Installing FreeBSD for the first time

E

England

I have spent most of last week reading the documentation on the installation of FreeBSD. So the first item is obtaining the package of software and creating a binary file on a USB stick. I see that you use the windows program "Win32diskimager to do this? Yes? I wondered what version of FreeBSD is recommended? 13.1/2/14? Please advise.

I would presume all are stable. I also presume that I will access the limited Bios on the mini PC I am purchasing to get the system to boot from the USB. The images shown on the installation documentation explain what I will encounter although I am sure there will be questions.

I want to configure a webserver using FreeBSD and please excuse my ignorance but I did not read about this option in the documentation. Maybe I missed it? Do you just install Xamp Apache server to do so or is there software already in the FreeBSD package. Please advise.
 
England said:
I wondered what version of FreeBSD is recommended? 13.1/2/14? Please advise.
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Use a supported version, that's 13.3 or 14.0 at this time. 13.2 is still supported but this will end in a few weeks. I would suggest giving the latest version, 14.0 a shot. At the very least stick to a -RELEASE version for the time being.
England said:
I would presume all are stable.
Click to expand...
Yes, if they weren't they wouldn't be released. Every major version also has a -STABLE version but this refers to the ABI, it remains stable (i.e. not subject to changes) throughout the lifetime of a major version. There's also -CURRENT but this is an unsupported development version, I don't recommend using this for new users. Get your feet wet first and once you have a better understanding of how FreeBSD is put together you can move to a -STABLE or -CURRENT.
England said:
I want to configure a webserver using FreeBSD and please excuse my ignorance but I did not read about this option in the documentation.
Click to expand...
There are several to chose from, Apache, nginx, lighttpd and a couple of lesser known ones. A familiar term might be LAMP, which is Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. FreeBSD's version would be FAMP, so FreeBSD, Apache (www/apache24), MySQL (databases/mysql80-server) and PHP (lang/php81). I'm sure lots of folks are going to tell you to use MariaDB or PostgreSQL or some other version of PHP, but these are the current 'default' versions, you should stick to those for now.
 
You have to make choices. MBR-partition, GPT-partion. EFI-boot or not ? ZFS or UFS?
The most easy is a freebsd-boot-partition & use UFS if it's your first time.
For webserver & database many combinations are possible.
There are some defaults which SirDice describes. Good to start.
Other combinations are fairly easily possible but you might need a deeper understanding.
For instance i use for everything mariadb ; php-fpm. And nginx/apache24
 
Don't overthink it - you are likely to make mistakes and will need to start over anyway.

Just try something, make notes as you go.

If something doesn't work or you want to try a different approach, go for it.

We learn from our mistakes.

And come here and ask questions if you get stuck on anything.

Walk before you run - see if you can get FreeBSD up-and-running and connecting to the network.

Then worry about web servers etc.
 
Two suggestions. First one: Install using ZFS and boot environments. Reason #1: boot environments means that if you screw up software installs or upgrades, you can just go back. Reason #2: ZFS is the better file system, and simply more reliable than most others; you might as well start learning how it works and how to use it.

Second suggestion (and there is a pun in here): As richardtoohey2 already said, "build one to throw it away ... you will anyway" (this is actually a quote from the greatest book on software engineer, the Mythical Man Month a.k.a. the tar pit book). As you install and start using FreeBSD, you will learn how to do it correctly, where "correctly" is a voyage of discovery about your needs and wants and they style you want to do things in. I would suggest installing it on a VM first (you can rent those from the big cloud providers, and all of them give you a year for free, although I don't think on Azure the FreeBSD version is completely free, and on Google there is an always free version). Set it up as a server, become comfortable with Apache (or the web server of your choice), play with firewalls, and then do the real thing.
 
England said:
I want to configure a webserver using FreeBSD and please excuse my ignorance but I did not read about this option in the documentation. Maybe I missed it? Do you just install Xamp Apache server to do so or is there software already in the FreeBSD package. Please advise.
Click to expand...
The Handbook (at https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/) can be used as an instruction manual for getting started on most of the stuff - installation, network servers like Apache, NFS, Samba, and a few others. In fact, the Apache web server has a dedicated chapter in the Handbook to help OP get started.

The nice thing about FreeBSD is that the hardware requirements are actually pretty minimal - both for initial installation and installation of ports like www/apache24...

I'd say becoming familiar with the Handbook (which covers lots of pretty interesting topics) would be a good first step.
 
ralphbsz said:
Two suggestions. First one: Install using ZFS and boot environments. Reason #1: boot environments means that if you screw up software installs or upgrades, you can just go back. Reason #2: ZFS is the better file system, and simply more reliable than most others; you might as well start learning how it works and how to use it.

Second suggestion (and there is a pun in here): As richardtoohey2 already said, "build one to throw it away ... you will anyway" (this is actually a quote from the greatest book on software engineer, the Mythical Man Month a.k.a. the tar pit book). As you install and start using FreeBSD, you will learn how to do it correctly, where "correctly" is a voyage of discovery about your needs and wants and they style you want to do things in. I would suggest installing it on a VM first (you can rent those from the big cloud providers, and all of them give you a year for free, although I don't think on Azure the FreeBSD version is completely free, and on Google there is an always free version). Set it up as a server, become comfortable with Apache (or the web server of your choice), play with firewalls, and then do the real thing.
Click to expand...
Ok I read your post above again. I am intrigued by your suggestion to use a Virtual Machine. Never considered it. I looked at Azure and Google but am not sure how FreeBSD works with these providers. Looks like a lot of business opportunities and of course usage for storage. I mean, do I install FreeBSD on some particular platform provided by the Cloud company? It sounds like a good idea to get started but I thought that when one is going to install FreeBSD and you have say an AMD CPU or Celeron you select a FreeBSD which complements that configuration or am I missing something here. JUst not sure of the procedure. Azure, for example, does says FreeBSD is supported but I could not decipher what to connect to or rent for free for 12 months. Can you comment a bit more?

Meanwhile I have downloaded that handwork suggested by "astyle"above, which has over 800 pages of information of great value. A lot of reading to do.
 
England said:
Ok I read your post above again. I am intrigued by your suggestion to use a Virtual Machine. Never considered it. I looked at Azure and Google but am not sure how FreeBSD works with these providers. Looks like a lot of business opportunities and of course usage for storage. I mean, do I install FreeBSD on some particular platform provided by the Cloud company? It sounds like a good idea to get started but I thought that when one is going to install FreeBSD and you have say an AMD CPU or Celeron you select a FreeBSD which complements that configuration or am I missing something here. JUst not sure of the procedure. Azure, for example, does says FreeBSD is supported but I could not decipher what to connect to or rent for free for 12 months. Can you comment a bit more?

Meanwhile I have downloaded that handwork suggested by "astyle"above, which has over 800 pages of information of great value. A lot of reading to do.
Click to expand...
OK, try to keep things simple here... the Handbook has a chapter on installation, a chapter on network servers like Apache, a chapter on VMs... you don't have to read it all at once. Break it up into manageable pieces.

Start with trying to install FreeBSD on whatever you can get your hands on. It doesn't have to be a VM, that only makes things more complicated. If you have a Celeron-based computer at home, try to install and boot FreeBSD on that. First goal is to make sure FreeBSD can boot up. Then comes everything else.
 
England said:
Ok I read your post above again. I am intrigued by your suggestion to use a Virtual Machine. Never considered it. I looked at Azure and Google but am not sure how FreeBSD works with these providers. Looks like a lot of business opportunities and of course usage for storage. I mean, do I install FreeBSD on some particular platform provided by the Cloud company? It sounds like a good idea to get started but I thought that when one is going to install FreeBSD and you have say an AMD CPU or Celeron you select a FreeBSD which complements that configuration or am I missing something here. JUst not sure of the procedure. Azure, for example, does says FreeBSD is supported but I could not decipher what to connect to or rent for free for 12 months. Can you comment a bit more?

Meanwhile I have downloaded that handwork suggested by "astyle"above, which has over 800 pages of information of great value. A lot of reading to do.
Click to expand...
I just re-checked which of the three big cloud providers supply FreeBSD VM: On Amazon AWS and on Microsoft Azure, you can get a FreeBSD machine, but it is only free for either 30 or 60 days, afterwards you have to start paying. On Google GCP, you can still get a small FreeBSD machine that is "free" forever, but it is very small. That's the one I've been using for several years now, and I was thinking of migrating it to another provider, but since it is sufficient for my needs, and free, I'll keep it there.

(Footnote: It is not exactly free. You have to give it a credit card to create an account, in case you go over usage limits. And one form of network traffic is non-free, namely all network traffic to China, Oceania and some other areas; my typical bill per month is $0.08 to $0.10 for network traffic from hackers probing my machine).

The way it works is very roughly: Create a Google login (which you may already have if you use Gmail). Then create a Google Cloud account; this may be the point where a credit card is required. Go to the cloud console, and create a new "project", then create a GCE (compute engine) instance, which is a VM. Having read the documentation, make sure you pick the correct size compute engine to make sure you have the free tier one. Then select what OS image to install; among the choices are various FreeBSD versions (I saw that they have 14.x available, and there is probably also 13.x). Then the machine starts, and you run the installer. Once installed, you can access it over the network (ssh works, as do most other services, I run a web server on mine). There is also a serial console, which can be accessed via a special ssh client. There is lots of documentation there.

My machine was installed in 2018 using FreeBSD 11.2, and has been continuously upgraded since; it is now on 13.2. So I haven't actually done a fresh install in 6 years.
 
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