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.

Update, December 2024

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 roxterm sddm stressdisk uclcmd usbutils virtualbox-ose-additions-72 xfce xorg

I normally omit:

drm-kmod when installing in a VirtualBox guest
kde 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

Final changes when exiting FreeBSD Installer

Install ee (easy editor) and nano

FreeBSD 14:

pkg install --yes 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

A concise comparison of operating systems. Some focus on root-on-ZFS, and on Plasma. Not intended to be comprehensive.

Describing availability is not necessarily a recommendation to install what's available.

The systems

Seeking the best unofficial resources

I fed a forty-word paragraph to Google Gemini 2.5 Pro (Experimental) on the evening of Sunday 20th April. Twenty of the forty:

Where can I find general troubleshooting advice for FreeBSD? Emphasis on: general. … I'm looking for the best unofficial resources. Thanks.

Gemini offered a 508-word response. I:

reduced it to around 330 (not counting * or … as words)
added a link to the third edition (2018) of Absolute FreeBSD

	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

	root@mowa219-gjp4-zbook-freebsd:~ # bectl list -c creation \| tail -n 6
	1500043-002-base - - 1.71G 2025-05-16 12:34
	1500043-003-base - - 1.74G 2025-05-20 11:00
	1500043-004-base - - 1.66G 2025-05-21 05:50
	1500043-005-base R /tmp/down 240G 2025-05-23 18:45
	1500043-007-base-firefox N / 8.88G 2025-05-25 06:08
	1500043-008-base - - 1.18G 2025-05-25 06:43
	root@mowa219-gjp4-zbook-freebsd:~ # bectl umount 1500043-005-base
	root@mowa219-gjp4-zbook-freebsd:~ # pkg iinfo gobject
	gobject-introspection-1.84.0,1