FreeSBIE 1.1 Documentation

$Id: article.html,v 1.2 2005/09/02 17:53:42 drizzt Exp $

This article is meant as an introductory guide for those who approach FreeSBIE for the first time, but also for the experienced user who wants to have a brief introduction to the new environment.


1. Introduction

FreeSBIE is a LiveCD based on the FreeBSD Operating system, or even easier, a FreeBSD-based operating system that works directly from a CD, without touching your hard drive.

The only thing you have to do is to insert a FreeSBIE cd in your cdrom drive.

FreeSBIE 1.1 is based on FreeBSD 5.3 and comes up with a collection of FREE software you could try and love (see later for descriptions).

With FreeSBIE you will be able to surf the Internet, to have a nice multimedia experience, to meet your friends with cool chat programs and to evaluate a real FreeBSD system without the pain to install it.


2. After a successful boot

Did you boot with FreeSBIE ? Well, let me explain a few things. The first menu you encounter is this:

You should normally wait for 10 seconds for the boot sequence to procede, but if you encounter problems such as kernel panics or similar, I suggest you to try choosing the second option by pressing the "2" key and booting FreeSBIE

If you experience any problem, please try the other options.

The second menu you encounter is this:

This menu will let you choose the layout FreeSBIE will use in console: this is extremely useful if you have a localized keyboard layout.

The third menu you encounter will allow you to choose the keyboard layout XOrg will use:

This is very important if you'd like the system to print the same character you pressed on keyboard!

The latest console based menu you encounter allows you to choose your preferred environment (console, fluxbox, xfce) or the installer.


3. Fluxbox Desktop

The image below shows the items you find if you choose fluxbox as your preferred environment.


4. XFCE Desktop

The image below shows the items you find if you choose XFCE as your preferred environment.


5. Installing FreeSBIE-1.1

FreeSBIE 1.1 includes the BSD installer, developed by the DragonFly BSD Installer Team.

You can choose the installer from the FreeSBIE startup menu, or you can invoke it at any time simply typing:

/scripts/installer

on a terminal window or console.

As FreeSBIE ships with lots of software compressed inside it, please note that you have to configure a quite big /usr partition (at least 2 gigabytes recommended) on the target system.

Using the installer is quite easy if you have little experience with *NIX-like system. Basically, let the installer decide partition sizes for you, keeping attention only to the /usr partition mentioned above.

BSD Installer makes distinct /usr and /home partitions by default. Anyway, if you're low on space, you can safely delete the /home partition and give /usr all the space left (by typing "*" on the size field). The installer will create home directories under /usr and a symlink on the root (/home -> /usr/home).

Don't be afraid if during the install process the after_installation_routines script (at 98% of the progress) takes quite long to finish. It has to recover permissions all around the filesystem, because the ISO-9660 filesystem of the CD isn't able to keep them.


6. Using the FreeSBIE scripts

FreeSBIE comes up with shell scripts you could find in the /scripts dir. The scripts you (probably) need are:

Table 1. Overview of the scripts

Script name Action
load_settings.sh This script allows you to load previously save settings (see save_settings.sh below). This script is automatically executed at the boot time, so you haven't to invoke it (but you can do it).
save_settings.sh This script allows you to save a lot of settings such as network interfaces configuration, your ppp.conf, hostname, keyboard layout, your environment, /root, /etc and /usr/local/etc directories. To invoke this script you could use the entry Save Settings in the FreeSBIE submenu (if you use fluxbox or XFCE) or open a terminal and type: /scripts/save_settings.sh This script will ask you where do you want to save your settings (yes, it will ask you to CONFIRM your choice so let's relax, man) and to press a key at the end of its execution.
mount_disks.sh This script allows you to mount ufs, msdos, ext2, NTFS detected partitions. This script is automatically executed when you boot FreeSBIE and it mounts every detected partition in read only mode (using mount_disks.sh with the ro parameter). If you would like to mount your partitions in read-write mode (i.e. if you would like to save your documents in your FAT32 disk) you have to open a terminal and launch it with the rw parameter: /scripts/mount_disks.sh rw
mount_usb.sh This script allows you to mount USB mass devices (USB pens, compact-flash readers and so on). You don't have to launch this script because it is automatically invoked when a new USB mass device is plugged into a USB port.

7. Common software for common needs

Table 2. Software you should use

You would like to You have to use  
  Console GUI
Chat on IRC irssi gaim, xchat
Chat on ICQ/MSN/Jabber   gaim
Edit files emacs, nano, vim emacs, SciTE, gvim
Listen to music mpg123, mp3blaster beep-media-player, rhythmbox, streamtuner, xmms
Image management ImageMagick gthumb, gimp, ImageMagick
Manage your emails mutt thunderbird
Printing CUPS [a] CUPS
Rip your media mencoder, transcode acidrip, dvdrip, handbrake, ogmrip
Surf the Internet lynx dillo, firefox
Word processing   openoffice-1.1.3
Watch divx, dvd, online streams mplayer gmplayer, xmms
Watch TV   motv, mplayer, xawtv
Notes:
a. FreeSBIE uses the powerful CUPS to give you the best printing experience. To enable cups you have to open a terminal and start the CUPS daemon with the following command:
sh /usr/local/etc/rc.d/cups.sh.sample start
Now, you can configure CUPS with a web browser using this URL:
http://localhost:631
If you wish to enable CUPS at boot time, you have to do:
mv /usr/local/etc/rc.d/cups.sh.sample /usr/local/etc/rc.d/cups.sh
chmod 755 /usr/local/etc/rc.d/cups.sh
and then save your settings with the following command:
/scripts/save_settings.sh

8. Last words

This LiveCD was brought to you by the FreeSBIE team

The official website can be found at http://www.freesbie.org.

This document was written to be distributed with the Release 1.1 of FreeSBIE, and an updated version can be found at http://www.freesbie.org/manual/.

Enjoy yourself while using FreeSBIE !

See you in FreeSBIE-1.2 !