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
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 AWS Marketplace, and probably some other cloud hosting providers offers too FreeBSD installations.

see also Creating a bootable disk

Learning BSD
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
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
 * CPU Information:


 * Memory installed:

Package Management (FreeBSD_Ports):
 * List installed packages:
 * Install a package
 * Delete a package

Installing FreeBSD
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
FreeBSD updates can be done using  command.

Managing Service
Services are managed using  command and the ,  , and   options.

Personalize command prompt
You can personalize your command prompt by editing  file. Change set prompt line to your desire value, for example: