                   For People New to Both FreeBSD and UNIX(R)

  Annelise Anderson

   <andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu>

   Revision: 46448

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   Last modified on 2015-04-03 15:18:19 by eadler.
   Abstract

   Congratulations on installing FreeBSD! This introduction is for people new
   to both FreeBSD and UNIX(R)-so it starts with basics.

   [ Split HTML / Single HTML ]

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   Table of Contents

   1. Logging in and Getting Out

   2. Adding A User with Root Privileges

   3. Looking Around

   4. Getting Help and Information

   5. Editing Text

   6. Other Useful Commands

   7. Next Steps

   8. Your Working Environment

   9. Other

   10. Comments Welcome

1. Logging in and Getting Out

   Log in (when you see login:) as a user you created during installation or
   as root. (Your FreeBSD installation will already have an account for root;
   who can go anywhere and do anything, including deleting essential files,
   so be careful!) The symbols % and # in the following stand for the prompt
   (yours may be different), with % indicating an ordinary user and #
   indicating root.

   To log out (and get a new login: prompt) type

 # exit

   as often as necessary. Yes, press enter after commands, and remember that
   UNIX(R) is case-sensitive-exit, not EXIT.

   To shut down the machine type

 # /sbin/shutdown -h now

   Or to reboot type

 # /sbin/shutdown -r now

   or

 # /sbin/reboot

   You can also reboot with Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Give it a little time to do its
   work. This is equivalent to /sbin/reboot in recent releases of FreeBSD and
   is much, much better than hitting the reset button. You do not want to
   have to reinstall this thing, do you?

2. Adding A User with Root Privileges

   If you did not create any users when you installed the system and are thus
   logged in as root, you should probably create a user now with

 # adduser

   The first time you use adduser, it might ask for some defaults to save.
   You might want to make the default shell csh(1) instead of sh(1), if it
   suggests sh as the default. Otherwise just press enter to accept each
   default. These defaults are saved in /etc/adduser.conf, an editable file.

   Suppose you create a user jack with full name Jack Benimble. Give jack a
   password if security (even kids around who might pound on the keyboard) is
   an issue. When it asks you if you want to invite jack into other groups,
   type wheel

 Login group is ``jack''. Invite jack into other groups: wheel

   This will make it possible to log in as jack and use the su(1) command to
   become root. Then you will not get scolded any more for logging in as
   root.

   You can quit adduser any time by typing Ctrl+C, and at the end you will
   have a chance to approve your new user or simply type n for no. You might
   want to create a second new user so that when you edit jack's login files,
   you will have a hot spare in case something goes wrong.

   Once you have done this, use exit to get back to a login prompt and log in
   as jack. In general, it is a good idea to do as much work as possible as
   an ordinary user who does not have the power-and risk-of root.

   If you already created a user and you want the user to be able to su to
   root, you can log in as root and edit the file /etc/group, adding jack to
   the first line (the group wheel). But first you need to practice vi(1),
   the text editor-or use the simpler text editor, ee(1), installed on recent
   versions of FreeBSD.

   To delete a user, use the rmuser command.

3. Looking Around

   Logged in as an ordinary user, look around and try out some commands that
   will access the sources of help and information within FreeBSD.

   Here are some commands and what they do:

   id

           Tells you who you are!

   pwd

           Shows you where you are-the current working directory.

   ls

           Lists the files in the current directory.

   ls -F

           Lists the files in the current directory with a * after
           executables, a / after directories, and an @ after symbolic links.

   ls -l

           Lists the files in long format-size, date, permissions.

   ls -a

           Lists hidden "dot" files with the others. If you are root, the
           "dot" files show up without the -a switch.

   cd

           Changes directories. cd .. backs up one level; note the space
           after cd. cd /usr/local goes there. cd ~ goes to the home
           directory of the person logged in-e.g., /usr/home/jack. Try cd
           /cdrom, and then ls, to find out if your CDROM is mounted and
           working.

   less filename

           Lets you look at a file (named filename) without changing it. Try
           less /etc/fstab. Type q to quit.

   cat filename

           Displays filename on screen. If it is too long and you can see
           only the end of it, press ScrollLock and use the up-arrow to move
           backward; you can use ScrollLock with manual pages too. Press
           ScrollLock again to quit scrolling. You might want to try cat on
           some of the dot files in your home directory-cat .cshrc, cat
           .login, cat .profile.

   You will notice aliases in .cshrc for some of the ls commands (they are
   very convenient). You can create other aliases by editing .cshrc. You can
   make these aliases available to all users on the system by putting them in
   the system-wide csh configuration file, /etc/csh.cshrc.

4. Getting Help and Information

   Here are some useful sources of help. Text stands for something of your
   choice that you type in-usually a command or filename.

   apropos text

           Everything containing string text in the whatis database.

   man text

           The manual page for text. The major source of documentation for
           UNIX(R) systems. man ls will tell you all the ways to use the ls
           command. Press Enter to move through text, Ctrl+B to go back a
           page, Ctrl+F to go forward, q or Ctrl+C to quit.

   which text

           Tells you where in the user's path the command text is found.

   locate text

           All the paths where the string text is found.

   whatis text

           Tells you what the command text does and its manual page. Typing
           whatis * will tell you about all the binaries in the current
           directory.

   whereis text

           Finds the file text, giving its full path.

   You might want to try using whatis on some common useful commands like
   cat, more, grep, mv, find, tar, chmod, chown, date, and script. more lets
   you read a page at a time as it does in DOS, e.g., ls -l | more or more
   filename. The * works as a wildcard-e.g., ls w* will show you files
   beginning with w.

   Are some of these not working very well? Both locate(1) and whatis(1)
   depend on a database that is rebuilt weekly. If your machine is not going
   to be left on over the weekend (and running FreeBSD), you might want to
   run the commands for daily, weekly, and monthly maintenance now and then.
   Run them as root and, for now, give each one time to finish before you
   start the next one.

 # periodic daily
 output omitted
 # periodic weekly
 output omitted
 # periodic monthly
 output omitted

   If you get tired of waiting, press Alt+F2 to get another virtual console,
   and log in again. After all, it is a multi-user, multi-tasking system.
   Nevertheless these commands will probably flash messages on your screen
   while they are running; you can type clear at the prompt to clear the
   screen. Once they have run, you might want to look at /var/mail/root and
   /var/log/messages.

   Running such commands is part of system administration-and as a single
   user of a UNIX(R) system, you are your own system administrator. Virtually
   everything you need to be root to do is system administration. Such
   responsibilities are not covered very well even in those big fat books on
   UNIX(R), which seem to devote a lot of space to pulling down menus in
   windows managers. You might want to get one of the two leading books on
   systems administration, either Evi Nemeth et.al.'s UNIX System
   Administration Handbook (Prentice-Hall, 1995, ISBN 0-13-15051-7)-the
   second edition with the red cover; or AEleen Frisch's Essential System
   Administration (O'Reilly & Associates, 2002, ISBN 0-596-00343-9). I used
   Nemeth.

5. Editing Text

   To configure your system, you need to edit text files. Most of them will
   be in the /etc directory; and you will need to su to root to be able to
   change them. You can use the easy ee, but in the long run the text editor
   vi is worth learning. There is an excellent tutorial on vi in
   /usr/src/contrib/nvi/docs/tutorial, if you have the system sources
   installed.

   Before you edit a file, you should probably back it up. Suppose you want
   to edit /etc/rc.conf. You could just use cd /etc to get to the /etc
   directory and do:

 # cp rc.conf rc.conf.orig

   This would copy rc.conf to rc.conf.orig, and you could later copy
   rc.conf.orig to rc.conf to recover the original. But even better would be
   moving (renaming) and then copying back:

 # mv rc.conf rc.conf.orig
 # cp rc.conf.orig rc.conf

   because the mv command preserves the original date and owner of the file.
   You can now edit rc.conf. If you want the original back, you would then mv
   rc.conf rc.conf.myedit (assuming you want to preserve your edited version)
   and then

 # mv rc.conf.orig rc.conf

   to put things back the way they were.

   To edit a file, type

 # vi filename

   Move through the text with the arrow keys. Esc (the escape key) puts vi in
   command mode. Here are some commands:

   x

           delete letter the cursor is on

   dd

           delete the entire line (even if it wraps on the screen)

   i

           insert text at the cursor

   a

           insert text after the cursor

   Once you type i or a, you can enter text. Esc puts you back in command
   mode where you can type

   :w

           to write your changes to disk and continue editing

   :wq

           to write and quit

   :q!

           to quit without saving changes

   /text

           to move the cursor to text; /Enter (the enter key) to find the
           next instance of text.

   G

           to go to the end of the file

   nG

           to go to line n in the file, where n is a number

   Ctrl+L

           to redraw the screen

   Ctrl+b and Ctrl+f

           go back and forward a screen, as they do with more and view.

   Practice with vi in your home directory by creating a new file with vi
   filename and adding and deleting text, saving the file, and calling it up
   again. vi delivers some surprises because it is really quite complex, and
   sometimes you will inadvertently issue a command that will do something
   you do not expect. (Some people actually like vi-it is more powerful than
   DOS EDIT-find out about the :r command.) Use Esc one or more times to be
   sure you are in command mode and proceed from there when it gives you
   trouble, save often with :w, and use :q! to get out and start over (from
   your last :w) when you need to.

   Now you can cd to /etc, su to root, use vi to edit the file /etc/group,
   and add a user to wheel so the user has root privileges. Just add a comma
   and the user's login name to the end of the first line in the file, press
   Esc, and use :wq to write the file to disk and quit. Instantly effective.
   (You did not put a space after the comma, did you?)

6. Other Useful Commands

   df

           shows file space and mounted systems.

   ps aux

           shows processes running. ps ax is a narrower form.

   rm filename

           remove filename.

   rm -R dir

           removes a directory dir and all subdirectories-careful!

   ls -R

           lists files in the current directory and all subdirectories; I
           used a variant, ls -AFR > where.txt, to get a list of all the
           files in / and (separately) /usr before I found better ways to
           find files.

   passwd

           to change user's password (or root's password)

   man hier

           manual page on the UNIX(R) filesystem

   Use find to locate filename in /usr or any of its subdirectories with

 % find /usr -name "filename"

   You can use * as a wildcard in "filename" (which should be in quotes). If
   you tell find to search in / instead of /usr it will look for the file(s)
   on all mounted filesystems, including the CDROM and the DOS partition.

   An excellent book that explains UNIX(R) commands and utilities is Abrahams
   & Larson, Unix for the Impatient (2nd ed., Addison-Wesley, 1996). There is
   also a lot of UNIX(R) information on the Internet.

7. Next Steps

   You should now have the tools you need to get around and edit files, so
   you can get everything up and running. There is a great deal of
   information in the FreeBSD handbook (which is probably on your hard drive)
   and FreeBSD's web site. A wide variety of packages and ports are on the
   CDROM as well as the web site. The handbook tells you more about how to
   use them (get the package if it exists, with pkg_add
   /cdrom/packages/All/packagename, where packagename is the filename of the
   package). The CDROM has lists of the packages and ports with brief
   descriptions in cdrom/packages/index, cdrom/packages/index.txt, and
   cdrom/ports/index, with fuller descriptions in /cdrom/ports/*/*/pkg/DESCR,
   where the *s represent subdirectories of kinds of programs and program
   names respectively.

   If you find the handbook too sophisticated (what with lndir and all) on
   installing ports from the CDROM, here is what usually works:

   Find the port you want, say kermit. There will be a directory for it on
   the CDROM. Copy the subdirectory to /usr/local (a good place for software
   you add that should be available to all users) with:

 # cp -R /cdrom/ports/comm/kermit /usr/local

   This should result in a /usr/local/kermit subdirectory that has all the
   files that the kermit subdirectory on the CDROM has.

   Next, create the directory /usr/ports/distfiles if it does not already
   exist using mkdir. Now check /cdrom/ports/distfiles for a file with a name
   that indicates it is the port you want. Copy that file to
   /usr/ports/distfiles; in recent versions you can skip this step, as
   FreeBSD will do it for you. In the case of kermit, there is no distfile.

   Then cd to the subdirectory of /usr/local/kermit that has the file
   Makefile. Type

 # make all install

   During this process the port will FTP to get any compressed files it needs
   that it did not find on the CDROM or in /usr/ports/distfiles. If you do
   not have your network running yet and there was no file for the port in
   /cdrom/ports/distfiles, you will have to get the distfile using another
   machine and copy it to /usr/ports/distfiles. Read Makefile (with cat or
   more or view) to find out where to go (the master distribution site) to
   get the file and what its name is. (Use binary file transfers!) Then go
   back to /usr/local/kermit, find the directory with Makefile, and type make
   all install.

8. Your Working Environment

   Your shell is the most important part of your working environment. The
   shell is what interprets the commands you type on the command line, and
   thus communicates with the rest of the operating system. You can also
   write shell scripts a series of commands to be run without intervention.

   Two shells come installed with FreeBSD: csh and sh. csh is good for
   command-line work, but scripts should be written with sh (or bash). You
   can find out what shell you have by typing echo $SHELL.

   The csh shell is okay, but tcsh does everything csh does and more. It
   allows you to recall commands with the arrow keys and edit them. It has
   tab-key completion of filenames (csh uses the Esc key), and it lets you
   switch to the directory you were last in with cd -. It is also much easier
   to alter your prompt with tcsh. It makes life a lot easier.

   Here are the three steps for installing a new shell:

    1. Install the shell as a port or a package, just as you would any other
       port or package.

    2. Use the chsh command to change your shell to tcsh permanently, or type
       tcsh at the prompt to change your shell without logging in again.

  Note:

   It can be dangerous to change root's shell to something other than sh or
   csh on early versions of FreeBSD and many other versions of UNIX(R); you
   may not have a working shell when the system puts you into single user
   mode. The solution is to use su -m to become root, which will give you the
   tcsh as root, because the shell is part of the environment. You can make
   this permanent by adding it to your .tcshrc file as an alias with:

 alias su su -m

   When tcsh starts up, it will read the /etc/csh.cshrc and /etc/csh.login
   files, as does csh. It will also read the .login file in your home
   directory and the .cshrc file as well, unless you provide a .tcshrc file.
   This you can do by simply copying .cshrc to .tcshrc.

   Now that you have installed tcsh, you can adjust your prompt. You can find
   the details in the manual page for tcsh, but here is a line to put in your
   .tcshrc that will tell you how many commands you have typed, what time it
   is, and what directory you are in. It also produces a > if you are an
   ordinary user and a # if you are root, but tsch will do that in any case:

   set prompt = "%h %t %~ %# "

   This should go in the same place as the existing set prompt line if there
   is one, or under "if($?prompt) then" if not. Comment out the old line; you
   can always switch back to it if you prefer it. Do not forget the spaces
   and quotes. You can get the .tcshrc reread by typing source .tcshrc.

   You can get a listing of other environmental variables that have been set
   by typing env at the prompt. The result will show you your default editor,
   pager, and terminal type, among possibly many others. A useful command if
   you log in from a remote location and can not run a program because the
   terminal is not capable is setenv TERM vt100.

9. Other

   As root, you can unmount the CDROM with /sbin/umount /cdrom, take it out
   of the drive, insert another one, and mount it with /sbin/mount_cd9660
   /dev/cd0a /cdrom assuming cd0a is the device name for your CDROM drive.
   The most recent versions of FreeBSD let you mount the CDROM with just
   /sbin/mount /cdrom.

   Using the live filesystem-the second of FreeBSD's CDROM disks-is useful if
   you have got limited space. What is on the live filesystem varies from
   release to release. You might try playing games from the CDROM. This
   involves using lndir, which gets installed with the X Window System, to
   tell the program(s) where to find the necessary files, because they are in
   the /cdrom file system instead of in /usr and its subdirectories, which is
   where they are expected to be. Read man lndir.

10. Comments Welcome

   If you use this guide I would be interested in knowing where it was
   unclear and what was left out that you think should be included, and if it
   was helpful. My thanks to Eugene W. Stark, professor of computer science
   at SUNY-Stony Brook, and John Fieber for helpful comments.

   Annelise Anderson, <andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu>
