Installation Which file do I download to get FreeBSD?

You generally need just one floppy image, the floppies/boot.flp file, which you image-copy onto a 1.44MB floppy and then boot from in order to download the rest (and the installation will manage your TCP/IP connection, deal with tapes, CDROMs, floppies, DOS partitions, whatever's necessary to get the rest of the bits installed).

If you need to download the distributions yourself (for a DOS filesystem install, for instance), below are some recommendations for distributions to grab: bin/ manpages/ compat*/ doc/ src/ssys.*

Full instructions on this procedure and a little bit more about installation issues in general can be found in the Help! The boot floppy image will not fit on a single floppy!

A 3.5 inch (1.44MB) floppy can accomodate 1474560 bytes of data. The boot image is exactly 1474560 bytes in size.

Common mistakes when preparing the boot floppy are: Not downloading the floppy image in binary mode when using FTP.

Some FTP clients default their transfer mode to ascii and attempt to change any end-of-line characters received to match the conventions used by the client's system. This will almost invariably corrupt the boot image. Check the size of the downloaded boot image: if it is not exactly that on the server, then the download process is suspect.

To workaround: type binary at the FTP command prompt after getting connected to the server and before starting the download of the image. Using the DOS copy command (or equivalent GUI tool) to transfer the boot image to floppy.

Programs like copy will not work as the boot image has been created to be booted into directly. The image has the complete content of the floppy, track for track, and is not meant to be placed on the floppy as a regular file. You have to transfer it to the floppy ``raw'', using the low-level tools (e.g. fdimage or rawrite) described in the . Where are the instructions for installing FreeBSD?

Installation instructions can be found in the What do I need in order to run FreeBSD?

You'll need a 386 or better PC, with 5 MB or more of RAM and at least 60 MB of hard disk space. It can run with a low end MDA graphics card but to run X11R6, a VGA or better video card is needed.

See also the section on I have only 4 MB of RAM. Can I install FreeBSD?

FreeBSD 2.1.7 was the last version of FreeBSD that could be installed on a 4MB system. Newer versions of FreeBSD, like 2.2, need at least 5MB to install on a new system.

All versions of FreeBSD, including 3.0, will RUN in 4MB of ram, they just can't run the installation program in 4MB. You can add extra memory for the install process, if you like, and then after the system is up and running, go back to 4MB. Or you could always just swap your disk into a system which has >4MB, install onto it and then swap it back.

There are also situations in which FreeBSD 2.1.7 will not install in 4 MB. To be exact: it does not install with 640 kB base + 3 MB extended memory. If your motherboard can remap some of the ``lost'' memory out of the 640kB to 1MB region, then you may still be able to get FreeBSD 2.1.7 up.

Try to go into your BIOS setup and look for a ``remap'' option. Enable it. You may also have to disable ROM shadowing.

It may be easier to get 4 more MB just for the install. Build a custom kernel with only the options you need and then get the 4 MB out again.

You may also install 2.0.5 and then upgrade your system to 2.1.7 with the ``upgrade'' option of the 2.1.7 installation program.

After the installation, if you build a custom kernel, it will run in 4 MB. Someone has even succeeded in booting with 2 MB (the system was almost unusable though :-)) How can I make my own custom install floppy?

Currently there's no way to *just* make a custom install floppy. You have to cut a whole new release, which will include your install floppy. There's some code in /usr/src/release/floppies/Makefile that's supposed to let you *just* make those floppies, but it's not really gelled yet.

To make a custom release, follow the instructions . Can I have more than one operating system on my PC?

Have a look at Can Windows 95 co-exist with FreeBSD?

Install Windows 95 first, after that FreeBSD. FreeBSD's boot manager will then manage to boot Win95 and FreeBSD. If you install Windows 95 second, it will boorishly overwrite your boot manager without even asking. If that happens, see the next section. Windows 95 killed my boot manager! How do I get it back?

You can reinstall the boot manager FreeBSD comes with in one of two ways: Running DOS, go into the tools/ directory of your FreeBSD distribution and look for bootinst.exe. You run it like so:

bootinst.exe boot.bin

and the boot manager will be reinstalled. Boot the FreeBSD boot floppy again and go to the Custom installation menu item. Choose Partition. Select the drive which used to contain your boot manager (likely the first one) and when you come to the partition editor for it, as the very first thing (e.g. do not make any changes) select (W)rite. This will ask for confirmation, say yes, and when you get the Boot Manager selection prompt, be sure to select "Boot Manager." This will re-write the boot manager to disk. Now quit out of the installation menu and reboot off the hard disk as normal. Can I install on a disk with bad blocks?

FreeBSD's bad block (the command) handling is still not 100% (to put it charitably) and it must unfortunately be said that if you've got an IDE or ESDI drive with lots of bad blocks, then FreeBSD is probably not for you! That said, it does work on thousands of IDE based systems, so you'd do well to try it first before simply giving up.

If you have a SCSI drive with bad blocks, see . Strange things happen when I boot the install floppy!

If you're seeing things like the machine grinding to a halt or spontaneously rebooting when you try to boot the install floppy, here are three questions to ask yourself:- Did you use a new, freshly-formatted, error-free floppy (preferably a brand-new one straight out of the box, as opposed to the magazine coverdisk that's been lying under the bed for the last three years)? Did you download the floppy image in binary (or image) mode? (don't be embarrassed, even the best of us have accidentally downloaded a binary file in ASCII mode at least once!) If you're using one of these new-fangled operating systems like Windows95 or Windows NT, did you shut it down and restart the system in plain, honest DOS? It seems these OS's can interfere with programs that write directly to hardware, which the disk creation program does; even running it inside a DOS shell in the GUI can cause this problem.

There have also been reports of Netscape causing problems when downloading the boot floppy, so it's probably best to use a different FTP client if you can. Help! I can't install from tape!

If you are installing 2.1.7R from tape, you must create the tape using a tar blocksize of 10 (5120 bytes). The default tar blocksize is 20 (10240 bytes), and tapes created using this default size cannot be used to install 2.1.7R; with these tapes, you will get an error that complains about the record size being too big. Connect two FreeBSD boxes over a parallel line (PLIP)

Get a laplink cable. Make sure both computer have a kernel with lpt driver support. $ dmesg | grep lp lpt0 at 0x378-0x37f irq 7 on isa lpt0: Interrupt-driven port lp0: TCP/IP capable interface

Plug in the laplink cable into the parallel interface.

Configure the network interface parameters for lp0 on both sites as root. For example, if you want connect the host max with moritz max <-----> moritz IP Address 10.0.0.1 10.0.0.2 on max start # ifconfig lp0 10.0.0.1 10.0.0.2 on moritz start # ifconfig lp0 10.0.0.2 10.0.0.1

Thats all! Please read also the manpages lp(4) and lpt(4).

You should also add the hosts to /etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 localhost.my.domain localhost 10.0.0.1 max.my.domain max 10.0.0.2 moritz.my.domain moritz

To check if it works do: on max: $ ifconfig lp0 lp0: flags=8851 mtu 1500 inet 10.0.0.1 --> 10.0.0.2 netmask 0xff000000 $ netstat -r Routing tables Internet: Destination Gateway Flags Refs Use Netif Expire moritz max UH 4 127592 lp0 $ ping -c 4 moritz PING moritz (10.0.0.2): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 10.0.0.2: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=2.774 ms 64 bytes from 10.0.0.2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=2.530 ms 64 bytes from 10.0.0.2: icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=2.556 ms 64 bytes from 10.0.0.2: icmp_seq=3 ttl=255 time=2.714 ms --- moritz ping statistics --- 4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 2.530/2.643/2.774/0.103 ms Can I install on my laptop over PLIP (Parallel Line IP)?

See also on the Mobile Computing page. Which geometry should I use for a disk drive?

(By the "geometry" of a disk, we mean the number of cylinders, heads and sectors/track on a disk - I'll refer to this as C/H/S for convenience. This is how the PC's BIOS works out which area on a disk to read/write from).

This seems to cause a lot of confusion for some reason. First of all, the All that matters is the For SCSI disks, the geometry to use depends on whether extended translation support is turned on in your controller (this is often referred to as "support for DOS disks >1GB" or something similar). If it's turned off, then use N cylinders, 64 heads and 32 sectors/track, where 'N' is the capacity of the disk in MB. For example, a 2GB disk should pretend to have 2048 cylinders, 64 heads and 32 sectors/track.

If it If you are not sure about this, or FreeBSD fails to detect the geometry correctly during installation, the simplest way around this is usually to create a small DOS partition on the disk. The correct geometry should then be detected (and you can always remove the DOS partition in the partition editor if you don't want to keep it, or leave it around for programming network cards and the like).

Alternatively, there is a freely available utility distributed with FreeBSD called ``tools subdirectory on the FreeBSD CDROM or on the various FreeBSD ftp sites) which can be used to work out what geometry the other operating systems on the disk are using. You can then enter this geometry in the partition editor. Any restrictions on how I divide the disk up?

Yes. You must make sure that your root partition is below 1024 cylinders so the BIOS can boot the kernel from it. (Note that this is a limitation in the PC's BIOS, not FreeBSD).

For a SCSI drive, this will normally imply that the root partition will be in the first 1024MB (or in the first 4096MB if extended translation is turned on - see previous question). For IDE, the corresponding figure is 504MB. What about disk managers? Or, I have a large drive!

FreeBSD recognizes the Ontrack Disk Manager and makes allowances for it. Other disk managers are not supported.

If you just want to use the disk with FreeBSD you don't need a disk manager. Just configure the disk for as much space as the BIOS can deal with (usually 504 megabytes), and FreeBSD should figure out how much space you really have. If you're using an old disk with an MFM controller, you may need to explicitly tell FreeBSD how many cylinders to use.

If you want to use the disk with FreeBSD and another operating system, you may be able to do without a disk manager: just make sure the the FreeBSD boot partition and the slice for the other operating system are in the first 1024 cylinders. If you're reasonably careful, a 20 megabyte boot partition should be plenty. When I boot FreeBSD I get ``Missing Operating System''

This is classically a case of FreeBSD and DOS or some other OS conflicting over their ideas of disk You will have to reinstall FreeBSD, but obeying the instructions given above will almost always get you going. I can't get past the boot manager's `F?' prompt.

This is another symptom of the problem described in the preceding question. Your BIOS geometry and FreeBSD geometry settings do not agree! If your controller or BIOS supports cylinder translation (often marked as ``>1GB drive support''), try toggling its setting and reinstalling FreeBSD. I have >16MB of RAM. Will this cause any problems?

Apart from performance issues, no. FreeBSD 2.X comes with bounce buffers which allow your bus mastering controller access to greater than 16MB. (Note that this should only be required if you are using ISA devices, although one or two broken EISA and VLB devices may need it as well).

Also look at the section on if you have that much memory, or if you're using a Compaq or other BIOS that lies about the available memory. Do I need to install the complete sources?

In general, no. However, we would strongly recommend that you install, at a minimum, the ``. With the exception of the kernel sources, our build structure is set up so that you can read-only mount the sources from elsewhere via NFS and still be able to make new binaries. (Because of the kernel-source restriction, we recommend that you not mount this on /usr/src directly, but rather in some other location with appropriate symbolic links to duplicate the top-level structure of the source tree.)

Having the sources on-line and knowing how to build a system with them will make it much easier for you to upgrade to future releases of FreeBSD.

To actually select a subset of the sources, use the Custom menu item when you are in the Distributions menu of the system installation tool. The src/install.sh script will also install partial pieces of the source distribution, depending on the arguments you pass it. Do I need to build a kernel?

Building a new kernel was originally pretty much a required step in a FreeBSD installation, but more recent releases have benefited from the introduction of a much friendlier kernel configuration tool. When at the FreeBSD boot prompt (boot:), use the "-c" flag and you will be dropped into a visual configuration screen which allows you to configure the kernel's settings for most common ISA cards.

It's still recommended that you eventually build a new kernel containing just the drivers that you need, just to save a bit of RAM, but it's no longer a strict requirement for most systems. I live outside the US. Can I use DES encryption?

If it is not absolutely imperative that you use DES style encryption, you can use FreeBSD's default encryption for even Since the DES encryption algorithm cannot legally be exported from the US, non-US users should not download this software (as part of the There is however a replacement libcrypt available, based on sources written in Australia by David Burren. This code is now available on some non-US FreeBSD mirror sites. Sources for the unencumbered libcrypt, and binaries of the programs which use it, can be obtained from the following FTP sites: ftp://ftp.internat.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD ftp://storm.sea.uct.ac.za/pub/FreeBSD ftp://ftp.iqm.unicamp.br/pub/FreeBSD ftp://nic.funet.fi/pub/unix/FreeBSD/eurocrypt

The non-US Non-US users should please not download any encryption software from the USA. This can get the maintainers of the sites from which the software is downloaded into severe legal difficulties.

A non-US distribution of Kerberos is also being developed, and current versions can generally be obtained by anonymous FTP from braae.ru.ac.za.

There is also a for the discussion of non-US encryption software. For more information, send an email message with a single line saying ``<majordomo@braae.ru.ac.za>. The boot floppy starts but hangs at the ``Probing Devices...'' screen.

If you have a IDE Zip or Jaz drive installed, remove it and try again. The boot floppy can get confused by the drives. After the system is installed you can reconnect the drive. Hopefully this will be fixed in a later release. I get a ``panic: cant mount root'' error when rebooting the system after installation.

This error comes from confusion between the boot block's and the kernel's understanding of the disk devices. The error usually manifests on two-disk IDE systems, with the hard disks arranged as the master or single device on separate IDE controllers, with FreeBSD installed on the secondary IDE controller. The boot blocks think the system is installed on wd1 (the second BIOS disk) while the kernel assigns the first disk on the secondary controller device wd2. After the device probing, the kernel tries to mount what the boot blocks think is the boot disk, wd1, while it is really wd2, and fails.

To fix the problem, do one of the following: At the Boot: prompt, enter 1:wd(2,a)kernel and press Enter. If the system starts, then run the command echo "1:wd(2,a)kernel" > /boot.config to make it the default boot string. Move the FreeBSD disk onto the primary IDE controller, so the hard disks are consecutive. modify the wd configuration lines to read: controller wdc0 at isa? port "IO_WD1" bio irq 14 vector wdintr disk wd0 at wdc0 drive 0 # disk wd1 at wdc0 drive 1 # comment out this line controller wdc1 at isa? port "IO_WD2" bio irq 15 vector wdintr disk wd1 at wdc1 drive 0 # change from wd2 to wd1 disk wd2 at wdc1 drive 1 # change from wd3 to wd2 Install the new kernel. If you moved your disks and wish to restore the previous configuration, replace the disks in the desired configuration and reboot. Your system should boot successfully. What are the limits for memory?

For memory, the (theoretical) limit is 4 gigabytes. One gigabyte has been tested; you generally can't buy i386 PCs that can support much more than that. What are the limits for ffs filesystems?

For ffs filesystems, the maximum theoretical limit is 8 terabytes (2G blocks), or 16TB for the default block size of 8K. In practice, there is a soft limit of 1 terabyte, but with modifications filesystems with 4 terabytes are possible (and exist).

The maximum size of a single ffs file is approximately 1G blocks (4TB) if the block size is 4K. maxfilesize ---------------------------------- 2.2.7 3.0 fs block size -stable -current works should-work ------------- ------- -------- ----- ----------- 4K 4T-1 4T-1 4T-1 4+T 8K 32+G 8T-1 32+G 16T-1 16K 128+G 16T-1 128+G 32T-1 32K 512+G 32T-1 512+G 64T-1 64K 2048+G 64T-1 2048+G 128T-1

When the fs block size is 4K, triple indirect blocks work and everything should be limited by the maximum fs block number that can be represented using triple indirect blocks (approx. 1K^3 + 1K^2 + 1K), but everything is limited by a (wrong) limit of 1G-1 on fs block numbers. The limit on fs block numbers should be 2G-1. There are some bugs for fs block numbers near 2G-1, but such block numbers are unreachable when the fs block size is 4K.

For block sizes of 8K and larger, everything should be limited by the 2G-1 limit on fs block numbers, but is actually limited by the 1G-1 limit on fs block numbers, except under -stable triple indirect blocks are unreachable, so the limit is the maxiumum fs block number that can be represented using double indirect blocks (approx. (blocksize/4)^2 + (blocksize/4)), and under -current exceeding this limit may cause problems. Using the correct limit of 2G-1 blocks does cause problems. How can I put 1TB files on my floppy?

I keep several virtual ones on floppies :-). The maxiumum file size is not closely related to the maximum disk size. The maximum disk size is 1TB. It is a feature that the file size can be larger than the disk size.

The following example creates a file of size 8T-1 using a whole 32K of disk space (3 indirect blocks and 1 data block) on a small root partition. The dd command requires a dd that works with large files. ttyv0:bde@alphplex:/tmp/q> cat foo df . dd if=/dev/zero of=z bs=1 seek=`echo 2^43 - 2 | bc` count=1 ls -l z du z df . ttyv0:bde@alphplex:/tmp/q> sh foo Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/sd0a 64479 27702 31619 47% / 1+0 records in 1+0 records out 1 bytes transferred in 0.000187 secs (5346 bytes/sec) -rw-r--r-- 1 bde bin 8796093022207 Sep 7 16:04 z 32 z Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/sd0a 64479 27734 31587 47% / ttyv0:bde@alphplex:/tmp/q> exit

Bruce Evans, September 1998