Solved Date of first installation of FreeBSD

[balanga]

Is there any way to tell when FreeBSD was first installed on a system?

I have a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 1 on which I installed FreeBSD alongside the original Windows installation but did this many years ago.

Is there any way to tell, eg from when the disk was repartitioned and which version of FreeBSD was installed?

It's time I tidied up this laptop and don't really know where to start

 

[SirDice]

Thread 'Date of a FreeBSD installation'

Nov 29, 2022

How to know when FreeBSD system was installed?
For example:

# stat -f '%SB %N' /
May 12 11:33:00 2022 /
#

But I remember that my system was installed in July, not earlier.

• Del.Mar
• Replies: 7
• Forum: General

• 

 

[cracauer@]

`ls -ltr /etc/` i what I use.

 

[Maturin]

Desktop: Apr. 9 2021
NAS: Jun. 18 2022
not first, current machines

 

[drhowarddrfine]

May 15, 2024 cause I wanted to switch to ZFS on a clean build. Out of curioslity, I looked to see when I rebuilt before that (from my notes): August 4, 2015!

 

[bvdw78]

My NAS server's boot disk broke in the beginning April of 2023. If it had lived, the install date would have been sometime in 2012. A broken HDD once every decade is acceptable.

 

[dr_grid]

November 11, 2014. That surprised me; didn't think it was that long ago.

 

[balanga]

-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 93049 Aug 13 2019 bsdinstall_log

DEBUG: UNAME_S=[FreeBSD] UNAME_P=[amd64] UNAME_R=[12.0-RELEASE]

So it has just gone seven years, I thought it was longer.

Seven years of junk to tidy up!

Where to start?

 

[drhowarddrfine]

Where to start?

At the beginning

 

[balanga]

I guess I should start by deleting pkgs I rarely or never use, but don't know if there is any way to tell when a pkg was last used.

 

[Maturin]

Seven years

That's a sign for a stable OS.

of junk to tidy up!

That's not FreeBSD's fault.

I guess I should start by deleting pkgs I rarely or never use

Depending on how large the mess on your machine is, it may be less effort, quicker and gives you more confidence in getting a clean system to save your /home, /etc, and maybe /usr/local/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d and /boot/loader.conf if you made some changes there, to another drive, also a copy of the file you create with pkg prime-list > myinstalledpackages.txt, and start all over freshly with installing 14.4 RELEASE.
(This way you can also create a larger swap partition.)