A Look and brief introduction to FreeBSD 12.1

hi I'm DJ we're on this episode of the cyber gizmo we're going to be looking at FreeBSD version 12.1 right after this [Music] I've gotten a couple of requests for doing an installation video on FreeBSD so as always I'm gonna take a step back and explain what FreeBSD is it is a unix-like operating system and you can't call it of course at UNIX because it isn't and because UNIX is a trademark FreeBSD requirements always start here for the hardware requirements it supports of course 64-bit Intel or AMD processors it requires about they say 96 megabyte of memory although in my experience it is taking a lot more than that probably because the I'm not be selecting some of the Pat all of the non-essential packages during the install but they do recommend that you use you give it about 2 to 4 gigabytes of memory if you're gonna run a GUI and it'll take about according to them 1.5 gigabytes of disk space I'm finding it more like about 6.5 gigabytes and when I'm all done installing you'll see that they recommend 8 gigabyte I'm gonna recommend if you really wanted to use this you need at least 20 gigabyte maybe even a little bit more I 386 32-bit is also supported it also runs on PowerPC on MIPS and sparc64 it runs on arm and there is support for RISC 5 as well so it has a pretty wide range of hardware platforms that it will support but what really is it so FreeBSD was initially released back in November of 1993 so it's about 26 years old little over 26 years old the latest release would came out last November in 2019 it is based on research of eunuchs and if you're not familiar with what that term means when bell labs begin developing eunuchs they split into two different halves there was the commercial half which was the programmers workbench / UNIX or PWB UNIX and then there was research unix which was used to develop new features and and then roll those at some point into the production releases of unix and so PWD are PWB UNIX went on to become system 3 it went on to become system 5 and so forth so that was their production system or their commercial version and the research Linux they teamed up with with the berkeley university to create a platform on which to build new functionality so they traded code back and forth and a lot of the early code came from berkeley that went back into unix so and they I think the last release that BSD took was released ten of research Linux sometimes you you know if you hear people say I worked on UNIX release eight or seven or nine or ten that's referring to research Linux excuse me research in UNIX so BSD is intended for servers and workstations embedded systems it runs Network firewalls and in fact PF census is based on FreeBSD and also is used in storage servers because of ZFS ZFS being the code that was developed by Sun initially and then taken over by Oracle so it has a pretty wide range of uses in the and throughout the market so BSD is kind of unique it's a permissive software licensed under the FreeBSD license unlike Linux which is released under the GPL version 2 BSD is very similar to Linux but it is not Linux and Linux is not Unix so they share kind of similar ideals and in how they make their approaches to doing things but Linux does not implement all of the things that FreeBSD does and FreeBSD does not implement all of the things that Linux does FreeBSD is very much unlike Linux in one respect Linux the only thing that the Linux Foundation releases is the kernel the rest of the software packages come third-party or from the ganoub project so freebsd on the other hand that they release everything they send released the kernel they released the drivers the user land utilities the documentation program development tools or compilers libraries that go with that all of it so FreeBSD is is also unlike Linux in that it is free and open source and I know that that this caused the Ganu foundation quite a bit of consternation but Linux requires that developers return the code that they that they change FreeBSD does not so that's it that's the difference you're free to use the code you're free to modify the code and you do not have to turn it back into them unless you want to I mean they certainly will take it it's just that you're not required by the license in order to do that there are a number of desktop environments were which are available for freebsd there is no and KDE and Xfce there's also open box there's flex box there's dwm and also BSP WM and one that everybody always leaves out which was the first one which is twn and when you deploy xorg TWM gets deployed with it which is the original I think it was called terminal window manager because really that's what it was it just managed terminal sessions so you can have multiple terminal screens up on you on your machine at once so on those days it was x11 terminals or blit terminals as they were called by AT&T so yeah it does support quite a few of those now I'm sure there are others but those are the only ones that I know of now I'm gonna say this but it's it's yeah FreeBSD does have some direct impact on Apple's OS the Mac OS they do supply of course apples Darwin was based on freebsd in the beginning course that used the mach kernel but a lot of the utilities and compilers and things originally came from freebsd mac OS still has a number of freebsd utilities although i I think though that number is dwindling as Apple is making it more and more proprietary and of course iOS and TB OS and watch OS all include a lot of that code as well FreeNAS of course is based on freebsd and the operating system for Sony PlayStation 3 and 4 is based on pre BSD as well so there's a lot of spin-off project I did not include next step in here because next step really had its roots a little higher up in the tree before freebsd came out so I didn't really include them although of course there were freebsd components in next step but the most of the system was proprietary and closed so free PSD can run most software that runs on Linux they have a compatibility layer which we'll talk about more it's not just it's not an emulator it is actually a compatibility layer that allows Linux code to run directly it implements the trusted BSD model and that was implemented years before in order to make a secure server or a secure workstation FreeBSD implements jails I've heard several people call it a it's a replacement for chroot well kinda it's nothing like chroot it is a better form of containerization it's similar but not exactly but it's similar to LXE and Solaris is owned so you have if you have multiple jails in freebsd you are sharing a single copy of freebsd the kernel between them and that's also true of LXE and also Solaris owns although Solaris zones does have a root zone or you can install its own kernel as well I don't believe jails has implemented that feature it also implements virtualization and they call it beehive herby hy-vee or behave I've heard it called both fully supports opens the FS and it's native it's all it's included in the kernel and it also it was I think one of the first ones to implement mandatory access controls freebsd has always been very I guess very progressive when it comes to security they've always been the first to step up and implement new features into the system in order to make it as secure as possible it also implements access control nests of course in order to maintain its POSIX compliance it is Foxx's compliant it supports the NSA flask te implementation which is the same implementation that is used selinux I supports in addition to that the sons basic security model or yeah basic security model or BSM today that's been moved out to the open source at that world and it's called open BSM you can read about it and it and this is an opinion so I think it's probably one of the most extensive security audit systems in existence and a lot of a lot of the auditing capabilities of that system are they show up both in FreeNAS and and also in PF sense so it's very good very good there are a number of shells but the two that come with it are the TC shell or tick shell which is used for the root account and then shell or the original bourne shell for users and you can also get bash zsh is on here sea shell is available as well as case shell in case shell goes way back it has the as we talked about earlier the OS compatibility layer which allows Linux binaries to run but it does more than that it also supports the execution of BSD OS now that's the original BSD as well as athe system 5 released for libraries so and binaries as well those will execute in that compatibility layer so it probably offers probably one of the most comprehensive Suites of software that is available so it's pretty good and that respect regardless courses is monolithic and it supports threads by the live thr model which is for your coders and programmers it's a one to one thread model and it of course supports SP and SMT that's the symmetric multiprocessing and symmetrical multi-threading it does have a very good scaler for the upper event notifications called KQ so if you're implementing if that base notification systems are event-driven systems it's very good at that and in fact it they have probably at some point down the road we'll get into that that's that's too deep for today's introduction I think so I think probably the best place to start is go install it right so let me switch over to the full screen and we'll go bring up boxes I was gonna do this on boxes first and if it didn't work I'd put it on hardware well let's just give it a try I'm gonna be running this on fedora of course and I already have an installation here I'm gonna give mine four gig of memory and I'm gonna leave the the I think that's about 21.5 let's get this down to four this is always kind of fun to try to drag it just get one tenth there you go and and then we'll go ahead and we'll create it it will fire it up automatically and start it now the bootloader and the driver for the Installer is all written in C and of course it's text-based as all of the early UNIX stuff this is kind of a trip down memory lane this goes way back so the first question it asks is do I want to begin an installation or use the live CD so there this is a live CD and you can use it as such I'm not going to I'm actually going to install it so there are a number of drivers that you can use for the council a lot of different languages that are available as you can see here I'll just scroll all the way down very comprehensive as the number of languages that it supports so it's internationalization features are pretty strong and I'm gonna continue with the US because that's where I am now this one you can you can just do that but you have to have a fully qualified name otherwise your machine will not start oddly enough and then that's for your hostname and of course then you come to this screen which allows you to pick and choose which packages you need and what you want ports I'll probably get into that a little bit later mmm ports is a way that you can install packages by compiling them on your machine so if you if you're if you're a developer or you're looking for the fastest performance that you can possibly get out of FreeBSD a lot of people use ports I don't I'm done with that but I'm just gonna install the binaries and then you come to the partitioning of the desk so there's a number of choices here the one at the bottom is guided route on ZFS and that is natively supported by FreeBSD you will we can I think I might be able to back out of here but well you can see that it has a number of different different ways that you can install it I could install this as stripe no redundancy if I have two drives that can do a mirror a stripe of course it only needs one drive to start with but it does it will use multiples if you have them mirror drive I need two drives to be able to do that it's a raid this is the this is raid one ZFS raid one and so there's Z 1 Z 2 Z 3 that you can use so I'm gonna cancel this and I'm gonna back out and we start this and it's probably gonna make me go all the way back so let get back to here for today I'm just going to install this as ufs you can do have a manual just set up if you want to go in and partition it the way you want it or if you don't want to bother with any of the commands that are in here you can do it yourself from the shell script but today I'm just going to do Auto Fu FS is fine for this I'm going to just take the defaults I could if I wanted to use UFE I could use GPT but I'm just going use an MBR partition for which would be a dos partition to do that and then it should say okay I'm gonna overwrite the disk which there's nothing in it anyway and then it will fetch the distribution and then start to install it this won't take very long it's usually pretty quick a few minutes if that so we're just waiting for this to finish and then it'll asking me for the root password so I will go ahead and give it less than oh my network interface this is the only one I have configured for four boxes and then ipv4 is what I want DHCP is fine for this but what I'm doing today anyway I don't need ipv6 now it'll bring you up to the configuration to set up your resolver host and for me I'm gonna put in this now if I get tab it's gonna jump out of the form so you want to hit the down arrow to be able to go and edit those other two that's just the way it's always as that's the way it's always been as far as I know kind of a strange if user interface normally you would think tab would just take you to the next field but it does not so I'm gonna put in my DNS addresses in my search path for my DNS he'll then ask you for the time zone I'm in America I'm gonna go down here to us went by it go down and pick central which is the closest to me I'll go ahead and let it set the date set the time and then I have some choices here as to what else I might want to install I can I can put my own network server up I can synchronize the system and what the network time at boot hour I can just leave it alone and now normally in a secure system I would disable that to enable crash dumps because that gives away information on your system that you may not want out but before today we'll just leave everything default if you have some hardening options that you need to put in there's a number of them that you can use I'm not going to set any again this is under a VM I don't really care it's probably gonna get destroyed in a few days anyway and then it asks do I want to put any users on the system and absolutely I do I'm gonna take the defaults for this I am gonna add wheel to the list of groups and I will need wheel or video in order to bring up a xorg so that's the reason why I put wheel in there that she'll is fine I see that seashell is also an option here see cell is not my favorite I know there's a lot of people likes the show I'm not one of them so I want password-based authentication yes now there's a number of other models that FreeBSD does support and you can check the documentation for what those are empty password no random password no I would prefer to set this myself and do I want to lock the account out no sometimes some administrators do that in order to create the account before the user maybe it's a new employee that hasn't arrived yet and something like to count out so that no one else can grab it until that employee is on site and then they'll unlock the account and allow them to log in but and in this event I'm not going to do that so I want to add another user no so at this point I'm done and I can apply the configuration and add or I can go back and change anything that I maybe I maybe I just didn't want let's down here allows me to install the st. this is the same free SP handbook that's on the website and I'll show you that a little bit but and you can have that copy on your system if you want it and then if I choose the s here it'll take me to a shell and I if I need special drivers or something like that allows me an opportunity to install those before the system reboots but I don't so I'm just gonna say no and at this point it asked me to reboot and that's what we're going to do and there this reboot it does send out a message if there are multiple people on the system is the suicide a message say we're rebooting but it doesn't give a whole lot of time to get off so okay so let's bring this back up now I don't have to do anything I could just sit here and it'll boot into the multi-user mode in four seconds or I can just hit enter and bypass that counter and this time we should be going in directly into the hard drive version of the installed FreeBSD okay and you'll notice this is text-based that's because this is FreeBSD is a little bit like arch and that you have to do things to set things up so it doesn't it doesn't come with it already set up but don't worry we'll get to that so at this point let's just make sure yeah twelve one release and if you're familiar with Solaris at all alright or the even the older son OS you'll notice that that that you name format is very similar to the way that Sun Solaris and Sun OS does it as well so I need to log in as root here oops wrong password it won't like that okay so now I'm in the manager for packages is called pkg and it works very similar and familiar with apt it works very similar to that so I can do an update and the first time you run a pkg command it's going to download the cache files for all the packages to your system and so that's what it's going to do right now and these I believe are updated quarterly and if it needs to change it will do so it'll do that and it says all them are up-to-date but if there had been I would do it upgrade just just like apt so except we're not gonna run apt so if you want to find a file you do a search so first the first before we do that let's see what I need I don't have my H top I have top what about Neil fetch and out that song here that glances isn't on here nope so we'll do an apt search I'm not sure what glances is called here so I'm going to do a search on glances oops yeah sure yeah I'm sorry my my debian is showing all right so it says we have two choices I can install the Python 22.7 version or the Python 3.7 well Python 2.7 is dead so and you use the install just like apt I got to stop saying that because I'll start typing it now one thing I don't have to put in the version number it will figure that out and I could have put the other packages on the same line and so I'll do this one first and then I'll do the other T together just to give you a flavor for how that works so it does kind of a similar operation or it downloads the package and then it checks the integrity and then it installs it extracts and installs and this time we'll put and we want each top together here and one nice thing about one other nice thing is I can do a package info and I can put all I'm going to do it more this will show you all the packages that are currently on the system so yeah it's kind of handy that you can go back and you can see and it gives you information unlike Linux Linux doesn't tell you that so you have to do two operations and Linux with apt in order to get both the name and the description so that's the default and open be in freebsd and OpenBSD and that bsd they all do that as far as I know so next thing I need I don't need any more of that so let's just see what we got here it says I have 14 packages installed doing well it's let's just do info or count 14 packages so yeah it does jive so yeah we do let's take a look at age top and see how much memory it's taken 401 meg nah I mean that's a little high for just a system that's just using text but there are a lot of packages that got installed that are big and I notice also that Getty is running here and Getty is a terminal driver so that's a serial driver for terminals there's also one for modems but that's in here too okay look no those are all terminals under 7 own they probably should just get rid of those we don't we certainly don't need those in memory let's do glances and see what glances says so if you've watched many of my videos you know that this looks very similar to the one that runs under Linux and it is showing 554 Meg being in use let's just check both of them and BM status ain't 497 266 Meg average and then the number of pages was 497 so not a lot alright so next step we want to go and we want to install we want to figure out how to I don't need that so I'm just going to go over here and do a search for FreeBSD and it's FreeBSD org is where you go to get this and then you would do your downloads here and the production releases is 12.1 they're still supporting 12 oh and eleven point three and they have some upcoming eleven four and 12.2 are in out beta I guess then uhand the documentation you'll have a number of options and so you can go there's a full set of man pages here there's some books there documentation about the project itself and I'm just gonna go to handbook I'm not gonna go to porters handbook this is very good I mean it gives you a synopsis about the project talks about how to install it it even gives you some basics on FreeBSD as well so even if you're new to Linux those would help you because the commands are similar until you get down here to the package and the ports everything else is going to be pretty similar and then X Windows it talks about installing X Windows and that's what I want to go next so only thing I need to do it looks like is to install xorg so we'll do that it's not I don't want that what box is this please so we will do package install X order and this will take a while so I'll be back first I better get my cursor released okay so that's done so the next thing I want to do is go back to my instructions here and see what else I need to do now I yeah i could just an inner start X right now and that would bring up the terminal windows or TWM I don't really want to do that I will tell you that earlier I did try to install KDE and for some reason on my system under boxes it would not show the menus it started it brought up STD I'm just fine I was able to log in but when I got to the KDE screen normally there's like this this information that gets passed and then it starts to set stuff up and it didn't do that so yeah I'm not quite sure what happened there so I'm just gonna go back and I'll just install gnome for today but oops that's XDM I don't want XDM either there we go so alright this is another little one that will take quite a bit it's not 2 3 let's like go back that bar and it looks like it's 3.2 8.2 is the version so they're a little bit behind I think I don't know what the most current one is but I know fedoras run in 3.34 so yeah this will take even longer because as you can see there's 454 packages there it's got to install so I'll be back and that is done but we're not quite finished with the install there's a few more things that we're gonna have to do so I'm going to need to go over to here to Etsy and then go into FS tab and I will need to install the proc file then they get readwrite and dump and pass or zero I think that's all I need there the other thing we'll need to do is to act is to edit the RC comp file this is where services are started in FreeBSD so the first thing we'll need is d-bus enabled equals yes and d-bus is used for messaging and I also need the hallux the hardware abstraction layer for xorg and for no and then I'll need gdm enabled which is of course the login screen for now and then I'll need Nome enabled as well so if I have everything correct and I'm just gonna double check with the that all looks so it's not enabled it's enable so there's no no there's no D okay probably should I looked up above on SSH cuz it's right there yeah all right so almost made a mistake that would have kept it probably from booting and at this point I can restart it I took I was gonna do if if numb for some reason didn't work I was gonna go try xfce but in my test it did come up and so I'm expecting it to work here unless I can figure something wrong and if I did no big deal like I can just all f1 over to our terminal window and fix it and then just reboot again mmm not the end of the world but we'll see what's gonna happen here it might pop up with the login down below and then the screen should flip into the gdm yep that's exactly what it did now will it come up and it did this is a boxes problem with the pork station cursor is on the screen at the same time so alright let's login and see if we get the gnome the gnome screen and it looks like we did I'm not crazy about that background yeah it does change throughout the day but I think I want to go with that one and then while I'm in here let's just verify that gnome yeah it's 3 to 8.2 also I don't have anything else I want to do there but I do have a couple other things I'd like to do so I'm gonna guess this is probably the gnome browser so we'll get rid of that and it has evolution and the gnome file manager I need that so I'll add that to favorites and I see tweaks is on here too so let's let's go let's see what we've got four choices here looks like just add owatta a dark which is fine I'll go with that for now we can always say add more themes later let's see if we can find y a new window would be good so let's see is that large enough for you to see yeah could be a little bit bigger let's go and do my usual thing here we'll turn that off so it gets the real the real colors and show you another custom font bump that up a little bit and then I'll slide it over so on the outside of my photo okay so let's do a package search let's see if Firefox is here yep now this one has both the Firefox ESR and Firefox so I wonder if it'll up yes and it is going to put the 73 version out here so that's good and then I should have that now visible to me somewhere probably under oh wait that's frequent let's go at all but it's all mm-hm let's look for it there it is okay then we can slide that up and we'll take this one off bye so that was gone mmm as far as go ahead and escape out of that so as far as far as packages is concerned you know you I think we can find let's see if we can find dpkg so yeah you can you can if you want to install deb-deb files you can do that and let's look for rpm and rpm is here as well so you have your do you have a lot of choices if there's Linux packages that you want to install you can get the RPMs from the RPM finder site and download those and then install the deb packages you could bring down from from debian or from ubuntu and install those as well if you want let's let's go back and check h top and see how much memory this is taken now yeah 1.3 gig mmm but I've seen worse glances 1.48 so yeah it does consume some memory no doubt about it but as far as responsiveness of the system it's pretty good now I would not stay with no and I would I would probably try xfce next and see if I can get that going but for today I think that's kind of going to be where I'm gonna leave things but I think I should probably stop and give you some final impressions that I have of it you know it's kind of refreshing to go back in to see to see a unix-like system I have gotten used to Linux and I like Linux but I still use BSD for my ZFS storage server and in the ZFS under Linux is good it's getting a lot better but there are still some things that are in BSD that haven't yet been implemented just yet under Linux it's getting close but yeah when when that time happens I'll switch over to Linux and I'll take my freebsd system down but I I do hope you enjoyed this today and if you did please like and subscribe and as always that there if you're using this and you have some comments I this won't be my last time in visiting FreeBSD I want to come back and probably do so people have been asking me to do a more in-depth ZFS tutorial kind of intermediate tutorial on ZFS and go through some of the other features of CFS and so I will do that and I'll probably use FreeBSD to do that one so again hope you enjoyed this and if you did please like and subscribe and as always hope to see you again in the next video bye for now

Channel: DJ Ware

Views: 68,052

Keywords: DJ Ware, CyberGizmo, BSD, FreeBSD

Id: l4WXHdB_-98

Length: 41min 0sec (2460 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 25 2020