - Atheros IEEE 802.11 wireless network driver ath_hal(4) - Atheros Hardware Access Layer (HAL)
Once the hardware inventory list is created, refer to it to ensure that drivers for installed hardware are not removed as the custom kernel configuration is edited.
In order to create a custom kernel configuration file and build a custom kernel, the full FreeBSD source tree must first be installed.
/usr/src/ does not exist or it is
empty, source has not been installed. Source can be installed
using Subversion and the instructions
in Section A.4, "Using Subversion".
Once source is installed, review the contents of
/usr/src/sys. This directory contains a
number of subdirectories, including those which represent the
following supported architectures:
powerpc, and
sparc64. Everything inside a particular
architecture's directory deals with that architecture only and
the rest of the code is machine independent code common to all
platforms. Each supported architecture has a
conf subdirectory which contains the
GENERIC kernel configuration file for that
Do not make edits to
GENERIC. Instead,
copy the file to a different name and make edits to the copy.
The convention is to use a name with all capital letters. When
maintaining multiple FreeBSD machines with different hardware, it
is a good idea to name it after the machine's hostname. This
example creates a copy, named
MYKERNEL, of
GENERIC configuration file for the
amd64 architecture:
cd /usr/src/sys/
cp GENERIC
now be customized with any ASCII text editor.
The default editor is vi, though an
easier editor for beginners, called
ee, is also installed with
The format of the kernel configuration file is simple.
Each line contains a keyword that represents a device or
subsystem, an argument, and a brief description. Any text
after a
# is considered a comment and
ignored. To remove kernel support for a device or subsystem,
put a
# at the beginning of the line
representing that device or subsystem. Do not add or remove a
# for any line that you do not
It is easy to remove support for a device or option and end up with a broken kernel. For example, if the ata(4) driver is removed from the kernel configuration file, a system using ATA disk drivers may not boot. When in doubt, just leave support in the kernel.
In addition to the brief descriptions provided in this file,
additional descriptions are contained in
NOTES, which can be found in the same
directory as
GENERIC for that architecture.
For architecture independent options, refer to
When finished customizing the kernel configuration file,
save a backup copy to a location outside of
Alternately, keep the kernel configuration file elsewhere and create a symbolic link to the file:
cd /usr/src/sys/amd64/conf
mkdir /root/kernels
cp GENERIC /root/kernels/MYKERNEL
ln -s /root/kernels/MYKERNEL
include directive is available for use
in configuration files. This allows another configuration file
to be included in the current one, making it easy to maintain
small changes relative to an existing file. If only a small
number of additional options or drivers are required, this
allows a delta to be maintained with respect to
GENERIC, as seen in this example:
include GENERIC ident MYKERNEL options IPFIREWALL options DUMMYNET options IPFIREWALL_DEFAULT_TO_ACCEPT options IPDIVERT
Using this method, the local configuration file expresses
local differences from a
GENERIC kernel.
As upgrades are performed, new features added to
GENERIC will also be added to the local
kernel unless they are specifically prevented using
nooptions or
nodevice. A
comprehensive list of configuration directives and their
descriptions may be found in config(5).
To build a file which contains all available options,
run the following command as
cd /usr/src/sys/
arch/conf && make LINT
Once the edits to the custom configuration file have been saved, the source code for the kernel can be compiled using the following steps:
Change to this directory:
cd /usr/src
Compile the new kernel by specifying the name of the custom kernel configuration file:
make buildkernel KERNCONF=
Install the new kernel associated with the specified
kernel configuration file. This command will copy the new
kernel to
/boot/kernel/kernel and save
the old kernel to
make installkernel KERNCONF=
Shutdown the system and reboot into the new kernel. If something goes wrong, refer to The kernel does not boot.
By default, when a custom kernel is compiled, all kernel
modules are rebuilt. To update a kernel faster or to build
only custom modules, edit
before starting to build the kernel.
For example, this variable specifies the list of modules to build instead of using the default of building all modules:
MODULES_OVERRIDE = linux acpi
Alternately, this variable lists which modules to exclude from the build process:
WITHOUT_MODULES = linux acpi sound
Additional variables are available. Refer to make.conf(5) for details.
There are four categories of trouble that can occur when building a custom kernel:
config fails
config fails, it will print the
line number that is incorrect. As an example, for the
following message, make sure that line 17 is typed
correctly by comparing it to
config: line 17: syntax error
make fails
make fails, it is usually due to
an error in the kernel configuration file which is not
severe enough for
config to catch.
Review the configuration, and if the problem is not
apparent, send an email to the FreeBSD general questions mailing list which
contains the kernel configuration file.
If the new kernel does not boot or fails to recognize
devices, do not panic! Fortunately, FreeBSD has an excellent
mechanism for recovering from incompatible kernels.
Simply choose the kernel to boot from at the FreeBSD boot
loader. This can be accessed when the system boot menu
appears by selecting the "Escape to a loader
prompt" option. At the prompt, type
, or the
name of any other kernel that is known to boot
After booting with a good kernel, check over the
configuration file and try to build it again. One helpful
resource is
/var/log/messages which
records the kernel messages from every successful boot.
Also, dmesg(8) will print the kernel messages from
the current boot.
When troubleshooting a kernel, make sure to keep
a copy of
GENERIC, or some other
kernel that is known to work, as a different name that
will not get erased on the next build. This is
important because every time a new kernel is installed,
kernel.old is overwritten with the
last installed kernel, which may or may not be bootable.
As soon as possible, move the working kernel by renaming
the directory containing the good kernel:
mv /boot/kernel
mv /boot/
If the kernel version differs from the one that the system utilities have been built with, for example, a kernel built from -CURRENT sources is installed on a -RELEASE system, many system status commands like ps(1) and vmstat(8) will not work. To fix this, recompile and install a world built with the same version of the source tree as the kernel. It is never a good idea to use a different version of the kernel than the rest of the operating system.
Putting information on paper is a vital function, despite many attempts to eliminate it. Printing has two basic components. The data must be delivered to the printer, and must be in a form that the printer can understand.
Basic printing can be set up quickly. The printer must be capable of printing plain ASCII text. For printing to other types of files, see Section 10.5.3, "Filters".
Create a directory to store files while they are being printed:
mkdir -p /var/spool/lpd/lp
chown daemon:daemon /var/spool/lpd/lp
chmod 770 /var/spool/lpd/lp
/etc/printcap with these
lpd by editing
/etc/rc.conf, adding this line:
Start the service:
service lpd startStarting lpd.
Print a test:
printf "1. This printer can print.\n2. This is the second line.\n" | lpr
If both lines do not start at the left border, but "stairstep" instead, see Section 10.5.3.1, "Preventing Stairstepping on Plain Text Printers".
Text files can now be printed with
lpr. Give the filename on the command
line, or pipe output directly into
lpr textfile.txt
ls -lh | lpr
Printers are connected to computer systems in a variety of ways. Small desktop printers are usually connected directly to computer's USB port. Older printers are connected to a parallel or "printer" port. Some printers are directly connected to a network, making it easy for multiple computers share them. A few printers use a much less common serial port connection.
FreeBSD can communicate with all of these types of printers.
USB printers can be connected to any available USB port on the computer.
When FreeBSD detects a USB printer,
two device entries are created:
/dev/ulpt0 and
/dev/unlpt0. Data sent to either
device will be relayed to the printer. After each print
ulpt0 resets the
USB port. Resetting the port can cause
problems with some printers, so the
unlpt0 device is used instead.
unlpt0 does not reset the USB port at
The parallel port device is
/dev/lpt0. This device appears
whether a printer is attached or not, it is not
Vendors have largely moved away from these "legacy" ports, and many computers no longer have them. Adapters can be used to connect a parallel printer to a USB port. With such an adapter, the printer can be treated as if it were actually a USB printer. Devices called print servers can also be used to connect parallel printers directly to a network.
Serial ports are another legacy port, rarely used for printers except in certain niche applications. Cables, connectors, and required wiring vary widely.
For serial ports built into a motherboard, the serial
device name is
/dev/cuau0 or
/dev/cuau1. Serial
USB adapters can also be used, and
these will appear as
Several communication parameters must be known to communicate with a serial printer. The most important are baud rate and parity. Values vary, but typical serial printers often use a baud rate of 9600 and no parity.
Network printers are connected directly to the local computer network.
The DNS hostname of the printer must be known. If the printer is assigned a dynamic address by DHCP, DNS should be dynamically updated so that the host name always has the correct IP address. Network printers are often given static IP addresses to avoid this problem.
Most network printers understand print jobs sent with
the LPD protocol. A print queue name
can also be specified. Some printers process data
differently depending on which queue is used. For
example, a
raw queue prints the data
unchanged, while the
text queue adds
carriage returns to plain text.
Many network printers can also print data sent directly to port 9100.
Wired network connections are usually the easiest to set up and give the fastest printing. For direct connection to the computer, USB is preferred for speed and simplicity. Parallel connections work but have limitations on cable length and speed. Serial connections are more difficult to configure. Cable wiring differs between models, and communication parameters like baud rate and parity bits must add to the complexity. Fortunately, serial printers are rare.
Data sent to a printer must be in a language that the printer can understand. These languages are called Page Description Languages, or PDLs.
Plain ASCII text is the simplest
way to send data to a printer. Characters correspond one
to one with what will be printed: an
in the data prints an
A on the page.
Very little formatting is available. There is no way to
select a font or proportional spacing. The forced
simplicity of plain ASCII means that
text can be printed straight from the computer with little
or no encoding or translation. The printed output
corresponds directly with what was sent.
Some inexpensive printers cannot print plain ASCII text. This makes them more difficult to set up, but it is usually still possible.
PostScript® is almost the opposite of ASCII. Rather than simple text, a PostScript® program is a set of instructions that draw the final document. Different fonts and graphics can be used. However, this power comes at a price. The program that draws the page must be written. Usually this program is generated by application software, so the process is invisible to the user.
Inexpensive printers sometimes leave out PostScript® compatibility as a cost-saving measure.
PCL is an extension of ASCII, adding escape sequences for formatting, font selection, and printing graphics. Many printers provide PCL5 support. Some support the newer PCL6 or PCLXL. These later versions are supersets of PCL5 and can provide faster printing.
Manufacturers can reduce the cost of a printer by giving it a simple processor and very little memory. These printers are not capable of printing plain text. Instead, bitmaps of text and graphics are drawn by a driver on the host computer and then sent to the printer. These are called host-based printers.
Communication between the driver and a host-based printer is often through proprietary or undocumented protocols, making them functional only on the most common operating systems.
Many applications from the Ports Collection and FreeBSD utilities produce PostScript® output. This table shows the utilities available to convert that into other common PDLs:
|Output PDL
|Generated By
|PCL or PCL5
-sDEVICE=ljet4 for monochrome,
-sDEVICE=cljet5 for color
|PCLXL or PCL6
-sDEVICE=pxlmono for
-sDEVICE=pxlcolor for
For the easiest printing, choose a printer that supports PostScript®. Printers that support PCL are the next preferred. With print/ghostscript, these printers can be used as if they understood PostScript® natively. Printers that support PostScript® or PCL directly almost always support direct printing of plain ASCII text files also.
Line-based printers like typical inkjets usually do not support PostScript® or PCL. They often can print plain ASCII text files. print/ghostscript supports the PDLs used by some of these printers. However, printing an entire graphic-based page on these printers is often very slow due to the large amount of data to be transferred and printed.
Host-based printers are often more difficult to set up. Some cannot be used at all because of proprietary PDLs. Avoid these printers when possible.
Descriptions of many PDLs can be found at http://www.undocprint.org/formats/page_description_languages. The particular PDL used by various models of printers can be found at http://www.openprinting.org/printers.
For occasional printing, files can be sent directly to a
printer device without any setup. For example, a file called
sample.txt can be sent to a
USB printer:
cp sample.txt /dev/unlpt0
Direct printing to network printers depends on the
abilities of the printer, but most accept print jobs on port
9100, and nc(1) can be used with them. To print the
same file to a printer with the DNS
hostname of
netlaser9100 < sample.txt
Printing a file in the background is called spooling. A spooler allows the user to continue with other programs on the computer without waiting for the printer to slowly complete the print job.
FreeBSD includes a spooler called lpd(8). Print jobs are submitted with lpr(1).
A directory for storing print jobs is created, ownership is set, and the permissions are set to prevent other users from viewing the contents of those files:
mkdir -p /var/spool/lpd/lp
chown daemon:daemon /var/spool/lpd/lp
chmod 770 /var/spool/lpd/lp
Printers are defined in
/etc/printcap. An entry for each printer
includes details like a name, the port where it is attached,
and various other settings. Create
/etc/printcap with these contents:
lp:\ :lp=/dev/unlpt0:\ :sh:\ :mx#0:\ :sd=/var/spool/lpd/lp:\ :lf=/var/log/lpd-errs:
The name of this printer. lpr(1) sends print
jobs to the
The device where the printer is connected. Replace this line with the appropriate one for the connection type shown here.
Suppress the printing of a header page at the start of a print job.
Do not limit the maximum size of a print job.
The path to the spooling directory for this printer. Each printer uses its own spooling directory.
The log file where errors on this printer will be reported.
After creating
/etc/printcap, use
chkprintcap(8) to test it for errors:
Fix any reported problems before continuing.
Enable lpd(8) in
Start the service:
service lpd start
Documents are sent to the printer with
lpr. A file to be printed can be named on
the command line or piped into
lpr. These
two commands are equivalent, sending the contents of
doc.txt to the default printer:
lpr doc.txt
cat doc.txt | lpr
Printers can be selected with
-P. To
print to a printer called
lpr -Plaser doc.txt
The examples shown so far have sent the contents of a text file directly to the printer. As long as the printer understands the content of those files, output will be printed correctly.
Some printers are not capable of printing plain text, and the input file might not even be plain text.
Filters allow files to be translated or processed. The typical use is to translate one type of input, like plain text, into a form that the printer can understand, like PostScript® or PCL. Filters can also be used to provide additional features, like adding page numbers or highlighting source code to make it easier to read.
The filters discussed here are
input filters or
text filters. These filters convert the
incoming file into different forms. Use su(1) to become
root before
creating the files.
Filters are specified in
/etc/printcap with the
if= identifier. To use
/usr/local/libexec/lf2crlf as a filter,
/etc/printcap like this:
lp:\ :lp=/dev/unlpt0:\ :sh:\ :mx#0:\ :sd=/var/spool/lpd/lp:\ :if=/usr/local/libexec/lf2crlf:\ :lf=/var/log/lpd-errs:
The backslash line continuation
characters at the end of the lines in
printcap entries reveal that an entry
for a printer is really just one long line with entries
delimited by colon characters. An earlier example can be
rewritten as a single less-readable line:
Typical FreeBSD text files contain only a single line feed character at the end of each line. These lines will "stairstep" on a standard printer:
A printed file looks like the steps of a staircase scattered by the wind
A filter can convert the newline characters into
carriage returns and newlines. The carriage returns make
the printer return to the left after each line. Create
/usr/local/libexec/lf2crlf with these
#!/bin/sh CR=$'\r' /usr/bin/sed -e "s/$/${CR}/g"
Set the permissions and make it executable:
chmod 555 /usr/local/libexec/lf2crlf
/etc/printcap to use the
new filter:
Test the filter by printing the same plain text file. The carriage returns will cause each line to start at the left side of the page.
GNU Enscript converts plain text files into nicely-formatted PostScript® for printing on PostScript® printers. It adds page numbers, wraps long lines, and provides numerous other features to make printed text files easier to read. Depending on the local paper size, install either print/enscript-letter or print/enscript-a4 from the Ports Collection.
with these contents:
#!/bin/sh /usr/local/bin/enscript -o -
Set the permissions and make it executable:
chmod 555 /usr/local/libexec/enscript
/etc/printcap to use the
new filter:
Test the filter by printing a plain text file.
Many programs produce PostScript® documents. However, inexpensive printers often only understand plain text or PCL. This filter converts PostScript® files to PCL before sending them to the printer.
Install the Ghostscript PostScript® interpreter, print/ghostscript9, from the Ports Collection.
with these contents:
#!/bin/sh /usr/local/bin/gs -dSAFER -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -q -sDEVICE=ljet4 -sOutputFile=- -
Set the permissions and make it executable:
chmod 555 /usr/local/libexec/ps2pcl
PostScript® input sent to this script will be rendered and converted to PCL before being sent on to the printer.
/etc/printcap to use this
new input filter:
Test the filter by sending a small PostScript® program to it:
printf "%%\!PS \n /Helvetica findfont 18 scalefont setfont \ 72 432 moveto (PostScript printing successful.) show showpage \004" | lpr
A filter that detects the type of input and
automatically converts it to the correct format for the
printer can be very convenient. The first two characters of
a PostScript® file are usually
filter can detect those two characters. PostScript® files
can be sent on to a PostScript® printer unchanged. Text
files can be converted to PostScript® with
Enscript as shown earlier.
/usr/local/libexec/psif with
these contents:
#!/bin/sh # # psif - Print PostScript or plain text on a PostScript printer # IFS="" read -r first_line first_two_chars=`expr "$first_line" : '\(..\)'` case "$first_two_chars" in %!) # %! : PostScript job, print it. echo "$first_line" && cat && exit 0 exit 2 ;; *) # otherwise, format with enscript ( echo "$first_line"; cat ) | /usr/local/bin/enscript -o - && exit 0 exit 2 ;; esac
Set the permissions and make it executable:
chmod 555 /usr/local/libexec/psif
/etc/printcap to use this
new input filter:
Test the filter by printing PostScript® and plain text files.
Writing a filter that detects many different types of input and formats them correctly is challenging. print/apsfilter from the Ports Collection is a smart "magic" filter that detects dozens of file types and automatically converts them to the PDL understood by the printer. See http://www.apsfilter.org for more details.
The entries in
/etc/printcap are
really definitions of queues. There can
be more than one queue for a single printer. When combined
with filters, multiple queues provide users more control over
how their jobs are printed.
As an example, consider a networked PostScript® laser
printer in an office. Most users want to print plain text,
but a few advanced users want to be able to print PostScript®
files directly. Two entries can be created for the same
printer in
textprinter:\ :lp=9100@officelaser:\ :sh:\ :mx#0:\ :sd=/var/spool/lpd/textprinter:\ :if=/usr/local/libexec/enscript:\ :lf=/var/log/lpd-errs: psprinter:\ :lp=9100@officelaser:\ :sh:\ :mx#0:\ :sd=/var/spool/lpd/psprinter:\ :lf=/var/log/lpd-errs:
Documents sent to
textprinter will be
formatted by the
/usr/local/libexec/enscript filter shown
in an earlier example. Advanced users can print PostScript®
files on
psprinter, where no filtering is
This multiple queue technique can be used to provide direct access to all kinds of printer features. A printer with a duplexer could use two queues, one for ordinary single-sided printing, and one with a filter that sends the command sequence to enable double-sided printing and then sends the incoming file.
Several utilities are available to monitor print jobs and check and control printer operation.
lpq(1) shows the status of a user's print jobs. Print jobs from other users are not shown.
Show the current user's pending jobs on a single printer:
lpq -PRank Owner Job Files Total Size 1st jsmith 0 (standard input) 12792 bytes
Show the current user's pending jobs on all printers:
lpq -alp: Rank Owner Job Files Total Size 1st jsmith 1 (standard input) 27320 bytes laser: Rank Owner Job Files Total Size 1st jsmith 287 (standard input) 22443 bytes
lprm(1) is used to remove print jobs. Normal users
are only allowed to remove their own jobs.
root can remove
any or all jobs.
Remove all pending jobs from a printer:
lprm -PdfA002smithy dequeued cfA002smithy dequeued dfA003smithy dequeued cfA003smithy dequeued dfA004smithy dequeued cfA004smithy dequeued
Remove a single job from a printer. lpq(1) is used to find the job number.
lpqRank Owner Job Files Total Size 1st jsmith 5 (standard input) 12188 bytes
lprm -PdfA005smithy dequeued cfA005smithy dequeued
lpc(8) is used to check and modify printer status.
lpc is followed by a command and an
optional printer name.
all can be used
instead of a specific printer name, and the command will be
applied to all printers. Normal users can view status with
lpc(8). Only
class="username">root can use
commands which modify printer status.
Show the status of all printers:
lpc status alllp: queuing is enabled printing is enabled 1 entry in spool area printer idle laser: queuing is enabled printing is enabled 1 entry in spool area waiting for laser to come up
Prevent a printer from accepting new jobs, then begin accepting new jobs again:
lpc disablelp: queuing disabled
lpc enablelp: queuing enabled
Stop printing, but continue to accept new jobs. Then begin printing again:
lpc stoplp: printing disabled
lpc startlp: printing enabled daemon started
Restart a printer after some error condition:
lpc restartlp: no daemon to abort printing enabled daemon restarted
Turn the print queue off and disable printing, with a message to explain the problem to users:
lpc downlp: printer and queuing disabled status message is now: Repair parts will arrive on Monday
lpRepair parts will arrive on Monday
Re-enable a printer that is down:
lpc uplp: printing enabled daemon started
See lpc(8) for more commands and options.
Printers are often shared by multiple users in businesses and schools. Additional features are provided to make sharing printers more convenient.
The printer name is set in the first line of the
entry in
/etc/printcap. Additional
names, or aliases, can be added after
that name. Aliases are separated from the name and each
other by vertical bars:
Aliases can be used in place of the printer name. For example, users in the Sales department print to their printer with
lpr -P
Users in the Repairs department print to their printer with
lpr -P
All of the documents print on that single printer. When the Sales department grows enough to need their own printer, the alias is removed from the shared printer entry and used as the name of the new printer. Users in both departments continue to use the same commands, but the Sales documents are sent to the new printer.
Users can have difficulty locating their documents in the stack of pages produced by a busy shared printer. Header pages were created to solve this problem. A header page with the user name and document name is printed before each print job. These pages are also sometimes called banner or separator pages.
Enabling header pages differs depending on whether the printer is connected directly to the computer with a USB, parallel, or serial cable, or is connected remotely by the network.
Header pages on directly-connected printers are enabled
by removing the
:sh:\ (Suppress Header)
line from the entry in
These header pages only use line feed characters for new
lines. Some printers will need the
filter to prevent stairstepped text. The filter configures
PCL printers to print both carriage
returns and line feeds when a line feed is received.
Header pages for network printers must be configured on
the printer itself. Header page entries in
/etc/printcap are ignored. Settings
are usually available from the printer front panel or a
configuration web page accessible with a web browser.
Several other printing systems are available in addition to the built-in lpd(8). These systems offer support for other protocols or additional features.
CUPS is a popular printing system available on many operating systems. Using CUPS on FreeBSD is documented in a separate article:../../../../doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/cups
Hewlett Packard provides a printing system that supports many of their inkjet and laser printers. The port is print/hplip. The main web page is at http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/index.html. The port handles all the installation details on FreeBSD. Configuration information is shown at http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/install/manual/hp_setup.html.
LPRng was developed as an enhanced alternative to lpd(8). The port is sysutils/LPRng. For details and documentation, see http://www.lprng.com/.
FreeBSD provides 32-bit binary compatibility with Linux®, allowing users to install and run most 32-bit Linux® binaries on a FreeBSD system without having to first modify the binary. It has even been reported that, in some situations, 32-bit Linux® binaries perform better on FreeBSD than they do on Linux®.
However, some Linux®-specific operating system features are not supported under FreeBSD. For example, Linux® binaries will not work on FreeBSD if they overly use i386™ specific calls, such as enabling virtual 8086 mode. In addition, 64-bit Linux® binaries are not supported at this time.
After reading this chapter, you will know:
How to enable Linux® binary compatibility on a FreeBSD system.
How to install additional Linux® shared libraries.
How to install Linux® applications on a FreeBSD system.
The implementation details of Linux® compatibility in FreeBSD.
Before reading this chapter, you should:
Know how to install additional third-party software.
By default, Linux® libraries are not installed and Linux® binary compatibility is not enabled. Linux® libraries can either be installed manually or from the FreeBSD Ports Collection.
Before attempting to build the port, load the Linux® kernel module, otherwise the build will fail:
kldload linux
To verify that the module is loaded:
kldstatId Refs Address Size Name 1 2 0xc0100000 16bdb8 kernel 7 1 0xc24db000 d000 linux.ko
The emulators/linux_base-c6 package or port is the easiest way to install a base set of Linux® libraries and binaries on a FreeBSD system. To install the port:
printf "compat.linux.osrelease=2.6.18\n" >> /etc/sysctl.conf
sysctl compat.linux.osrelease=2.6.18
pkg install emulators/linux_base-c6
For Linux® compatibility to be enabled at boot time,
add this line to
Users who prefer to statically link Linux® binary
compatibility into a custom kernel should add
options COMPAT_LINUX to their custom kernel
configuration file. Compile and install the new kernel as
described in Chapter 9, Configuring the FreeBSD Kernel.
If a Linux® application complains about missing shared libraries after configuring Linux® binary compatibility, determine which shared libraries the Linux® binary needs and install them manually.
From a Linux® system,
ldd can be used
to determine which shared libraries the application needs.
For example, to check which shared libraries
linuxdoom needs, run this command from a
Linux® system that has Doom
ldd linuxdoomlibXt.so.3 (DLL Jump 3.1) => /usr/X11/lib/libXt.so.3.1.0 libX11.so.3 (DLL Jump 3.1) => /usr/X11/lib/libX11.so.3.1.0 libc.so.4 (DLL Jump 4.5pl26) => /lib/libc.so.4.6.29
Then, copy all the files in the last column of the output
from the Linux® system into
/compat/linux on the FreeBSD system. Once
copied, create symbolic links to the names in the first
column. This example will result in the following files on
the FreeBSD system:
/compat/linux/usr/X11/lib/libXt.so.3.1.0 /compat/linux/usr/X11/lib/libXt.so.3 -> libXt.so.3.1.0 /compat/linux/usr/X11/lib/libX11.so.3.1.0 /compat/linux/usr/X11/lib/libX11.so.3 -> libX11.so.3.1.0 /compat/linux/lib/libc.so.4.6.29 /compat/linux/lib/libc.so.4 -> libc.so.4.6.29
If a Linux® shared library already exists with a
matching major revision number to the first column of the
ldd output, it does not need to be copied
to the file named in the last column, as the existing library
should work. It is advisable to copy the shared library if it
is a newer version, though. The old one can be removed, as
long as the symbolic link points to the new one.
For example, these libraries already exist on the FreeBSD system:
/compat/linux/lib/libc.so.4.6.27 /compat/linux/lib/libc.so.4 -> libc.so.4.6.27
ldd indicates that a binary
requires a later version:
libc.so.4 (DLL Jump 4.5pl26) -> libc.so.4.6.29
Since the existing library is only one or two versions out
of date in the last digit, the program should still work with
the slightly older version. However, it is safe to replace
the existing
libc.so with the newer
/compat/linux/lib/libc.so.4.6.29 /compat/linux/lib/libc.so.4 -> libc.so.4.6.29
Generally, one will need to look for the shared libraries that Linux® binaries depend on only the first few times that a Linux® program is installed on FreeBSD. After a while, there will be a sufficient set of Linux® shared libraries on the system to be able to run newly installed Linux® binaries without any extra work.
ELF binaries sometimes require an extra step. When an unbranded ELF binary is executed, it will generate an error message:
./my-linux-elf-binaryELF binary type not known Abort
To help the FreeBSD kernel distinguish between a FreeBSD ELF binary and a Linux® binary, use brandelf(1):
brandelf -t Linux my-linux-elf-binary
Since the GNU toolchain places the appropriate branding information into ELF binaries automatically, this step is usually not necessary.
In order to install a Linux® RPM-based
application, first install the
archivers/rpm package or port. Once
root can
use this command to install a
cd /compat/linux
rpm2cpio < /path/to/linux.archive.rpm | cpio -id
If necessary,
brandelf the installed
ELF binaries. Note that this will prevent
a clean uninstall.
If DNS does not work or this error appears:
resolv+: "bind" is an invalid keyword resolv+: "hosts" is an invalid keyword
as follows:
order hosts, bind multi on
This specifies that
/etc/hosts is
searched first and DNS is searched second.
/compat/linux/etc/host.conf does not
exist, Linux® applications use
/etc/host.conf and complain about the
incompatible FreeBSD syntax. Remove
bind if a
name server is not configured using
This section describes how Linux® binary compatibility
works and is based on an email written to FreeBSD chat mailing list by
Terry Lambert
<email@example.com> (Message ID:
FreeBSD has an abstraction called an "execution class loader". This is a wedge into the execve(2) system call.
Historically, the UNIX® loader examined the magic number (generally the first 4 or 8 bytes of the file) to see if it was a binary known to the system, and if so, invoked the binary loader.
If it was not the binary type for the system, the execve(2) call returned a failure, and the shell attempted to start executing it as shell commands. The assumption was a default of "whatever the current shell is".
Later, a hack was made for sh(1) to examine the first
two characters, and if they were
:\n, it
invoked the csh(1) shell instead.
FreeBSD has a list of loaders, instead of a single loader, with
a fallback to the
#! loader for running shell
interpreters or shell scripts.
For the Linux® ABI support, FreeBSD sees the magic number as an ELF binary. The ELF loader looks for a specialized brand, which is a comment section in the ELF image, and which is not present on SVR4/Solaris™ ELF binaries.
For Linux® binaries to function, they must be
branded as type
using brandelf(1):
brandelf -t Linux file
When the ELF loader sees the
brand, the loader replaces a pointer in the
proc structure. All system calls are indexed
through this pointer. In addition, the process is flagged for
special handling of the trap vector for the signal trampoline
code, and several other (minor) fix-ups that are handled by the
Linux® kernel module.
The Linux® system call vector contains, among other things,
a list of
sysent[] entries whose addresses
reside in the kernel module.
When a system call is called by the Linux® binary, the trap
code dereferences the system call function pointer off the
proc structure, and gets the Linux®, not the
FreeBSD, system call entry points.
Linux® mode dynamically reroots
lookups. This is, in effect, equivalent to the
union option to file system mounts. First, an
attempt is made to lookup the file in
If that fails, the lookup is done in
This makes sure that binaries that require other binaries can
run. For example, the Linux® toolchain can all run under
Linux® ABI support. It also means that the
Linux® binaries can load and execute FreeBSD binaries, if there
are no corresponding Linux® binaries present, and that a
uname(1) command can be placed in the
/compat/linux directory tree to ensure that
the Linux® binaries can not tell they are not running on
In effect, there is a Linux® kernel in the FreeBSD kernel. The various underlying functions that implement all of the services provided by the kernel are identical to both the FreeBSD system call table entries, and the Linux® system call table entries: file system operations, virtual memory operations, signal delivery, and System V IPC. The only difference is that FreeBSD binaries get the FreeBSD glue functions, and Linux® binaries get the Linux® glue functions. The FreeBSD glue functions are statically linked into the kernel, and the Linux® glue functions can be statically linked, or they can be accessed via a kernel module.
Technically, this is not really emulation, it is an ABI implementation. It is sometimes called "Linux® emulation" because the implementation was done at a time when there was no other word to describe what was going on. Saying that FreeBSD ran Linux® binaries was not true, since the code was not compiled in.
The remaining chapters of the FreeBSD Handbook cover all aspects of FreeBSD system administration. Each chapter starts by describing what you will learn as a result of reading the chapter, and also details what you are expected to know before tackling the material.
These chapters are designed to be read when you need the information. You do not have to read them in any particular order, nor do you need to read all of them before you can begin using FreeBSD.
One of the important aspects of FreeBSD is proper system configuration. This chapter explains much of the FreeBSD configuration process, including some of the parameters which can be set to tune a FreeBSD system.
After reading this chapter, you will know:
The basics of
rc.conf configuration
/usr/local/etc/rc.d startup
How to configure and test a network card.
How to configure virtual hosts on network devices.
How to use the various configuration files in
How to tune FreeBSD using sysctl(8) variables.
How to tune disk performance and modify kernel limitations.
Before reading this chapter, you should:
Understand UNIX® and FreeBSD basics (Chapter 4, UNIX Basics).
Be familiar with the basics of kernel configuration and compilation (Chapter 9, Configuring the FreeBSD Kernel).
Many users install third party software on FreeBSD from the Ports Collection and require the installed services to be started upon system initialization. Services, such as mail/postfix or www/apache22 are just two of the many software packages which may be started during system initialization. This section explains the procedures available for starting third party software.
In FreeBSD, most included services, such as cron(8), are started through the system start up scripts.
Now that FreeBSD includes
configuration of application startup is easier and provides
more features. Using the key words discussed in
Section 12.4, "Managing Services in FreeBSD", applications can be set to
start after certain other services and extra flags can be
passed through
/etc/rc.conf in place of
hard coded flags in the start up script. A basic script may
look similar to the following:
#!/bin/sh # # PROVIDE: utility # REQUIRE: DAEMON # KEYWORD: shutdown . /etc/rc.subr name=utility rcvar=utility_enable command="/usr/local/sbin/utility" load_rc_config $name # # DO NOT CHANGE THESE DEFAULT VALUES HERE # SET THEM IN THE /etc/rc.conf FILE # utility_enable=${utility_enable-"NO"} pidfile=${utility_pidfile-"/var/run/utility.pid"} run_rc_command "$1"
This script will ensure that the provided
utility will be started after the
DAEMON pseudo-service. It also provides a
method for setting and tracking the process ID
This application could then have the following line placed
This method allows for easier manipulation of command
line arguments, inclusion of the default functions provided
/etc/rc.subr, compatibility with
rcorder(8), and provides for easier configuration via
Other services can be started using inetd(8). Working with inetd(8) and its configuration is described in depth in Section 29.2, "The inetd Super-Server".
In some cases, it may make more sense to use cron(8) to start system services. This approach has a number of advantages as cron(8) runs these processes as the owner of the crontab(5). This allows regular users to start and maintain their own applications.
@reboot feature of cron(8),
may be used in place of the time specification. This causes
the job to run when cron(8) is started, normally during
system initialization.
One of the most useful utilities in FreeBSD is
cron. This utility runs in the
background and regularly checks
/etc/crontab for tasks to execute and
/var/cron/tabs for custom crontab
files. These files are used to schedule tasks which
cron runs at the specified times.
Each entry in a crontab defines a task to run and is known as a
cron job.
Two different types of configuration files are used: the
system crontab, which should not be modified, and user crontabs,
which can be created and edited as needed. The format used by
these files is documented in crontab(5). The format of the
system crontab,
/etc/crontab includes a
who column which does not exist in user
crontabs. In the system crontab,
cron runs the command as the user
specified in this column. In a user crontab, all commands run
as the user who created the crontab.
User crontabs allow individual users to schedule their own
tasks. The
root user
can also have a user
crontab which can be
used to schedule tasks that do not exist in the system
Here is a sample entry from the system crontab,
# /etc/crontab - root's crontab for FreeBSD # # $FreeBSD: head/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/config/chapter.xml 47083 2015-07-25 16:50:31Z dru $ # SHELL=/bin/sh PATH=/etc:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin # #minute hour mday month wday who command # */5 * * * * root /usr/libexec/atrun
Lines that begin with the
The equals (
This line defines the seven fields used in a system
This entry defines the values for this cron job. The
Commands can include any number of switches. However, commands which extend to multiple lines need to be broken with the backslash "\" continuation character.
To create a user crontab, invoke
crontab in editor mode:
crontab -e
This will open the user's crontab using the default text editor. The first time a user runs this command, it will open an empty file. Once a user creates a crontab, this command will open that file for editing.
It is useful to add these lines to the top of the crontab file in order to set the environment variables and to remember the meanings of the fields in the crontab:
SHELL=/bin/sh PATH=/etc:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin # Order of crontab fields # minute hour mday month wday command
Then add a line for each command or script to run,
specifying the time to run the command. This example runs the
specified custom Bourne shell script every day at two in the
afternoon. Since the path to the script is not specified in
PATH, the full path to the script is
0 14 * * * /usr/home/dru/bin/mycustomscript.sh
Before using a custom script, make sure it is executable and test it with the limited set of environment variables set by cron. To replicate the environment that would be used to run the above cron entry, use:
env -i SHELL=/bin/sh PATH=/etc:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin HOME=/home/
The environment set by cron is discussed in crontab(5). Checking that scripts operate correctly in a cron environment is especially important if they include any commands that delete files using wildcards.
When finished editing the crontab, save the file. It will automatically be installed and cron will read the crontab and run its cron jobs at their specified times. To list the cron jobs in a crontab, use this command:
crontab -l0 14 * * * /usr/home/dru/bin/mycustomscript.sh
To remove all of the cron jobs in a user crontab:
crontab -rremove crontab for dru?
FreeBSD uses the rc(8) system of startup scripts during
system initialization and for managing services. The scripts
listed in
/etc/rc.d provide basic services
which can be controlled with the
stop, and
restart options to
service(8). For instance, sshd(8) can be restarted
with the following command:
service sshd restart
This procedure can be used to start services on a running
system. Services will be started automatically at boot time
as specified in rc.conf(5). For example, to enable
natd(8) at system startup, add the following line to
If a
natd_enable="NO" line is already
present, change the
NO to
YES. The rc(8) scripts will
automatically load any dependent services during the next boot,
as described below.
Since the rc(8) system is primarily intended to start
and stop services at system startup and shutdown time, the
stop and
restart options will only perform their action
if the appropriate
/etc/rc.conf variable
is set. For instance,
sshd restart will
only work if
sshd_enable is set to
YES in
stop or
restart a service regardless of the settings
/etc/rc.conf, these commands should be
prefixed with "one". For instance, to restart
sshd(8) regardless of the current
/etc/rc.conf setting, execute the following
service sshd onerestart
To check if a service is enabled in
/etc/rc.conf, run the appropriate
rc(8) script with
rcvar. This example
checks to see if sshd(8) is enabled in
service sshd rcvar# sshd # sshd_enable="YES" # (default: "")
# sshd line is output from the
above command, not a
root console.
To determine whether or not a service is running, use
status. For instance, to verify that
sshd(8) is running:
service sshd statussshd is running as pid 433.
In some cases, it is also possible to
reload a service. This attempts to send a
signal to an individual service, forcing the service to reload
its configuration files. In most cases, this means sending
the service a
SIGHUP signal. Support for
this feature is not included for every service.
The rc(8) system is used for network services and it
also contributes to most of the system initialization. For
instance, when the
/etc/rc.d/bgfsck script is executed, it
prints out the following message:
Starting background file system checks in 60 seconds.
This script is used for background file system checks, which occur only during system initialization.
Many system services depend on other services to function properly. For example, yp(8) and other RPC-based services may fail to start until after the rpcbind(8) service has started. To resolve this issue, information about dependencies and other meta-data is included in the comments at the top of each startup script. The rcorder(8) program is used to parse these comments during system initialization to determine the order in which system services should be invoked to satisfy the dependencies.
The following key word must be included in all startup scripts as it is required by rc.subr(8) to "enable" the startup script:
PROVIDE: Specifies the services this
file provides.
The following key words may be included at the top of each startup script. They are not strictly necessary, but are useful as hints to rcorder(8):
REQUIRE: Lists services which are
required for this service. The script containing this key
word will run after the specified
BEFORE: Lists services which depend
on this service. The script containing this key word will
run before the specified
By carefully setting these keywords for each startup script, an administrator has a fine-grained level of control of the startup order of the scripts, without the need for "runlevels" used by some UNIX® operating systems.
Additional information can be found in rc(8) and rc.subr(8). Refer to this article for instructions on how to create custom rc(8) scripts.
The principal location for system configuration
information is
/etc/rc.conf. This file
contains a wide range of configuration information and it is
read at system startup to configure the system. It provides
the configuration information for the
rc* files.
The entries in
/etc/rc.conf override
the default settings in
/etc/defaults/rc.conf. The file
containing the default settings should not be edited.
Instead, all system-specific changes should be made to
A number of strategies may be applied in clustered
applications to separate site-wide configuration from
system-specific configuration in order to reduce
administration overhead. The recommended approach is to place
system-specific configuration into
/etc/rc.conf.local. For example, these
entries in
/etc/rc.conf apply to all
sshd_enable="YES" keyrate="fast" defaultrouter="10.1.1.254"
Whereas these entries in
/etc/rc.conf.local apply to this system
hostname="node1.example.org" ifconfig_fxp0="inet 10.1.1.1/8"
/etc/rc.conf to every
system using an application such as
rsync or
puppet, while
/etc/rc.conf.local remains
Upgrading the system will not overwrite
/etc/rc.conf, so system configuration
information will not be lost.
/etc/rc.conf and
are parsed by sh(1). This allows system operators to
create complex configuration scenarios. Refer to
rc.conf(5) for further information on this
Adding and configuring a network interface card (NIC) is a common task for any FreeBSD administrator.
First, determine the model of the NIC and the chip it uses. FreeBSD supports a wide variety of NICs. Check the Hardware Compatibility List for the FreeBSD release to see if the NIC is supported.
If the NIC is supported, determine
the name of the FreeBSD driver for the NIC.
Refer to
/usr/src/sys/conf/NOTES and
for the list of NIC drivers with some
information about the supported chipsets. When in doubt, read
the manual page of the driver as it will provide more
information about the supported hardware and any known
limitations of the driver.
The drivers for common NICs are already
present in the
GENERIC kernel, meaning
the NIC should be probed during boot. The
system's boot messages can be viewed by typing
more /var/run/dmesg.boot and using the
spacebar to scroll through the text. In this example, two
Ethernet NICs using the dc(4) driver
are present on the system:
dc0: <82c169 PNIC 10/100BaseTX> port 0xa000-0xa0ff mem 0xd3800000-0xd38 000ff irq 15 at device 11.0 on pci0 miibus0: <MII bus> on dc0 bmtphy0: <BCM5201 10/100baseTX PHY> PHY 1 on miibus0 bmtphy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto dc0: Ethernet address: 00:a0:cc:da:da:da dc0: [ITHREAD] dc1: <82c169 PNIC 10/100BaseTX> port 0x9800-0x98ff mem 0xd3000000-0xd30 000ff irq 11 at device 12.0 on pci0 miibus1: <MII bus> on dc1 bmtphy1: <BCM5201 10/100baseTX PHY> PHY 1 on miibus1 bmtphy1: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto dc1: Ethernet address: 00:a0:cc:da:da:db dc1: [ITHREAD]
If the driver for the NIC is not
present in
GENERIC, but a driver is
available, the driver will need to be loaded before the
NIC can be configured and used. This may
be accomplished in one of two ways:
The easiest way is to load a kernel module for the
NIC using kldload(8). To also
automatically load the driver at boot time, add the
appropriate line to
/boot/loader.conf. Not all
NIC drivers are available as
Alternatively, statically compile support for the
NIC into a custom kernel. Refer to
and the manual page of the driver to determine which line
to add to the custom kernel configuration file. For more
information about recompiling the kernel, refer to Chapter 9, Configuring the FreeBSD Kernel. If the NIC
was detected at boot, the kernel does not need to be
Unfortunately, there are still many vendors that do not provide schematics for their drivers to the open source community because they regard such information as trade secrets. Consequently, the developers of FreeBSD and other operating systems are left with two choices: develop the drivers by a long and pain-staking process of reverse engineering or using the existing driver binaries available for Microsoft® Windows® platforms.
FreeBSD provides "native" support for the Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS). It includes ndisgen(8) which can be used to convert a Windows® XP driver into a format that can be used on FreeBSD. Because the ndis(4) driver uses a Windows® XP binary, it only runs on i386™ and amd64 systems. PCI, CardBus, PCMCIA, and USB devices are supported.