Installing Unix

[Jerry McAllister]

On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 04:52:15PM +0100, Ese Oronsaye wrote:

> Hi
> I am a newbie to Unix with no experience in installing unix operating
> system. Have been through Download Freebsd but not quite sure what I should
> download.
> What is ISO and Distribution not quite sure which I should download.
> Can anyone help me with this.

Well, some of this is covered well in the FreeBSD Handbook and some
other documents that are all available online starting at the 
  http://www.freebsd.org/   web site.
Even after that it can be a little confusing at first about how to
find just which ISO you want to download.

First determine what is the highest level RELEASE available.  At the
beginning, do not worry about -STABLE and -CURRENT.  

At the moment, the latest RELEASE is 7.2   

Next determine the hardware you want to install on.   That will
probably be either i386 for regular 32 bit or AMD64 for 64 bit
machines, though there are other possibilities.  

The next thing to do is to familiarize yourself with the site for
downloading the ISOs.   Just do an anonymous ftp in and look around.

  ftp to    ftp.freebsd.org   and log in as  anonymous
Use your email address as a password.

You can do an 'ls' in each of the directories you enter to see what is there.
In that first directory you will see only one item --  the  pub directory.
So, cd to it.   Do;
  cd pub
In that directory you will see there is only the FreeBSD  directory so
cd to that.   Do:
  cd FreeBSD        note that it is case sensitive so  cd freebsd won't work.

In the FreeBSD directory, when you do an  ls  you will see lots of stuff
including files, directories and links.   You can look at these things
but you will eventually want to cd to 'releases'  and then to  'i386' or
to 'amd64'

Then cd to 'ISO-IMAGES' and finally to '7.2'

In that directory you will see the .iso files you want to download.
If your internet connection is good enough, then you only need to
download the ....disc1.iso  file and burn it to CD.
You may also want to download the CHECKSUM.MD5 and use that to
verify the good/clean transmission of the .iso file.

After that you are ready to move on to the installation - although
you should read and learn about it so you know what you want to do.

////jerry   
> Regards

> Ese
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