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From: Anthony Jenkins <ajenkins@auburn.campus.mci.net>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Help for a UNIX newbie...please.
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 1997 23:10:50 -0500
Organization: CampusMCI
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Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:44643
JRosen5187 wrote:
>
> Okay... so I'm using a lame AOL account, therefore I do not know mky IP
> address etc. How can I download FreeBSD without using the Boot Disk
> install program? Please help if you can...
>
> Thanks
AFAIK, AOL doesn't allow subscribers access to intimate gateway details
(before I got my own ISP I asked AOL if I could have info on accessing
their mail server to use Netscape to get my mail, they said, "NO! NO
WAY!"). I am assuming AOL is your only access to the internet. My
suggestion would be the following, which is similar to what I did when I
first got FreeBSD:
1. Create a directory, say C:\FREEBSD, to hold the FBSD binaries &
stuff.
2. FTP to the FreeBSD FTP site (ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD) or a
mirror site (ftp.cdrom.com comes to mind of course).
3. CD to the version of FreeBSD you wish to install (e.g.
2.2.2-RELEASE).
4. Download the following directories and their contents:
bin(the minimum requirement for running FreeBSD)
and any other stuff you want (you'll have to read INSTALL.TXT and
README.TXT in the current FTP directory for more info on which
distributions to download). You should now have the directory(ies)
C:\FREEBSD\${I}
where ${I} stands for "bin" and any other directories you've included to
install from the FTP site, each directory containing files such as
${I}.aa, ${I}.ab ... ${I}.ay ...
5. Now make an installation disk as per the instructions in the
README.TXT file in the current directory. Shouldn't be too terribly
difficult, just download two files: the image for the disk and a program
to write that image verbatim to a blank, formatted floppy.
6. Boot from the newly-made floppy. Select the visual mode setup option
when it presents itself; here you want to tell the installation program
as much as you know about the hardware on your system (at least as much
as it needs to know to find your harddrive). I just went through
deleting any devices that weren't recognizable; if in doubt, leave it
in- the boot probe does a pretty good job of finding your hardware on
its own. You wanna reduce the number of conflicts in the upper-right
corner (I think) of the screen to zero. Press Q when you're happy &
watch the screen list your hardware resources. Look for a line saying
"wdc" for an IDE harddrive (or "scd" I think for a SCSI drive, not
sure).
7. Go through the installation procedure as per the INSTALL.TXT and
README.TXT documents you read from the FTP site. Use the "Installing
from DOS" sections. When specifying distributions to install, you can
(obviously) only install the ones you downloaded from the FTP site
earlier. Later, you can d/l other distributions to the C:\FREEBSD
directory & install them similarly.
The drawback to this method (aside from the sheer complication level) is
when you want to split an existing DOS-formatted harddrive into a DOS
partition and a FreeBSD partition, as having the FreeBSD distribution
files (C:\FREEBSD\*) reduces the amount of space you can allocate to
FreeBSD. If you have a large disk this shouldn't be too big of a deal.
Lemme know if this helps or if you run into any snags... chances are I
ran into the same ones & just didn't recall 'em.
Anthony