Graham Perrin grahamperrin

FreeBSD Installer: using the installer's offline packages

The rough guide below is for:

FreeBSD-15.0-ALPHA5-amd64-20251004-1c0898edf28f-280541-dvd1.iso

After a minimimal installation of FreeBSD

Before first boot:

FreeBSD: pkgbase: major upgrades

A rough guide, for alpha testing on AMD64:

tested with FreeBSD 15.0-ALPHA2 and ALPHA3
things might be less rough with ALPHA4, with or without the next release of ports-mgmt/pkg.

Not intended to be comprehensive.

Preamble

A shortlist of FreeBSD packages

Packages that I often install on test systems.

pkg install --quiet --yes drm-kmod firefox gdisk gitup htop hw-probe kde lsblk lynx nano pciutils plasma6-sddm-kcm roxterm sddm stressdisk uclcmd usbutils virtualbox-ose-additions xfce xorg

I normally omit:

drm-kmod when installing in a VirtualBox guest
kde and plasma6-sddm-kcm when I want Xfce alone

Using pkgbasify to repair a broken installation of FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE

Condensed steps

Use a memstick.img file to write a FreeBSD installer to a memory stick
boot from the stick in single user mode
/bin/csh
use gpart(8) to resize things
growfs /
mount -uw /

FreeBSD: preferring ee (avoiding vi) for csh/tcsh and sh

ee(1) is no longer a feature of the minimal system.

Before exiting the installer

Install ee (easy editor) and nano

pkg install --yes base/FreeBSD-ee editors/nano

Package availability

FreshPorts provides tables, and more.

Desktop environments, display managers, Sway, X.Org

It's not unusual for a Tier 1 platform to have no package for a wanted desktop environment. Two platforms are at this tier:

aarch64 – 64-bit ARMv8

	Script started on Sat Nov 1 15:59:36 2025
	# mount \| grep cd
	/dev/iso9660/15_0_BETA4_AMD64_DVD on / (cd9660, local, read-only)
	# which csh
	# ee
	/bin/sh: ee: not found
	# nano
	/bin/sh: nano: not found
	# pkg install -qy FreeBSD-ee FreeBSD-csh FreeBSD-bsdconfig nano
	pkg: Repository FreeBSD-base has a wrong packagesite, need to re-create database

-Script started on Tue Oct 28 21:44:47 2025
-root@beta-3:~ # echo $SHELL
-/bin/tcsh
-root@beta-3:~ # freebsd-version -kru ; uname -mvKU
-.0-BETA3
-.0-BETA3
-.0-BETA3
-FreeBSD 15.0-BETA3 releng/15.0-n280772-74a6de9f9625 GENERIC amd64 1500068 1500068

	Script started on Mon Oct 27 05:11:46 2025
	root@fourteen-two:~ # echo $SHELL

	/bin/tcsh
	root@fourteen-two:~ # pkg repos -e \| grep url \| sort

	url : "pkg+https://pkg.FreeBSD.org/FreeBSD:14:amd64/quarterly",
	root@fourteen-two:~ # freebsd-version -kru ; uname -mvKU

	14.2-RELEASE

	Script started on Thu Sep 25 06:55:15 2025
	root@freebsd-conf:~ # echo $SHELL

	/bin/csh
	root@freebsd-conf:~ # freebsd-version -kru ; uname -mvKU

	14.3-RELEASE-p3
	14.3-RELEASE-p3
	14.3-RELEASE-p3
	FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE-p3 releng/14.3-n271443-ed55d0f2bc69 GENERIC amd64 1403000 1403000