FreeBSD 13.2 has been released a few days ago. The 13.2 edition of FreeBSD comes with many updates and features. This step-by-step guide explains how to download the latest version of FreeBSD, how to create a bootable FreeBSD USB and how to install FreeBSD 13.2 latest edition with screenshots.
What is FreeBSD?
FreeBSD is an advanced Unix-like operating system that can be installed on modern servers, desktops, laptops, and embedded platforms.
The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993, and today it is the most widely used open source BSD operating system.
FreeBSD is the direct descendant of BSD Unix and, of course, is free. It is licensed under the permissive BSD license.
Download FreeBSD 13.2 Go to the official FreeBSD download
page and download the appropriate version for your system architecture. FreeBSD
13.2-RELEASE is available for amd64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpc64le, powerpcspe, armv6, armv7, aarch64, and riscv64 architectures. FreeBSD
installation requires at
least 2-4 GB of RAM and 8 GB of hard disk space. However, you may need more memory and disk space to run graphical desktop environments.
Create FreeBSD USB Bootable Medium FreeBSD
DVD ISO size is around 4.3 GB. Therefore, you may need a USB drive of 6GB or more.
First, you need to create bootable USB media with the FreeBSD ISO file. There are many bootable USB creation tools available to create bootable USB media.
We have listed some of the tools to create a bootable USB drive on Linux.
Command-Line
Bootable USB Creation Tools:How to Create Multiboot USB Drives with Ventoy on Linux How to Create a Bootable USB Drive
- Using the dd
- Bootiso Command Allows You to Safely Create a
- Ventoy
Bootable USB Drive on Linux Graphical Bootable USB Creation Tools:Create bootable USB drive with
WebUI on Linux
- Create
- Popsicle
- with USBImager in Linux
- Kindd – A graphical frontend command to dd
bootable USB drives and SD cards with Recorder in Linux
– Create multiple bootable USB drives at once Create bootable USB drive
If you want to install and test FreeBSD on any hypervisor (Virtualbox, KVM, Vmware ), simply skip the media creation step and boot the ISO image.
For demonstration purposes, I will install FreeBSD on Proxmox VE.
Install FreeBSD
13.2 Step-by-Step
Boot your system with FreeBSD USB boot. You will be greeted with the FreeBSD Boot Loader menu.
Press 1 (number one) or press the ENTER key to start the FreeBSD installation.
For a few seconds, you will be asked to choose one of the three options.
- Press ENTER to install FreeBSD on your hard drive
- Select Shell and press to enter command-line mode. In praise line mode, you can partition hard drives as per your choice before installing FreeBSD on it.
- The third option, Live CD will allow you to test the FreeBSD system live without installing it.
.
Choose the “
Install” option and press ENTER to start the FreeBSD installation.
Select your preferred keymap. I’ll go with the default keymap.
Enter a hostname for your FreeBSD system.
Choose the optional system components you want to install on your FreeBSD system.
This is an important step. In this step, you need to choose how you want to partition the drive. You will be asked to choose one of the four partitioning methods listed below.
- Auto (ZFS): This is the default selection. If you choose this option, the drive will be automatically partitioned with the ZFS file system.
- Auto (UFS) – This will automatically partition the disk with the UFS file system.
- Manual – It is intended for advanced users. When you selected this method, you can create custom partitions from the enu options as desired.
- Shell – Allows users to create custom partitions of their choice using command line tools like fdisk, gpart, etc.
Choose the partition
method that suits you best and follow the on-screen instructions to complete the drive partition. I’ll go with the default selection, i.e. Auto (ZFS).
When you select the Auto (ZFS) method, you will see the ZFS main configuration menu that provides a number of options for controlling pool creation. Configure the options according to your requirements.
Finally, choose “>>> the Install Continue with Installation” option and press ENTER to continue.
Next, we need to partition the disk drive and allocate space for each partition. The FreeBSD installer provides six different partitioning methods to choose from.
Depending on the use case, you can choose any of the following partition methods.
- stripe – Provides maximum storage of all attached disks, but without redundancy. If only one disk fails, the data in the pool is completely lost.
- mirroring – Mirroring stores a complete copy of all data on each disk. It provides good read performance because data is read from all disks in parallel. In contrast, write performance is slower because data is written to all disks in the pool. Allows all but one disk to fail. To use this option, you must have at least two disks.
- raid10 – Striped mirrors. It provides the best performance, but the least storage. This option requires at least an even number of disks and a minimum of four disks.
- raidz1 – Single redundant RAID. It requires at least three disks and allows one disk to fail simultaneously.
- raidz2 – Dual redundant RAID. It requires at least four disks and allows two disks to fail simultaneously.
- raidz3 – triple redundant RAID. It requires at least five disks and allows three disks to fail simultaneously.
I only have one disc and I’m going with the “stripe” option.
For other partitioning methods, please refer to the Disk Space Allocation section in the FreeBSD manual.
Once the partition method is selected, a list of available disk drives will be displayed in the following menu. You must select one or more devices to form the ZFS group.
You will now see a warning message saying that the contents of the selected disks will be deleted. Make sure you don’t have anything important on the disk. Choose “Yes” and press the ENTER key to continue.
The FreeBSD installation will now begin. It will take a few minutes to complete.
After the FreeBSD installation is complete, you will be prompted to set a password for the root user.
Choose a network interface to configure.
Choose “Yes
” to configure IPv4
.
If you have a DHCP server on your network and want to automatically assign the DHCP IP address to the FreeBSD system, choose Yes and press ENTER. If you don’t have a DHCP server, just choose “No”.
I don’t
have a DHCP server on my network, so I chose “No”.
Enter the IP address, subnet mask, and gateway
.
You will then be asked if you want to configure IPv6 for the network interface. I don’t want to configure IPv6 right now, so I chose “No”.
If you choose “
yes” to configure IPv6, you must provide the IP address, subnet, and gateway as shown above.
Enter the DNS server details. Here, I have used Google’s public DNS servers.
Select your geographic region, and then press ENTER.
Select your country.
A pop-up message will ask you to confirm the time zone.
Set your current date.
Set the time.
Choose the services you want to start on system reboot.
Choose the system hardening options you want to apply on your FreeBSD systems.
Select “Yes” if you want to add a new user to your system.
Enter the user’s details, such as username, full name, password, etc. Review the
user details and type “yes” and press ENTER to create the user. If
you want to
create more users, type “yes” and enter the details of the new user. If you don’t want to add more users, just type “no” and press ENTER.
We have reached the final stage of installing FreeBSD. You can now modify the configuration options that you made throughout the installation process. If you don’t want to make any changes, just choose “Exit” and press ENTER.
The FreeBSD installation is complete! If you want to make any manual changes before completing the installation, choose “yes”. If you do not want to make any modifications, choose “no” and press ENTER.
Restart the newly installed FreeBSD system.
Log in to the FreeBSD system as root.
Check the FreeBSD installation version using any of the following commands
:# freebsd-version -k# uname -mrs# cat /etc/os-release Upgrading the FreeBSD System
The first thing you need to do after installing any operating system is to apply the latest updates available.
To upgrade FreeBSD OS, run the following command as root:
# freebsd-update fetch install
Congratulations! We have successfully installed and updated the FreeBSD 13.2 edition. In our upcoming articles, we’ll look at how
,
- Create sudo users
- Enable SSH
- Set static IP address and DNS
- Reset or recover root password,
- and more things related to BSD.
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