Copyright © 2004-2005 Gruppo Utenti FreeBSD Italia (http://www.gufi.org)
$Id: article.html,v 1.2 2005/09/02 17:53:42 drizzt Exp $
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.
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.
The console environment is a shell prompt without any graphical interface (no firefox, no thunderbird, no gaim).
The fluxbox environment is a light environment that could be useful if you have not-so-recent hardware or if you like a minimal desktop :)
The xfce environment is a complete Desktop Environment full of icons, bells, whistles and beautiful women.
The installer will allow you to install (yes, now you can destroy all your mp3 with a few clicks) FreeSBIE on a hard disk. It will guide you step-by-step with a console-based interface. At the end you'll have FreeBSD 5.3 installed with all the FreeSBIE customizations and tweaks.
The image below shows the items you find if you choose fluxbox as your preferred environment.
The image below shows the items you find if you choose XFCE as your preferred environment.
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.
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. |
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 |
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 !