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I’ve spent a few hours this evening putting together some articles on installing and configuring FreeBSD 7.0. So far the articles cover installation, configuring a minimalist desktop, sound, boot config, etc and will span over the next week. These posts are on blog.zelut.org.
Also, many thanks to all the comments and resources regarding getting started. Those that I’ve been able to look at have been very helpful so far.
I had some time this morning on the bus into work so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to post _something_ here. I know its been quite some time since I’ve been blogging, and I’d like to get started again, life is just hectic right now.
Between starting a new job, having a 7 month old baby and our b0rken economy here in the US blogging is not the first thing on my mind.
One of the other things that has kept me busy is learning FreeBSD. We are very much a RHEL/CentOS shop at work but we have quite a bit of FreeBSD mixed in there as well. After I found that out I decided I should dive into it and get familiar with it. Well, so far, I’m enjoying it quite a bit. I feel like I’m back to the learning stage that I enjoyed so much when I started with Linux years ago. So many new things to explore and troubleshoot.
If any of you loyal readers are FreeBSD fans I’d appreciate any tips that you have or good resources to look into. So far I have been doing minimal installs + ports, and I like how efficient it seems to be.
I have a bunch of FreeBSD related articles I could write up, but I don’t know how fitting they are for this blog so I may put them on my other blog. Lets see if I have time today to write one up.
Anyhow, I hope this posts turns out as I am writing it via elinks on FreeBSD sans GUI on my laptop.
I just received the email announcing the release of FreeBSD 7.0. Some excerpts from the email follow:
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE. This is the first release from the 7-STABLE branch which introduces many new features along with many improvements to functionality present in the earlier branches.
…
For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and errata list, available at:
…
7.0-RELEASE ISOs are available via BitTorrent. A collection of torrent files to download the images is available at:
You can read the complete release announcement here.
MD5 (7.0-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso) = 60ff91f3a0851077a2c335f830e1e028 MD5 (7.0-RELEASE-amd64-disc1.iso) = 0232f1b6ffde0e3e76034c9f10791acd MD5 (7.0-RELEASE-amd64-disc2.iso) = 17be33da3bdddfce3b32e697724e021e MD5 (7.0-RELEASE-amd64-disc3.iso) = 3d001985149acc50a5857626f20ddb93 MD5 (7.0-RELEASE-amd64-docs.iso) = b0877e52f08aecd2e70ce86bd1ceb554 MD5 (7.0-RELEASE-amd64-livefs.iso) = 6fea83a3679e8ac785c685f0e446788b MD5 (7.0-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.iso) = cb4f8d05d07aa74f2038050e53673455 MD5 (7.0-RELEASE-i386-disc1.iso) = 5f185a688ef2e0db59105e8f439c8620 MD5 (7.0-RELEASE-i386-disc2.iso) = bb59156b4fc1f9c148095b8c239c827a MD5 (7.0-RELEASE-i386-disc3.iso) = 44de27d5f6bcdbf14e3db38c84f12348 MD5 (7.0-RELEASE-i386-docs.iso) = bcf16778ecc73975024a8e6450ee4ba4 MD5 (7.0-RELEASE-i386-livefs.iso) = abe6773601feda1dc56dade0022fca59FreeBSD, Open Source
I've been waiting for this (and running beta and RC versions) for a long time. Finally, pfSense 1.2 is released.
FreeBSD, Open Source, pfSenseI just received the email announcing FreeBSD 7.0 Release Candidate 2. Images should be available at the usual mirrors (but they're not on the BitTorrent tracker yet), or, if you're already running RC1 (as I am on a few machines), you can follow these instructions for a minor version update using freebsd-update.
Here are the MD5 hashes for the i386 CD images:
MD5 (7.0-RC2-i386-bootonly.iso) = 0a4daf90fc9926b2abe5f0538a6aee95 MD5 (7.0-RC2-i386-disc1.iso) = 7ec7c631f46c891da0da23f4cd4b35e0 MD5 (7.0-RC2-i386-disc2.iso) = 9ddbf85aa9d9a1f135810dd862e0fe34 MD5 (7.0-RC2-i386-disc3.iso) = 9191f36f26aee38680714beb891f8474 MD5 (7.0-RC2-i386-docs.iso) = c23f49125a556971c8a83886ab1f40b7 MD5 (7.0-RC2-i386-livefs.iso) = 5380cf66d547fff489e7fed162b2bdb6FreeBSD, Open Source
OK, I know that it has been a while. But I just set up a VMWare server on my ubuntu machine and I think that I will keep testing some stuff out. The latest victim: FreeBSD. I know, it isn't linux. I know, I am crazy. I really thought that I could like it. I based that off of the opinion of a friend. Wow, not going there again!
To start the installer. Not to pretty, in standard text based installer layout. But the menu system was a little confusing. It wasn't that there were super convoluted menus, just that there were a ton of them. I mean really, a ton. So I get through that and I restart after it gets everything that it needs. And I get a shell prompt. I pause, I told it that I wanted the X window system. So I log in and I am using the dvorak keyboard layout. Everything a normal shell. I do startx, and I am now faced with a primative looking GUI with what looks like the fluxbox window manager, and I see three shells and a clock. No menu, no status bar, nothing. I find that if I kill the shell labeled "logon" I kill X altogether. And that I can't really resize these windows easily. The only thing that I can start from the "menu" is another terminal. That is ok, I can use the terminal. But my shell is /bin/sh, not /bin/bash. I have a dozen commands and that is it. I could do nothing. I tried to install something, like bash or wdm. I can't us the SU command so that I have root privileges.
It may have been a short test but it spoke volumes. I will try it again someday. After I learn another shell and decide I don't need to use my computer in an interactive way. Until then, I don't think that I will use any BSD version for a while.