Post-installation configuration

In the last chapter we looked at the installation of the basic system, up to the point where it could be rebooted. It's barely possible that this could be enough. Almost certainly, though, you'll need to perform a number of further configuration steps before the system is useful. In this chapter we roughly follow the final configuration menu, but there are a few exceptions. The most important things to do are:

In this chapter, we’ll concentrate on getting the system up and running as quickly as possible. Later on in the book we'll go into more detail about these topics.

At the end of the previous chapter, we had a menu asking whether we wanted to visit the "last options" menu. If you answer YES, you get the configuration menu shown in Figure 6-1 . If you have rebooted the machine, log in as root and start sysinstall. Then select Configure, which gets you into the same menu.

As the markers under the word Networking indicate, this menu is larger than the window in which it is displayed. We'll look at some of the additional entries below. Only some of these entries are of interest in a normal install; we'll ignore the rest.

There may be some reasons to deviate from the sequence in this chapter. For example, if your CD-ROM is mounted on a different system, you may need to set up networking before installing additional software.

Installing additional software

The first item of interest is Packages. These are some of the ports in the Ports Collection, which we'll look at in more detail in Chapter 9 .

The Ports Collection contains a large quantity of software that you may want to install. In fact, there's so much that just making up your mind what to install can be a complicated process: there are over 8,000 ports in the collection. Which ones are worth using? I recommend the following list:

Why do l recommend these particular ports? Simple: because I like them, and I use most of them myself. That doesn't mean they're the only choice, though. Others prefer the for more details.

Instant workstation

The ports mentioned in the previous section are included in the misc/instant-workstation port, which installs typical software and configurations for a workstation and allows you to be productive right away. At a later point you may find that you prefer other software, in which case you can install it.

It's possible that the CD set you get will not include instant-workstation. That's not such a problem. Due to space restrictions, some CD distributions include instant-workstation-lite instead. If that's not there either, just install the individual ports from this list. You can also do this if you don't like the list of ports.

Changing the default shell for root

After installation, you may want to change the default shell for existing users to bash. If you have installed instant-workstation, you should copy the file /usr/lo-cal/share/dot.bashrc to root's home directory and call it .bashrc and .bash_profile. First, start

presto# cp /usr/local/share/dot.bashrc .bashrc
presto# ln .bashrc .bash_profile
presto# bash
=== root@presto (/dev/ttyp2) ~ 1 -gt; chsh

The last command starts an editor with the following content:

#Changing user database information for root.
Login: root
Password:
Uid [#]: 0
Gid [# or name]: 0
Change [month day year]:
Expire [month day year]:
Class:
Home directory: /root
Shell: /bin/csh
Full Name: Charlie 
Office Location:
Office Phone:
Home Phone:
Other information:

Change the Shell line to:

Shell: /usr/local/bin/bash

Note that the bash shell is in the directory /usr/local/bin; this is because it is not part of the base system. The standard shells are in the directory /bin.

Adding users

A freshly installed FreeBSD system has a number of users, nearly all for system components. The only login user is root, and you shouldn't log in as root. Instead you should add at least one account for yourself. If you're transferring a master.passwd file from another system, you don't need to do anything now. Otherwise select this item and then the menu item User, and fill out the resulting menu like this:

You should not need to enter the fields UID and Home directory: sysinstall does this for you. It's important to ensure that you are in group wheel so that you can use the su command to become root, and you need to be in group operator to use the shutdown command.

Don't bother to add more users at this stage; you can do it later. We’ll look at user management in Chapter 8 , on page 112.

Setting the root password

Next, select Root Password. We’ll talk about passwords more on page 144. Select this item to set the password in the normal manner.

Time zone

Next, select the entry time zone. The first entry asks you if the machine CMOS clock (i.e. the hardware clock) is set to UTC (sometimes incorrectly called GMT, which is a British time zone). If you plan to run only FreeBSD or other UNIX-like operating systems on this machine, you should set the clock to UTC. If you intend to run other software that doesn't understand time zones, such as many Microsoft systems, you have to set the time to local time, which can cause problems with daylight savings time.

The next menu asks you to select a "region," which roughly corresponds with a continent. Assuming you are living in Austin, TX in the United States of America, you would select America -- North and South and then (after scrolling down) United States of America. The next menu then looks like this: Select Central Time and select Yes when the system asks you whether the abbreviation CST sounds reasonable.

This particular step is relatively cumbersome. You may find it easier to look in the directory /usr/share/zoneinfo after installation. There you find:

# cd /usr/share/zoneinfo/
# ls
Africa       Australia   Etc       MET       WET
America      CET         Europe    MST       posixrules
Antarctica   CST6CDT     Factory   MST7MDT   zone tab
Arctic       EET         GMT       PST8EDT
Asia         EST         HST       Pacific 
Atlantic     EST5EDT     Indian    SystemV

If you want to set the time zone to, say, Singapore, you could enter:

# cd Asia/
# ls
Aden       Chungking  Jerusalem     Novosibirsk  Tehran
Almaty     Colombo    Kabul         Omsk         Thimbu
Amman      Dacca      Kamchatka     Phnom_Penh   Tokyo
Anadyr     Damascus   Karachi       Pyongyang    Ujung_Pandang
Aqtau      Dili       Kashgar       Qatar        Ulaanbaatar
Aqtobe     Dubai      Katmandu      Rangoon      Ulan -Bator
Ashkhabad  Dushanbe   Krasnoyarsk   Riyadh       Urumqi
Baghdad    Gaza       Kuala_Lumpur  Saigon       Vientiane
Bahrain    Harbin     Kuching       Samarkand    Vladivostok
Baku       Hong_Kong  Kuwait        Seoul        Yakutsk
Bangkok    Hovd       Macao         Shanghai     Yekaterinburg
Beirut     Irkutsk    Magadan       Singapore    Yerevan
Bishkek    Istanbul   Manila        Taipei
Brunei     Jakarta    Muscat        Tashkent
Calcutta   Jayapura   Nicosia       Tbilisi
# cp Singapore /etc/localtime

Note that the files in /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia (and the other directories) represent specific towns, and these may not correspond with the town in which you are located. Choose one in the same country and time zone.

You can do this at any time on a running system.

Network services

The next step is to configure your networking equipment. Figure 6-4 shows the Network Services Menu. There are a number of ways to get to this menu:

The first step should always be to set up the network interfaces, so this is where you find yourself if you are performing a Standard or Express installation.

Setting up network interface

Figure 6-5 shows the network setup menu. On a standard 80x25 display it requires scrolling to see the entire menu. If you installed via FTP or NFS, you will already have set up your network interfaces, and sysinstall won't ask the questions again. The only real network board on this list is xl0, the Ethernet board. The others are standard hardware that can also be used as network interfaces. Don't try to set up PPP here; there's more to PPP configuration than sysinstall can handle. We'll look at PPP configuration in Chapter 20 .

In our case, we choose the Ethernet board. The next menu asks us to set the internet parameters. Figure 6-6 shows the network configuration menu after filling in the values. Specify the fully qualified local host name; when you tab to the Domain: field, the domain is filled in automatically. The names and addresses correspond to the example network that we look at in Chapter 16, on page 294. We have chosen to call this machine presto, and the domain is example.org. In other words, the full name of the machine is presto.example.org. It's IP address is 223.147.37.2. In his configuration, all access to the outside world goes via gw.example.org, which has the IP address 223.147.37.5. The name server is located on the same host, presto.example.org. The name server isn't running when this information is needed, so we specify all addresses in numeric form.

What happens if you don't have a domain name? If you're connecting to the global Internet, you should go out and get one—see page 318. But in the meantime, don't fake it. Just leave the fields empty. If you're not connecting to the Internet, of course, it doesn't make much difference what name you choose.

As is usual for a class C network, the net mask is 255.255.255.0. You don't need to fill in this information—if you leave this field without filling it in, sysinstall inserts it for you. Normally, as in this case, you wouldn't need any additional options to ifconfig.

Other network options

It's up to you to decide what other network options you would like to use. None of the following are essential, and none need to be done right now, but you may possibly find some of the following interesting:

You don't need to specify any of the remaining configuration options during configuration. See the online handbook for further details.

Startup preferences

The next step of interest is the Startup submenu, which allows you to choose settings that take effect whenever you start the machine. See Chapter 29 for details of the startup files.

Configuring the mouse

FreeBSD detects PS/2 mice at boot time only, so the mouse must be plugged in when you boot. If not, you will not be able to use it. To configure, select Mouse from the configuration menu. The menu in Figure 6-8 appears.

With a modern PS/2 mouse, you don't need to do any configuration at all. You just enable the mouse daemon or moused. Select the menu item Enable: you have the chance to move the mouse and note that the cursor follows. The keys don't work in this menu: select Yes and exit the menu. That's all you need to do.

If you're running a serial mouse, choose the item Select mouse port and set it to correspond with the port you have; if you have an unusual protocol, you may also need to set it with the Type menu. For even more exotic connections, read the man page for moused and set the appropriate parameters.

Configuring X

You should have installed X along with the rest of the system—see page 75. If you haven't, install the package x11/XFree86. In this section, we'll look at what you need to do to get X up and running.

X configuration has changed a lot in the course of time, and it's still changing. The current method of configuring X uses a program called x/86c/g, which is still under development, and it shows a few strangeness’s. Quite possibly the version you get will not behave identically with the following description. The differences should be relatively clear, however.

The configuration is stored in a file called XF86Config, thhough the directory has changed several times in the last few years. It used to be in /etc/X11/XF86Config or

/etc/XF86Config, but the current preferred place is /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/XF86Config.The server looks for the configuration file in multiple places, so if you're upgrading from an earlier version, make sure you remove any old configuration files. We'll look at the contents of the file in detail in Chapter 28 . In this section, we'll just look at how to generate a usable configuration.

From the configuration menu, select XFree86 and then xf86cfg. There is a brief delay while xf86cfg creates an initial configuration file, then you see the main menu of Figure 6-9. This application runs without knowing what the hardware is, so the rendering is pretty basic. The window on the left shows the layout of the hardware, and the window on the right is available in case your mouse isn't working. Select the individual components with the mouse or the numeric keypad. For example, to configure the mouse, select the image at top left:

In all likelihood that won't be necessary. The configuration file that xf86cfg has already created may be sufficient, so you could just exit and save the file. You'll probably want to change some things, though. In the following, we'll go through the more likely changes you may want to make.