FreeBSD on DETER

Officially Supported Images

FBSD7-STD

• ​FBSD7-STD FreeBSD 7.3 image.

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 binary packages from scratch, the environment variable PACKAGEROOT is set to '\​http://scratch'. To check that 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 (soon to be supported on DETER)

To learn more about managing packages on FreeBSD, please refer to ​Section 4.4 of the FreeBSD Handbook

Source for FreeBSD

For now, the source can be found in /share/freebsd