FreeSBIE 2.0 Release Notes, Handbook and FAQ

2.1 Booting is all about cheating

Insert the CD-ROM in the drive, switch your computer on and boot from the CD-ROM. You should see a menu like the one in the following image:

This is the first FreeSBIE Boot Menu (since it is the first, you can easily imagine that there will be another one later). If you just want to boot FreeSBIE without changing the default values it uses for its configuration parameters, just press 1 or wait 10 seconds. If you feel brave or just want to tune FreeSBIE to fit your needs, press 2 and the second (and last) FreeSBIE boot menu will be drawn on the screen. For a moment, let's suppose you pressed 1: now you see a new menu which you should be familiar with if you ever used FreeBSD before. The menu you see should be similar to the one in the image:

You should not bother to understand all listed options: they are for advanced users and will not be described here; if you need them, you know their meaning, otherwise you just do not need them. To eventually boot FreeSBIE 2.0, press 1 or wait 10 more seconds.

On the other hand, if you pressed 2 at the first boot menu, the screen will look like the following image:

You may wonder why this section's title is "Booting is all about cheating". Now we will try to explain this assertion. FreeSBIE has many parameters which can be tweaked: localization, memory filesystem disks' sizes, window manager to use. Well, not too many, but at least "some". Tweaking these parameters could really improve your FreeSBIE experience. We are not going to describe every parameter in this document but the following table may be of help. Type help cheatcodes and press Enter at the OK prompt to get additional information.

Here we are: FreeSBIE 2.0 is booting! The following image will appear on your screen:

This image will hide any boot message. Press any key to hide the image and show the messages. When the boot process is completed, the freesbie user is automatically logged in on the first pseudo-terminal, as shown in the following image:

2.2 From the console to the window manager and back again

Now you have FreeSBIE up and running on your machine, so we can start the all-around tour.

FreeSBIE is equipped with two window managers, that is, two "graphical interfaces": Xfce and FluxBox. The following images show how these two different window managers look in FreeSBIE 2.0. Additional screenshots can be found on the FreeSBIE website.

The default window manager is Xfce, but you can easily switch to FluxBox by modifying the /home/freesbie/.xinitrc file. All you have to do is change the line exec startxfce to exec fluxbox.

Starting the window manager is as simple as typing startx on the command line.

2.3 Mounting your disks

FreeSBIE can be used in many different situations but quite often it reveals its usefulness as a Rescue and Recovery tool: your machine boots from the FreeSBIE CD-ROM and you get a working system to recover the one installed on the hard disks of your machine. To accomplish this task you need to mount your hard disks. FreeSBIE can do this for you: the script /usr/local/sbin/mountdisks.sh can mount your FAT16/32, UFS2, EXT2FS, ReiserFS slices and partitions up to a number of 8 per filesystem type. To use it, run it as the user freesbie with the following command:

% sudo mountdisks.sh rw

2.4 Backing Up and Restoring your Data

FreeSBIE uses a memory disk to store data. This means that once you have switched your machine off, any data you saved during the FreeSBIE session gets lost. This is not always what you want, so we introduced a tool which makes data backup easy: /usr/local/bin/savebackup. This script reads the file /etc/backup.lst, creates an archive containing the data you chose to back up and put it on a device you specified.

Let's take a closer look at the details. First of all, what is /etc/backup.lst supposed to be? This file contains a list of files or directories you want to back up. Just list them one per line and you are done. If you want to back up a directory but not back up a file or a subdirectory in it, add a line with a "-" followed by the name of that file or directory. An example list can be found in /etc/defaults/backup.lst.

Once you have written the list of files to be backed up, the script can be launched with

% sudo savebackup da0s1

You may wonder where your backup is stored. The answer is: it is the compressed archive freesbie_YYYYMMDD_HHMM in the FreeSBIE directory of the slice you specified when you backed up your data; the date and time in the filename are those of archive creation.

To restore your data, use the /usr/local/sbin/restoredata script. Please note that during the boot process FreeSBIE will look for backup archives on your disks and will try to restore your data automatically.

2.5 Using Tor and Privoxy under FreeSBIE

Privacy is important and that is a fact. You should not want to let other people know what you do every moment of your life. Nor you want other people to know what websites you visited, where did you came from and so on. The same applies for other internet services: SSH, IRC, and so on. Two pieces of software can give you a hand in increasing your privacy level online: Tor and Privoxy. Tor works on your network connections and encripts and redirect them to different routers on the Internet to make your provenience virtually impossible to recognize. Privoxy is used to increase the privacy level as far as HTTP is concerned. They are commonly used together and we chose to include both in the liveCD. The PF packet filter included in FreeBSD is used to redirect outgoing TCP connections into Tor to protect applications that are not already configured to use Privoxy or Tor directly. As we know that their correct configuration is not so easy and that many of you may be interested in just giving them a try without having to lose time for their configuration, we included a script which allows you to turn this beautiful couple on and off: /usr/local/bin/freesbie_tor. The table shows the accepted parameters and their meaning.

6.1 The monitor does not use the correct resolution!

This problem is caused by the X.org server unable to communicate correctly with your monitor. You can try to solve this by editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf: look for the Monitor section and follow the instructions.

6.2 Can I install FreeSBIE 2.0 on my hard disk?

Short answer: no. Long answer: FreeSBIE 1.1 had BSDInstaller installed, thus it was possible to install FreeSBIE 1.1 on a hard disk. Due to lack of time, resources and interest, FreeSBIE 2.0 does not offer this feature. Nevertheless, since FreeSBIE is nothing more than FreeBSD on a Live CD you can install FreeBSD, take FreeSBIE's configuration files and copy them to the installed FreeBSD system.