What follows are general notes that I made when installing FreeBSD and are OLD. This page should not be perceived as a guide. If you need a guide, I recommend that you use FreeBSD 6 Unleashed (which I edited).


  • Unlike in Linux, you cannot just su to root as any user. You must first add that user to the wheel group.
  • Disks are named based on driver name, disk number, physical partition, FreeBSD partition. For example, on the device using the driver twed, using the second disk, and the fourth partition, You would have the device /dev/twed1s4. Normal IDE device is named ad.
  • To add ext2 handling to FreeBSD, do the following (reference):
    1. Run /stand/sysinstall
    2. Select Configure -> Distributions -> src -> sys
    3. Select Configure -> Distributions -> src -> base
    4. Select OK
    5. Select FTP Server
    6. cd /usr/src
    7. make KERNCONF=GENERIC buildkernel
    8. make KERNCONF=GENERIC installkernel
  • FreeBSD does not allow exporting ext2 volumes over NFS. This made it poorly suited to my file server, and I have not experimented with the OS any further.