FreeBSD on DETER

Officially Supported Images

FBSD7-STD

FreeBSD 7.3 image. Source for FreeBSD can be found in the /share filesystem.

Working with FreeBSD

First things first

FreeBSD comes with excellent documentation. This includes complete manual pages that document everything from syscalls to command line utilities and a handbook that covers basic system administration tasks.

• ​Web Interface for the FreeBSD man pages
• ​The FreeBSD Handbook
• ​All FreeBSD documentation resources

Binary Packages

Binary packages for FreeBSD 7.3-RELEASE are mirrored on scratch. In order to install packages, the environment variable PACKAGEROOT needs to be set. This should be set by default on all supported FreeBSD images. To check if this is set, simple echo the variable:

node0 ~]$ echo $PACKAGEROOT
http://scratch
[jjh@node0 ~]$ 

You can now use the ​pkg_add command to install packages. Using the '-r' option instructs ​pkg_add to fetch the package from the remote host defined by the PACKAGEROOT variable. This command needs to be run as root, so we use the sudo command.

[jjh@node0 ~]$ sudo pkg_add -r tmux
Fetching http://scratch/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-7.3-release/Latest/tmux.tbz... Done.
[jjh@node0 ~]$ 

To view the list of available packages, you can go to:

• ​Packages available for FreeBSD 7.3
• ​Packages available for FreeBSD 8.1