BSD

BSD stands for Berkeley Software Distribution and is an operating system. Most of its common variations are considered to be Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS). This resource is similar to its counterpart Linux and one should explore things like Basic commands in Linux and Directories in Linux. Most work for the BSDs also. FreeBSD is what we'll be looking at primarily but we will also cover NetBSD, OpenBSD and others.

See the main article at Wikipedia

## Getting FreeBSD

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Getting FreeBSD is easy. This course is based on the FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE which came from here. If you are new to installing operating systems, you might consider getting only the `7.2-RELEASE-i386-livefs.iso` to look at a Live CD version. PC-BSD and FreeSBIE are also available. You can also learn FreeBSD if you have an Amazon AWS account, as there is free version available on w:AWS Marketplace, and probably some other cloud hosting providers offers too FreeBSD installations.

see also Creating a bootable disk

## Learning BSD

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We chose FreeBSD for the i386 family. Look again at the Getting FreeBSD page to see if it matches your test machine. If you don't have a test machine, there are many BSD servers online where you can get a shell account.

## Basic Commands

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* CPU Information: `sysctl hw.model hw.machine hw.ncpu`

user@example.com# sysctl hw.model hw.machine hw.ncpu
hw.model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1230 V2 @ 3.30GHz
hw.machine: amd64
hw.ncpu: 8

* Memory installed: `sysctl hw.physmem`

Package Management (w:FreeBSD_Ports#Packages):

* List installed packages: `pkg info`[1]
* Install a package `pkg install package_name`
* Delete a package `pkg delete package_name`

## Installing FreeBSD

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Our CD set:

* `7.x-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.iso`
* `7.x-RELEASE-i386-disc1.iso`
* `7.x-RELEASE-i386-disc2.iso`
* `7.x-RELEASE-i386-disc3.iso`
* `7.x-RELEASE-i386-docs.iso`

Our Hardware: Our test machine will be a Dell PowerEdge 2400 server with one i386 class Pentium IV (even though there is a socket for a second).

This course is under construction... see the talk page 03:00, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

## Updating FreeBSD

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FreeBSD updates can be done using `freebsd-update` command.

## Managing Service

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Services are managed using `service` command and the `start`, `stop`, and `restart` options.[2]

## Personalize command prompt

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You can personalize your command prompt by editing `~/.cshrr` file. Change set prompt line to your desire value, for example: `set prompt="%{\033[46m%}[$HOSTTYPE]`uname -r`%B[%.2]%b"`

## Reflist

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1. ↑ https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=pkg&sektion=&n=1
2. ↑ https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/configtuning-rcd.html

## See also

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* b:Guide to Unix/BSD/FreeBSD