I've spent the past thirty minutes installing FreeBSD as a KVM guest. This mostly involved fetching the ISO (I chose the latest stable release 10.0), and accepting all the defaults. A pleasant experience.
As I'm running KVM inside screen I wanted to see the boot prompt, etc, via the serial console, which took two distinct steps:
- Enabling the serial console - which lets boot stuff show up
- Enabling a login prompt on the serial console in case I screw up the networking.
To configure boot messages to display via the serial console, issue the following command as the superuser:
# echo 'console="comconsole"' >> /boot/loader.conf
To get a login: prompt you'll want to edit /etc/ttys and change "off" to "on" and "dialup" to "vt100" for the ttyu0 entry. Once you've done that reload init via:
# kill -HUP 1
Enable remote root logins, if you're brave, or disable PAM and password authentication if you're sensible:
vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config
/etc/rc.d/sshd restart
Configure the system to allow binary package-installation - to be honest I was hazy on why this was required, but I ran the two command and it all worked out:
pkg
pkg2ng
Now you may install a package via a simple command such as:
pkg add screen
Removing packages you no longer want is as simple as using the delete option:
pkg delete curl
You can see installed packages via "pkg info", and there are more options to be found via "pkg help". In the future you can apply updates via:
pkg update && pkg upgrade
Finally I've installed 10.0-RELEASE which can be upgraded in the future via "freebsd-update" - This seems to boil down to "freebsd-update fetch" and "freebsd-update install" but I'm hazy on that just yet. For the moment you can see your installed version via:
uname -a ; freebsd-version
Expect my future CPAN releases, etc, to be tested on FreeBSD too now :)
Tags: exploration, freebsd, kvm 2 comments