Before you install

Compaq/Digital Alpha machines

FreeBSD also supports computers based on the Compaq (previously Digital) AXP processor, commonly called Alpha. Much of the information above also applies to the Alpha; notable exceptions are:

• Much of the PC hardware mentioned above was never supplied with the Alpha. This applies particularly to older hardware.
• The PC BIOS is very different from the Alpha console firmware. We'll look at that below.
• Disk partitioning is different. FreeBSD does not support multiple operating systems on the Alpha platform.

In this section we'll look at some additional topics that only apply to the Alpha.

FreeBSD requires the SRM console firmware, which is used by Tru64 (formerly known as Digital UNIX). It does not work with the ARC firmware (sometimes called AlphaBIOS) used with Microsoft NT. The SRM firmware runs the machine in 64 bit mode, which is required to run FreeBSD, while the ARC firmware sets 32 bit mode. If your system is currently running Tru64, you should be able to use the existing SRM console.

The SRM console commands differ from one version to another. The commands supported by your version are described in the hardware manual that was shipped with your system. The console help command lists all supported console commands. If your system

has been set to boot automatically, you must type Ctrl-C to interrupt the boot process and get to the SRM console prompt (>>>). If the system is not set to boot automatically, it displays the SRM console prompt after performing system checks.

All SRM console versions support the set and show commands, which operate on environment variables that are stored in non-volatile memory. The show command lists all environment variables, including those that are read-only.

Alpha's SRM is picky about which hardware it supports. For example, it recognizes NCR SCSI boards, but it doesn't recognize Adaptec boards. There are reports of some Alphas not booting with particular video boards. The GENERIC kernel configuration (/usr/src/sys/alpha/conf/GENERIC) shows what the kernel supports, but that doesn't mean that the SRM supports all the devices. In addition, the SRM support varies from one machine to the next, so there's a danger that what's described here won't work for you.

Other differences for Alpha include:

• The disk layout for SRM is different from the layout for Microsoft NT. SRM looks for its bootstrap where Microsoft keeps its partition table. This means that you cannot share a disk between FreeBSD and Microsoft on an Alpha.
• Most SRM-based Alpha machines don't support IDE drives: you're limited to SCSI.

The CD-ROM distribution

The easiest way to install FreeBSD is from CD-ROM. You can buy them at a discount with the order form at the back of the book, or you can download an ISO image from ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org and create your own CD-ROM. There are a number of CD-ROMs in a FreeBSD distribution, but the only essential one is the first one, the Installation CD-ROM. It contains everything you need to install the system itself. The other CD-ROMs contain mainly installable packages. Individual releases may contain other data, such as a copy of the source code repository. We'll take a more detailed look at the installation CD-ROM here.

Installation CD-ROM

The Installation CD-ROM contains everything you need to install FreeBSD on your system. It supplies two categories of installable software:

• The base operating system is stored as gzipped tar archives in the directories base, boot, cat pages, compat1x, compat20, compat21, compat3x, compat4x, des, dict, doc, games, info, manpages and proflibs.To facilitate transport to and installation from floppy, the archive shave been divided into chunks of 1.44 MB. For example, the only required set is in the files base/base.?? , in other words, all files whose names start with base. and contain two additional characters. This specifically excludes the files base.inf and base.mtree, which are not part of the archive.
• The directory packages/All contains ported, installable software packages as gzipped tar archives. They are designed to be installed directly on a running system, so they have not been divided into chunks. Due to size restrictions on the CD-ROM, this directory does not contain all the packages: others are on additional CD-ROMs.

packages/Latest contains the latest versions of the packages.

packages/All contains a large subset of the Ports Collection. To make it easier for you to find your way around them, symbolic links to appropriate packages have been placed in the directories archivers, astro, audio, benchmarks, biology, cad, chinese, comms, converters, databases, deskutils, devel, editors, emulators, french, ftp, games, german, graphics, hebrew, irc, japanese, java, korean, lang, mail, math, mbone, misc, net, news, palm, picobsd, plan9, print, russian, science, security, shells, sysutils, templates, textproc, ukrainian, vietnamese, www, x11, x11-clocks, x11-fm, x11-fonts, x11-servers, x11-toolkits and x11-wm. Don't get the impression that these are different packages—they are really pointers to the packages in All. You will find a list of the currently available packages in the file packages/INDEX.

We'll look at the Ports Collection in more detail in "The Ports Collection" .

The .TXT files are also supplied in HTML format with a .HTM suffix.

The contents of the CD-ROM will almost certainly change from one release to another. Read README.TXT for details of the changes.

Live File System CD-ROM

Although the installation CD-ROM contains everything you need to install FreeBSD, the format isn't what you'd like to handle every day. The distribution may include a Live File System CD-ROM, which solves this problem: it contains substantially the same data stored in file system format in much the same way as you would install it on a hard disk. You can access the files directly from this CD-ROM.

CVS Repository CD-ROM

One of the disks may also contain the &CVS Repository.&The repository is the master source tree of all source code, including all update information. We'll look at it in more detail in "Keeping up to date" , Keeping up to date,page 581.

The Ports Collection CD-ROM

An important part of FreeBSD is the Ports Collection, which comprises many housand popular programs. The Ports Collection automates the process of porting software to FreeBSD. A combination of various programming tools already available in the base FreeBSD installation allows you to simply type make to install a given package. The ports mechanism does the rest, so you need only enough disk space to build the ports you want. We'll look at the Ports Collection in more detail in "The Ports Collection" . The files are spread over a number of CD-ROMs:

• You'll find the ports, the instructions for building the packages, on the installation CD-ROM
• The base sources for the Ports Collection fill more than one CD-ROM, even though copyright restrictions mean that not all sources may be included: some source files are freely distributable on the Net, but may not be distributed on CD-ROM.
• Don't worry about the missing sources: if you're connected to the Internet, the Ports Collection automatically retrieves the sources from an Internet server when you typemake.
• You'll find the most popular packages, the precompiled binaries of the ports, on the Installation CD-ROM. A full distribution contains a number of other CD-ROMs with most of the remaining packages.