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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.2//EN"
"http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.2/docbookx.dtd">
<book>
<bookinfo>
<title>Windows+BSD+Linux Installation Guide</title>
<authorgroup>
<author>
<firstname>Subhasish</firstname>
<surname>Ghosh</surname>
<affiliation>
<address><email>subhasish_ghosh([A][T])linuxwaves[DOT]com</email></address>
</affiliation>
</author>
<othercredit role='converter'>
<firstname>Gerardo</firstname>
<surname>Arnaez</surname>
<contrib>Conversion from html to Docbook xml 4.2</contrib>
</othercredit>
<othercredit role='reviewer'>
<firstname>Stephen</firstname>
<surname>Keeling</surname>
<contrib>Language review, xml source formatting</contrib>
</othercredit>
</authorgroup>
<revhistory>
<revision>
<revnumber>1.3.2</revnumber>
<date>2004-07-02</date>
<revremark>Minor edits (ulinks, reformatting, manually
numbered itemized lists converted to ordered lists).</revremark>
</revision>
<revision>
<revnumber>1.3.1</revnumber>
<date>2004-4-18</date>
<revremark>Second Language Review for TLDP, major XML source
reformatting.</revremark>
</revision>
<revision>
<revnumber>1.3</revnumber>
<date>2004-4-18</date>
<authorinitials>gea</authorinitials>
<revremark>Initial conversion to XML by Gerardo Arnaez. I
think I may have deleted some sentences while converting. URLs
still need to be put in.</revremark>
</revision>
<revision>
<revnumber>1.2.2</revnumber>
<date>2004-06-08</date>
<authorinitials>gea</authorinitials>
<revremark>I have done some more cleaning up after converting
doc to xml.</revremark>
</revision>
<revision>
<revnumber>1.2</revnumber>
<date>2004-01-5</date>
<revremark>Troubleshooting Chapter updated. Information on
Linux updated to cover Red Hat Linux 8.0 (Psyche Edition) and
FreeBSD to FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE.</revremark>
</revision>
<revision>
<revnumber>1.1</revnumber>
<date>2004</date>
<revremark>Corrections made and information added. Information
on FreeBSD -RELEASE updated to cover 4.8-RELEASE. Chapter
Installing NetBSD 1.6.1 added and a few minor modifications
made to the guide.</revremark>
</revision>
<revision>
<revnumber>1.0</revnumber>
<date>2004</date>
<revremark>Initial release, reviewed by Linux Documentation
Project (LDP). A few structural changes and minor corrections
made; Chapters Troubleshooting and Installing OpenBSD
3.2-RELEASE added.</revremark>
</revision>
</revhistory>
<abstract>
<para>Welcome! This document explains how three different
operating systems can be installed and configured on the same
hard disk of a computer. The reader may choose from: Microsoft
Windows 95/98(Second Edition)/Millennium Edition(ME)/NT/2K/XP +
FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE/OpenBSD 3.2-RELEASE/NetBSD 1.6.1 +
Linux. Only Intel architecture multi-booting is discussed and
GNU GRUB is the boot loader of choice. If you have any questions
or comments, feel free to contact me by e-mail at this address:
subhasish_ghosh([A][T])linuxwaves[DOT]com. Thank you!</para>
</abstract>
</bookinfo>
<preface>
<title>Notice</title>
<important>
<para>In the Organization section, readers must choose to
execute Chapter 3 or Chapter 4 or Chapter 5.</para>
</important>
</preface>
<chapter>
<title>Introduction</title>
<section>
<title>Purpose of This Guide</title>
<para>Though many of us prefer using only one operating system
on our personal computers for our daily tasks, there may be
times when we would like to install two or more operating
systems on the same computer. Let us suppose, you are required
to use MATLAB 6.0 for your engineering applications; design,
program and implement a web site using PHP and the back-end
database using MySQL (as a part of an enterprise-application
development project) and also learn how to configure a
packet-filtering Firewall using IPFW. As it so happens, the
MATLAB software runs on Microsoft Windows platform, the MySQL
database you want to implement on the Linux operating system and
last but not the least, your professor at the university is
teaching <quote>how to configure a packet-filtering Firewall
using IPFW</quote> using the FreeBSD operating system
software. In such situations, you can safely fall back on the
<quote>multiple-booting</quote> mechanism and of course refer to
this guide from time to time.</para>
<para>This document represented in the form of a Guide, is
intended to help those Windows, Linux and FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD
users who believe in the method of <quote>learning by
doing</quote>. Multiple-booting systems is not an exact
science. You come across a document, you read it, find it
interesting, do it yourself, make mistakes and then finally you
achieve the desired aim. That is how you are supposed to
learn. That is how I learned. That is how the Unix experts
learned a long time back. By the time a reader finishes reading
this guide, he would have a clear understanding of the basic
topics required for successfully installing and configuring
three different operating systems on the same hard disk of a
computer. I have tried my level best to describe each and every
topic in a clear and easily understandable simple
language.</para>
<para> Most installation HOWTOs and guides (for Linux, FreeBSD
and OpenBSD operating systems) which are available on the
Internet are incomplete because they assume too much leaving the
reader to do most of the difficult stuff themselves. In this
guide, I illustrate every step thereby making the entire process
a simple walk through.</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>What is Multiple-booting?</title>
<para>Webster's New World Computer Dictionary (9th edition) by
Bryan Pfaffenberger, defines the term
<quote>dual-booting</quote> as: <quote>A computer that enables
the user to choose between two operating systems at boot
time.</quote> Rightly so. Considering this definition as our
boilerplate, we may frame our own definition of a
<quote>multiple-booting</quote> or (in short) a multi-boot
system i.e., a computer that enables the user to choose between
more than 2 operating systems at boot time.</para>
<para>This document explains how three operating systems can be
successfully installed and configured on the same hard disk of a
computer thus enabling it to become a <quote>multi-boot</quote>
system. The operating systems chosen for this illustration
include: either Microsoft Windows 95/98 (Second
Edition)/Millennium Edition (ME)/NT/2K/XP, FreeBSD
5.1-RELEASE/OpenBSD 3.2-RELEASE/NetBSD 1.6.1 and Red Hat Linux
8.0. I would install a Microsoft Windows operating system first,
then either FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE or OpenBSD 3.2-RELEASE or NetBSD
1.6.1 and finally round-off by installing Red Hat Linux 8.0
(Psyche). GNU GRUB is the boot loader used for booting these
three operating systems.</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>Multi-booting Pros and Cons</title>
<para>An idea or thought as: <quote>Hey! Dual and multi-booting
computer systems only has advantages and absolutely no
disadvantages</quote> is wrong. Often an important question
which readers do ask is: Where does it make sense to multi-boot
a PC? The answer to this question is simple: Multi-booting
systems only makes sense where you would like to experiment with
a number of configurations (or operating systems in general)
than you have computers for and more significantly where no data
is at risk.</para>
<para>Let us consider a situation like this: Peter has a single
PC at home which runs Slackware Linux. All his significant
documents and downloaded files from the Internet are stored on
it. He now decides to learn and practice hacking the FreeBSD
Kernel. Thus, he decides to make his PC a dual-boot
system. Converting one's only or in other words, the primary PC
at home or at work into a dual or multi-booting system is a bad
choice. If a primary home PC must be used as a dual or
multi-booting system, it will be much safer to add a second hard
disk and leave the first relatively untouched. A powerful boot
loader like GRUB will allow booting from the other hard
disk.</para>
<para>The Computer Science Department at my university has 15
laboratories for varying purposes that runs hardware ranging
from i386s to Sun SPARCs. Where data and security is of absolute
concern, computers run only one operating system whether Windows
2000 Professional, Red Hat Linux, Slackware, FreeBSD or Sun
Solaris. However, we do have <quote>test labs</quote> of about
10-12 PCs each, where we have dual and multi-booting systems
running ASP Linux, Red Hat Linux, Slackware, Windows 2000
Professional, FreeBSD and others. This can be considered as an
ideal situation.</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>List of Assumptions</title>
<para>Though each and every step required has been explained
from the very ground-up, yet a few significant assumptions have
been taken into consideration while writing this guide, a few of
which are as follows:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>The reader possesses some theoretical and practical
experience of partitioning hard disks utilizing Microsoft
fdisk, BSD style partition table editor, Linux fdisk and
so on.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Understands hard disk geometries, concept of a
primary partition, an extended partition, logical disks
within an extended partition; Linux disk naming and
partitioning schemes, BSD style disk labeling and
partitioning schemes.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Possesses theoretical and practical experience of
compiling and configuring custom Linux and BSD
Kernels.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Knowledge of basic Unix commands common to both
Linux and FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD operating systems. For
example, mounting filesystems, editing configuration files
like the /boot/grub/grub.conf on Linux and other such
trivial tasks.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>The reader is using an Intel x86 computer system. I
would be installing Windows, FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD and
Linux operating systems on IA32 platform.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>The reader is using a hard disk whose BIOS supports
the Logical Block Addressing (LBA) mode of representing
data on the disk. By using LBA mode, the 1024 Cylinder
Limit on old hard disks is dealt with.</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist></para>
<para>Do not worry if you do not know some of these yet, simply
read on because the most important steps would be explained in
detail in the forthcoming sections as required. Before
proceeding any further, make sure you browse through the
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section of the guide.</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>Acknowledgments</title>
<para>I would like to thank all the following people and
projects without the help and active participation of which,
this document would never have been possible. Some of them
include:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>Guylhem Aznar (guylhem at metalab dot unc dot edu),
Chief coordinator, main contact of \x{201C}TLDP\x{201D}
for making this guide possible.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Tabatha Persad (tabatha at merlinmonroe dot com),
Linux Documentation Project Review Coordinator, for
technical reviews and for answering my million
queries.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Michael K. Johnson (johnsonm at redhat dot com), for
the excerpt from his <quote>Linux Information
Sheet</quote> at the TLDP site, mentioned in Chapter 1 of
this guide on Linux.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Microsoft Corporation for using important
information on Microsoft tools and technologies mentioned
in Chapter 2 of the guide.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>To each and every Open-Source community contributor
and to all my friends all around the world.</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist></para>
<para>Additionally, while writing this guide, I consulted the
following printed books, online journals, magazines and official
papers:</para>
<orderedlist>
<listitem>
<para>Modern Operating Systems, by Andrew S. Tanenbaum</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Understanding the Linux Kernel, by Daniel P. Bovet,
Marco Cesati</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Red Hat Linux 8 Bible, by Christopher Negus</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Red Hat Linux Official x86 Installation Guides at
<ulink url="http://www.redhat.com"/></para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Linux Gazette and Linux Focus online magazines at
<ulink url="http://www.linuxgazette.com"/> and <ulink
url="http://www.linuxfocus.org"/> respectively.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>The FreeBSD Handbook at <ulink
url="http://www.freebsd.org"/></para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>The FreeBSD FAQ at <ulink
url="http://www.freebsd.org"/></para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>The OpenBSD FAQ at <ulink
url="http://www.openbsd.org"/></para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>The Official Microsoft Windows Installation Guides and
FAQs at <ulink url="http://www.microsoft.com"/></para>
</listitem>
</orderedlist>
</section>
<section>
<title>Legalese</title>
<para>Trademarks are owned by their owners.</para>
<para>Although the information given in this document is
believed to be correct, the author will accept no liability for
the content of this document. Use the tips and examples given
herein at your own risk.</para>
<para>Copyright (c) 2003, Subhasish Ghosh</para>
<para>Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify
this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation
License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free
Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover
Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is located
at <ulink url="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html"/>, in the
section entitled <quote>GNU Free Documentation
License</quote>.</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>About the Author</title>
<para>Subhasish <quote>savvy</quote> Ghosh has been working with
GNU/Linux and FreeBSD (and more recently OpenBSD, NetBSD, Sun
Solaris and other UNIX-variant) operating systems for the past 7
years or so since schooldays. Currently, aged 22, Ghosh is an
engineering student at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute
(Technical University) at Moscow, Russian Federation;
specializing in the field of <quote>Informatics and Computer
Science Engineering</quote>. He is a Microsoft Certified
Professional (MCP), MCSD, MCP Certified on NT 4.0; additionally
has a host of other GNU/Linux and computer-industry related
certifications. His web page can be accessed at
<ulink url="http://groups.msn.com/Linuxdump"/>.</para>
</section>
</chapter>
<chapter>
<title>Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)</title>
<para>Readers have questions. Thus, this FAQ section has been
included for answering some of the most obvious questions from the
reader's point of view. All readers are requested to read through
this section for finding answers to their personal
questions.</para>
<para>After reading through this FAQ entirely, if the reader feels
that he/she still has a <quote>question</quote> or two to ask,
please feel free to drop a line at
subhasish_ghosh([A][T])linuxwaves[DOT]com.</para>
<qandaset>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>What is the aim/purpose of this Guide?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>This guide can be used by anyone for installing and
configuring 3 operating systems (OSes) on the same hard disk
of a computer. First, a Microsoft Windows operating system
(according to the choice of the reader) is installed, then
FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE or OpenBSD 3.2-RELEASE or NetBSD 1.6.1
is installed and finally, we round-off the guide by
installing Red Hat Linux 8.0. Though I always use this
particular order, the reader can install in an order
comfortable to him/her.</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>Why have you used three operating systems for this
guide?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>The current scenario is such that Microsoft Windows
operating systems rule the desktops, with GNU/Linux
distributions and *BSD releases (FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD)
competing for <quote>total world domination</quote> in the
server markets, thus, I thought it would be the absolute
best to include all of them in this guide. The first OS is a
Microsoft Windows OS, the second one belonging to the *BSD
family and the last one a commonly used GNU/Linux
distribution (Red Hat). Thus, the number of OSes ended up
with three.</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>Did you try out the steps mentioned in this guide
yourself? What are the configurations of the computer system
on which you tested all the material mentioned in this
guide?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>I assure everyone that I tested each and every step
mentioned in this guide on my personal computer
systems. Later they were tested successfully on other
computers with varying configurations as well. My computer
has a 266.87 MHz Intel Pentium 2 processor, 64MB Physical
DIMM RAM, a single 20.0 GB Maxtor IDE HDD and other usual
accessories which runs Microsoft Windows 98 (SE), FreeBSD
5.1-RELEASE and Red Hat Linux 8.0. The other one with pretty
much the same configuration runs FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE,
OpenBSD 3.2-RELEASE and Red Hat Linux 8.0. The general rule
of the thumb is: <quote>The better the resources, the better
the performance of the computer.</quote></para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>All your installations are CD-ROM based installation
types. What about Ethernet, FTP, HTTP, NFS installation
types?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>I decided to keep the guide as simple as possible. And
since most of us usually use CDs from local CD-ROMs for
installing operating systems, I have assumed that the reader
undertakes a CD-ROM based installation for installing the
covered operating systems. Moreover, this guide is intended
for all types of users, ranging from intermediate Linux
users to the experienced Unix experts. Since, NFS, HTTP, FTP
and other such installation types usually require networks
with servers running, which is impossible for an ordinary
home-user to access, I have only covered the CD-ROM based
installation types. Sorry for the inconvenience caused to
the network lovers.</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>Why would anyone ever need to run 3 operating systems
on the same hard disk of a computer? I want to run 3
operating systems on 2 separate hard disks. What is the big
deal with this guide anyway?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>For lots of reasons. Fun, for learning new installing
and booting methodologies, for gaining inside knowledge of
multi-booting, partitioning schemes, boot loaders and so on,
or simply because you just cannot afford 2 separate 40.0 GB
hard disk drives for the 3 different operating systems you
want to tinker with. As for me, I guess the last reason
suits the best.</para> <para>Lastly, if you do want, you can
always install and configure your computer system with 3
varying operating systems installed in 2 separate hard
disks.</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>Why Red Hat? Why NOT Debian GNU/Linux, Slackware,
Caldera, SuSE, TurboLinux and others?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>Since most of my past Linux projects and work in
general had been related to the Red Hat Linux distribution;
continually installing, configuring and administering Red
Hat Linux personal desktops and workstations. Currently, Red
Hat Linux is <emphasis>the</emphasis> leading Linux
solutions provider in the world, with big corporate
real-time systems being implemented using the Red Hat
operating system software. Moreover, Red Hat documentation
and support are easy to find. Thus, Red Hat Linux has been
chosen. The other distributions, namely Debian GNU/Linux,
Slackware and Mandrake are good, and I will probably add
more sections covering other Linux distributions
later.</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>Why FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD operating systems? Why
not BSD/OS, Darwin, Irix, Sun Solaris, Digital UNIX, HP-UX,
IBM-AIX and others?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>I personally have networking and source-code hacking
experience on FreeBSD and OpenBSD boxes and, more recently,
have access to NetBSD 1.6.1 and Sun Microsystems' SunOS
operating system in the Solaris Operating Environment. I do
<emphasis>not</emphasis> have any experience working with
Irix, Ultrix, Minix, HP-UX, IBM-AIX, Darwin and
others. Thus, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD have been
chosen.</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>Which Kernel version have you used for
GNU/Linux?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>Linux Kernel 2.4.18-14 has been used for the Red Hat
Linux distribution (Psyche).</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>I installed 3 operating systems in my computer as you
have illustrated in this guide. And then unfortunately,
something went wrong somewhere. My computer crashed and I
lost all the data. Would you be kind enough to take the
responsibility for all this mess?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>Well, first my deepest condolences on your data-loss
and for all this apparent mess. I would love to take all the
responsibility, but as it is, I have enough problems of my
own to handle. Thus, I am not ready to take the
responsibility for anything that goes wrong anywhere. At the
least, I can say, that all the steps and methods mentioned
in this guide have been tested thoroughly on a number of
systems with varying configurations, and no problems have
been noted so far.</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>You used the GNU GRUB for booting all the 3 operating
systems. May I know the reason why? Why not use the popular
Linux Loader (LILO) or FreeBSD or NT boot loader for this
purpose?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>As known to everyone, boot loaders play a vital role
while configuring multiple-booting systems where you can use
any suitable boot loader which is capable of booting
multiple operating systems. I chose GRUB in this guide for
three specific reasons: 1) GNU GRUB is the
<emphasis>default</emphasis> boot loader in Red Hat
distribution releases currently. 2) As mentioned in the
'Release Notes' of Red Hat Linux 8.0, the use of LILO is
deprecated and the package would be removed from one of its
future releases. 3) GRUB is a very powerful (x86)
PC-compatible boot loader which supports a number of
operating systems directly and other proprietary ones too
via chain-loading for booting them. Thus, GRUB is used
instead of other boot loaders.</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>I have older Red Hat, FreeBSD and OpenBSD
distributions and/or releases. Will they work?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>I am sure they would with a few modifications at
places. All steps mentioned should behave in a normal manner
if you are using Kernel 2.2.x or higher (for Linux). For
FreeBSD users, if you are using not earlier than
4.X-RELEASES, there should not be any problems
whatsoever. Just take a deep breath, and start doing as
given in this guide. If in case, at some place it does not
work, make sure you are using the right step and commands
etc. Most times, it is human error rather than
computer-related error which lets big servers and networks
down. Always remember this!</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>I would like to have access to good resources on Linux
and FreeBSD. Could you suggest a few?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>Yes, definitely I could. There is a lot of very good
technical information on all the open-source operating
systems out there on the Internet. For Linux, make sure you
often visit <ulink url="http://www.linuxgazette.com"/>,
<ulink url="http://www.linuxfocus.org"/>, <ulink
url="http://www.linux.com"/> and a host of others. Besides,
The Linux Documentation Project (TLDP) provides excellent
resources on all topics related to GNU/Linux. As for printed
books, these are some of my absolute favorites: Red Hat
Linux 8.0 Bible, Understanding the Linux Kernel, Modern
Operating Systems, Linux Kernel Programming, The FreeBSD
Handbook at <ulink url="http://www.freebsd.org"/>, The Design
of the UNIX Operating System, The Design and Implementation
of the 4.4BSD Operating System. That should be enough for
the time-being.</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>I have a few suggestions, new ideas and exciting
comments. Can I send them to you?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>Without asking, please do. Only by hearing from
others, I can make this guide a better one in the near
future. So, drop a line if you want to.</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>I have <emphasis>installation-specific</emphasis>
questions/queries or something <emphasis>failed</emphasis>
or <emphasis>this quite didn't work?</emphasis> Can I send
these reports to you?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>Of course do. But please be patient as I am busy with
lots of things at my university; tests, exams, assignments,
dating my <quote>infinitely patient FreeBSD-compatible
rock-stable girlfriend</quote>, maintaining this guide,
other Linux assignments etc. So, I cannot promise to get
back to you immediately. I need some time solving your
problems.</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>Will you be updating this guide from time to time?
Will <emphasis>my</emphasis> problems be listed here?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>Yes, I would definitely update this guide from time to
time with changes, updates, fixes, additions and so
on.</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>Does this guide have any newest version on the
Internet?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>As of now, no, it does not. This is the only place
where it will be updated from time to time.</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>(For people living in and around Moscow, Russia) I
have a computer system and I would love to install 3
operating systems on them. Would you be kind enough to come
to my place and do the installation and
configuration?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>If you do live in Moscow, or on the outskirts of
Moscow; drop me a line. I would come down to your place and
do everything that is required for free. I'm sorry, but I
cannot help others living far away.</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>(For people of Russia) We love Microsoft Windows,
FreeBSD and OpenBSD operating systems. But Why have you NOT
used the common Russian GNU/Linux distributions? I mean ASP
Linux, Black Cat Linux, ALT Linux and others?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>All the above-mentioned GNU/Linux distributions are
basically Red Hat-based Linux distributions. They heavily
rely on Red Hat for package installation procedures, Kernel
hacking, Kernel updates etc. I have used ASP Linux 7.2
myself, and it does offer a few new and exciting features,
but I personally prefer working with Red Hat Linux. I have
no experience using Black Cat and ALT GNU/Linux
distributions.</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
</qandaset>
</chapter>
<chapter>
<title>Organization</title>
<para>The content of this guide has been split into 7 distinct
sections for ease of searching and reading on behalf of the
reader. The reader is expected to choose any one Microsoft Windows
operating system from the list mentioned in Chapter 2, thus the
other sections regarding Microsoft Windows operating systems could
be skipped without any risk at all. After the reader has chosen
which Microsoft operating system to install, he/she can proceed
with the installation, then proceed with the
FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD and Linux installations
sequentially.</para>
<para>Chapter 1: About the operating systems covers a brief
discussion on Windows operating system family (I chose to speak a
few words on Microsoft Windows XP Professional), Linux, FreeBSD,
OpenBSD and NetBSD operating systems. General information on each
operating system, legal stuff etc. is discussed. For more official
and exhaustive information, refer to the official web-sites of the
products and projects listed there.</para>
<para>Chapter 2: Installing Microsoft Windows covers the
installation of any one of the Microsoft Windows operating systems
that the reader chooses to install on a new hard disk. The
operating system that the reader chooses to install here is the
one that would co-exist with the FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD and Red
Hat Linux operating systems. Disk partitioning and labeling
schemes under Windows is discussed in detail herein.</para>
<para>Chapter 3: Installing FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE covers topics
required for installing and configuring FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE with
the already existing Microsoft Windows operating system. If the
reader chooses to install OpenBSD 3.2-RELEASE instead of FreeBSD
5.1-RELEASE, he/she may skip this chapter and proceed to the next
chapter.</para>
<warning>
<para>WARNING: Since both FreeBSD and OpenBSD operating systems
are POSIX compliant BSD-derivatives, both use the same BSD-style
hard disk partitioning and labeling schemes, and both have the
same set of commands when viewed from the user-level. Thus,
partitioning and filesystems naming covered in FreeBSD section
will not be repeated in the next chapter. If it so happens that
you are a complete OpenBSD newbie or the term
<quote>OpenBSD</quote> sounds like a Greek mythology character,
it is best for you to go through all the information in this
chapter and install and configure FreeBSD. The OpenBSD
installation, though simple and neat, is a text-based
installation procedure completely and assumes a sound knowledge
of hardware, BSD-style hard disk slicing and labeling
schemes. Messing up at any one stage messes up the entire
installation and may even render the Microsoft Windows operating
system (installed initially) totally inaccessible. Experience
has taught me to keep proper backups when doing such
installations. Do not send problem reports later. You have been
warned!</para>
</warning>
<para>Chapter 4: Installing OpenBSD 3.2-RELEASE covers topics
required for installing and configuring OpenBSD 3.2-RELEASE with
the already existing Microsoft Windows operating system. If the
reader chooses to install FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE instead of OpenBSD
3.2-RELEASE, he/she may skip this chapter and take a peek into the
earlier chapter. Partitioning and essential booting process
details etc. is discussed herein.</para>
<para>Chapter 5: Installing NetBSD 1.6.1 covers topics needed for
installing and configuring NetBSD 1.6.1 with the already existing
Microsoft Windows operating system. If the reader chooses to
install FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE or OpenBSD 3.2-RELEASE, he/she may
skip this chapter and take a peek into the earlier
chapters. Partitioning and essential booting process details
etc. is discussed herein. </para>
<para>Chapter 6: Installing Red Hat Linux 8.0 (Psyche) covers the
topics required for installing and configuring Red Hat Linux 8.0
distribution release with the already pre-existing Microsoft
Windows operating system and FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE/OpenBSD
3.2-RELEASE/NetBSD 1.6.1.</para>
<para>Chapter 7: The final Chapter, Mounting Filesystems, contains
a detailed discussion on topics required for mounting Linux
filesystem (ext2fs) on FreeBSD systems and mounting UFS (or FFS)
on Linux systems and other minute yet significant details. Readers
interested in gathering working knowledge on Linux filesystems
must browse through the contents of this Chapter.</para>
</chapter>
<chapter>
<title>About The Operating Systems</title>
<para>A general overview of the operating systems that have been
covered in this guide has been provided here. Readers must note
that these are my personal views (and comments) and have nothing
to do with the views of the Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD or in
general terms, the Open-Source community.</para>
<section>
<title> Microsoft Windows</title>
<para> Microsoft Corp. has a long (yet fatally weak and buggy)
list of operating systems, targets ranging from the mild and
feeble home-user to the truly multi-tasking, multi-processing,
multi-programming, fault-tolerant, hack-resilient real-time
systems; from MS Windows 95 to the most recently launched
Microsoft Windows Server 2003. The reader is free to choose any
operating system according to his/her own personal taste and/or
targeted environment. I personally do <emphasis>not</emphasis>
consider Microsoft Windows 2000 family of operating systems
(Windows 2000 Professional, Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2000
Advanced Server and Windows 2000 DataCenter server) a very good
choice for corporate environments. If the PASSME theme of
Software engineering is considered, where PASSME = Performance,
Availability, Scalability, Security, Maintainability and
Extensibility features of any software under scrutiny; Microsoft
Windows 2000 servers (and operating systems, in general) are
rated much lower than UNIX SVR4, *BSDs, Sun Solaris, Linux and
any of the other commercial variants of UNIX like IBM-AIX,
HP-UX, Digital UNIX, Tru64 UNIX, SGI-Irix and so on.</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>Linux</title>
<para>Linux is the kernel or core of an operating system called
GNU/Linux system, where the GNU Project provides the software
and applications that runs on the Linux kernel. The Linux
kernel, originally written by Linus Benedict Torvalds, is a
UNIX clone, which is POSIX compliant and was initially targeted
towards the Intel x86 architecture. As rightly mentioned in the
<emphasis>Linux Information Sheet</emphasis> by Michael
K. Johnson at <ulink url="http://www.tldp.org"/>,
<blockquote>
<para><quote>... Linux is a completely free re-implementation
of the POSIX specification, with SYSV and BSD extensions
(which means it looks like Unix, but does not come from the
same source code base), which is available in both source code
and binary form. Its copyright is owned by Linus Torvalds and
other contributors, and is freely redistributable under the
terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). A copy of the
GPL is included with the Linux source; you can also get a copy
from <ulink url="ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/COPYING"/>
...</quote>.</para>
</blockquote>
</para>
<para>Readers must note the fact that though many Linux users
worldwide refer to the GNU/Linux operating system simply as
<emphasis>Linux,</emphasis> it is more appropriate to refer to
the operating system as a GNU/Linux system and when talking
about the kernel in particular just to call it Linux. Moreover,
a very popular misconception amongst new Linux users is:
<quote>Hey! Linux is UNIX!</quote> No, absolutely not. Once
again, readers must note: the Linux kernel is a UNIX clone, in
other words a reimplementation of the UNIX Kernel, but it is not
UNIX itself. On the other hand, the BSDs, FreeBSD and OpenBSD
for example, are not kernels merely. They are closer to the real
UNIX (AT&amp;Ts Official Release UNIX SVR4). They represent an
entire operating system with a whole set of applications, tools,
user utilities, shells, games, documentation, developer
utilities, system and user-level binaries and full source code
for the operating systems.</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>*BSD's</title>
<section>
<title>FreeBSD</title>
<para>FreeBSD which stands for the Free version of Berkeley
Software Distribution operating system software (though all
the BSDs out there are <emphasis>open source</emphasis> or
<emphasis>free</emphasis> in nature except BSD/OS) is
technically speaking, the most powerful, professional quality
and advanced UNIX compatible operating system software on
earth today. FreeBSD was originally based on 4.4BSD-Lite (with
a minor inclusion from the 4.4BSD-Lite2 code base too),
developed at the University of California, Berkeley, under the
authorization of the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG),
Computer Science Division, Department of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science at Berkeley. FreeBSD
operating system (just like a Linux distribution) comes with a
whole set of packages, including user applications, tools,
user utilities, shells, games, documentation, developer
utilities, system and user-level binaries and full source code
for the operating systems. The FreeBSD Project web-site can be
accessed at: <ulink url="http://www.freebsd.org"/>.</para>
<para>Recently, a lot of media spotlight has put the GNU/Linux
system (more specifically the Linux Kernel) in a stardom
status. Some rate Linux as the best ever written UNIX clone
that would spell disaster for UNIX and other UNIX clones and
UNIX compatibles out there in the market. But in reality it is
not so. Readers must note: just as the power of an automobile
comes from the quality of the engine running under its hood,
similarly features like stability, reliability, extensibility
and robustness of an operating system software comes from the
internal structure of the Kernel or the core of that
corresponding operating system. I personally feel that both
the Linux and the FreeBSD Kernel are great works of creativity
and tremendous effort and just a user-level or technical
comparison between the two is meaningless. Situations where
memory is a scarcity and moreover gets crunched and stressed
upon real hard, the Linux Kernel breaks down. FreeBSD with its
highly optimized and advanced VM/Swap system comes to the
rescue! On the other hand, under given situations, Linux may
outperform FreeBSD by a mile. The significant point for
readers to note and remember is that the Linux Kernel favors
simplicity over highly optimized and dynamic yet more complex
code whereas the FreeBSD Kernel optimizes performance by
introducing more complex code and heavily optimizing the code
base by rearranging and rewriting some of the more important
internal algorithms and data structures from time to
time.</para>
<para>A complete and exhaustive discussion on Linux and
FreeBSD Kernels is beyond the scope of this guide. If readers
find it interesting, they may search the Internet for more
Linux and/or FreeBSD specific information. I would suggest
<quote>Understanding the Linux Kernel</quote> by Bovet and
Cesati for more in-depth information on the inner-workings of
the Linux Kernel, <quote>The Design and Implementation of the
4.4BSD Operating System</quote> for FreeBSD/OpenBSD and so on,
and <quote>The Design of the UNIX Operating System</quote> by
M. Bach for UNIX SVR4 internals.</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>OpenBSD</title>
<para>The BSD family, other than the dominant big brother
FreeBSD, also consists of OpenBSD, NetBSD, BSD/OS and Darwin
operating systems. OpenBSD is a fully functional,
multi-platform UNIX-like Operating System based on Berkeley
Networking Release 2 (Net/2) and 4.4BSD-Lite. The OpenBSD team
strives to achieve what is called <quote>a secure by
default</quote> status. This means that an OpenBSD user should
feel safe that their newly installed machine will not be
compromised. This <quote>secure by default</quote> goal is
achieved by taking a proactive stance on security. FreeBSD
-RELEASES target stability and reliability under the most
adverse of conditions whereas OpenBSD -RELEASES target optimum
security in corporate environments. The OpenBSD operating
system software has been labeled <quote>the proactively secure
Unix-like operating system.</quote> The OpenBSD Kernel is
heavily optimized with security features thereby providing
customers with utmost secure and hack-resilient real-time
systems. The OpenBSD Project website can be accessed at:
<ulink url="http://www.openbsd.org"/>.</para>
<para>The OpenBSD operating system software has integrated
strong cryptography into the base system. A fully functional
IPsec (Internet Protocol Security) implementation is provided
as well as support for common protocols such as SSL (Secure
Sockets Layer) and SSH (Secure Shell). Network filtering and
monitoring tools such as packet filtering, NAT (Network
Address Translation), and bridging are also included. For high
performance demands, support for hardware cryptography has
also been added to the base system. OpenBSD provides as many
security options as possible to allow the user to enjoy secure
computing without feeling burdened by it.</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>NetBSD</title>
<para> The NetBSD kernel focuses on clean design and
architecturally sound solutions. NetBSD supports a massive
range of hardware platforms from a single source tree,
including simultaneous release across all platforms, and
continues to attract users and experienced developers
despite lack of media exposure and commercial backing - all
thanks to attention to code quality. The NetBSD operating
system kernel targets <emphasis>portability</emphasis> and
tries to run on as many platforms as possible. The NetBSD
Project website can be accessed at:
<ulink url="http://www.netbsd.org"/></para>
</section>
<section>
<title>Additional Reading for *BSD's</title>
<para>For browsing through the Official FreeBSD Handbook,
visit: <ulink url="http://www.freebsd.org"/></para>
<para>The official sources for FreeBSD are available via
anonymous FTP from: <ulink url="ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/"/></para>
<para>For a comparative study between FreeBSD, Linux and
Microsoft Windows 2000, check out this document at
<ulink url="http://people.freebsd.org/~murray/bsd_flier.html"/></para>
</section>
<section>
<title>Target Audience</title>
<para>The following table exhibits the main target of every
operating system covered in this guide:</para>
<para>Windows: Ask Mr. Gates himself... Difficult to
guess!</para>
<para>Linux Linux targets new, exciting, and cutting edge
features like HyperThreading, USB, Wireless NICs and so
on.</para>
<para>FreeBSD FreeBSD targets stability and robustness;
optimizing the kernel code base for optimum performance under
heavy network-loads.</para>
<para>OpenBSD OpenBSD targets optimum security. It is the
most proactively secure UNIX-like OS.</para>
<para>NetBSD NetBSD targets portability. To run on as many
platforms as possible is its primary target.</para>
</section>
</section>
</chapter>
<chapter>
<title>Installing Microsoft Windows</title>
<section>
<title>Windows Options</title>
<para>I have used a Microsoft Windows operating system as the
first operating system on my computer. I have MS Windows 98
(SE) installed. The reader may choose any one of the Microsoft
operating systems mentioned below in the listed form. Suppose
you would like to use Microsoft Windows 98 (SE) as your first
operating system too. Read the information given in Section B:
Installing MS Windows 98 (SE) and after doing as mentioned in
that section, proceed forward with installing FreeBSD
5.1-RELEASE or OpenBSD 3.2-RELEASE or NetBSD 1.6.1.</para>
<para>Thus, we have the following sections:</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>Section A: Installing MS Windows 95</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Section B: Installing MS Windows 98 (SE)</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Section C: Installing MS Windows Millennium (ME)</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Section D: Installing MS Windows NT (4.0)</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Section E: Installing MS Windows 2000 (Professional)</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Section F: Installing MS Windows XP (Home/Professional)</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<para>One can use the Windows fdisk and format tools for
partitioning a new unformatted hard disk. I have assumed that
the reader has a new unformatted hard disk which he/she wishes
to partition and then format for installing a Microsoft
Windows operating system. The material mentioned below applies
to Microsoft Windows 95, Microsoft Windows 98 (SE) and
Microsoft Windows Millennium (ME). If you plan to install
Windows NT, Windows 2000 or Windows XP, skip this section and
go to the part referring to sections D, E and F.</para>
<section>
<title>Section's A, B, C</title>
<para>Section A: Installing MS Windows 95</para>
<para>Section B: Installing MS Windows 98 (SE)</para>
<para>Section C: Installing MS Windows Millennium (ME)</para>
<para>The material mentioned below applies to Microsoft
Windows 95, Microsoft Windows 98 (SE) and Microsoft
Windows Millennium (ME). Thus, if you are installing any
one of these, make sure you read through all the content
mentioned herein which describes the fdisk and format
tools and explains how to use them to partition or
repartition a hard disk. The material describes the
following topics:</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>How to Use the Fdisk and Format Tools</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Important Considerations Before You Use the Fdisk and
Format Tools</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>How to Partition and Format a Master Hard Disk</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<para>Before you install your operating system, you must
first create a primary partition on the hard disk (disk 1)
on your computer, then format a filesystem on that
partition. The fdisk tool is an MS-DOS-based tool that you
can use to prepare (partition) a hard disk. You can use the
fdisk tool to create, change, delete, or display current
partitions on the hard disk, and then each allocated space
on the hard disk (primary partition, extended partition, or
logical drive) is assigned a drive letter. Disk 1 may
contain one extended partition, and a second hard disk may
contain a primary or extended partition. An extended
partition may contain one or more logical MS-DOS
drives/partitions.</para>
<para>After you have used the fdisk tool to partition the
hard disk, you can use the format tool to format those
partitions with a filesystem. The filesystem File Allocation
Table (FAT) allows the hard disk to accept, store and
retrieve data. Windows 95, Windows 98 (SE), Windows
Millennium (ME) and Windows 2000 support the FAT16 and FAT32
filesystems. When you run the fdisk tool on a hard disk that
is larger than 512 megabytes (MB), you are prompted to
choose one of the following file systems: FAT16 or
FAT32. The FAT16 filesystem has a maximum of 2 gigabytes
(GB) for each allocated space or drive letter. For example,
if you use the FAT16 filesystem and have a 6-GB hard disk,
you can have three drive letters (C, D, and E), each with 2
GB of allocated space. As for the FAT32 filesystem, it
supports drives that are up to 2 terabytes in size and
stores files on smaller sections of the hard disk than the
FAT16 filesystem does. This results in more free space on
the hard disk. Please note that the FAT32 filesystem does
not support drives that are smaller than 512 MB. When you
run the <application>fdisk</application> and
<application>format</application> commands, the Master Boot
Record (MBR) and File Allocation Tables (FAT) are
created. The MBR and FAT store the necessary disk geometry
that allows hard disk to accept, store, and retrieve
data.</para>
<para>Please note that I have assumed that you own a
computer system which can run without glitches and that you
have access to a bootable Microsoft Windows CD-ROM. If you
do run into problems booting from the CD-ROM or using
Startup disks, please consult your hardware manufacturer to
obtain the CD-ROM device driver(s). For partitioning a
master hard disk, you have to run the fdisk command. First
insert the Startup disk in the floppy disk drive, restart
your computer, then use one of the following methods,
depending on your operating system.</para>
<section>
<title>For a Windows 95/98/ME Startup disk</title>
<para>At a command prompt, type fdisk, then press
enter. If your hard disk is larger than 512 MB, you
receive the following message: Your computer has a disk
larger than 512 MB. This version of Windows includes
improved support for large disks, resulting in more
efficient use of disk space on large drives, allowing
disks over 2 GB to be formatted as a single drive.</para>
<para>If you enable large disk support and create any new
drives on this disk, you will NOT be able to access the
new drive(s) using other operating systems, including some
versions of Windows 95 and Windows NT, as well as earlier
versions of Windows and MS-DOS. In addition, disk
utilities that were not designated explicitly for the
FAT32 file system will not be able to work with this
disk. If you need to access this disk with other operating
systems or older disk utilities, do not enable large drive
support.</para>
<screen>Do you wish to enable large disk support?</screen>
<para>If you want to use the FAT32 file system, press Y
and then press enter. If you want to use the FAT16 file
system, press N, then press enter. After you press enter,
the following fdisk Options menu is displayed:</para>
<screen>
1. Create DOS partition or Logical DOS Drive
2. Set active partition
3. Delete partition or Logical DOS Drive
4. Display partition information
5. Change current fixed disk drive
</screen>
<warning>
<para>Please note that option 5 is available only if you
have two physical hard disks in the computer.</para>
</warning>
<para>Press 1 to select the Create DOS partition or
Logical DOS Drive menu option, then press enter. Press 1
to select the Create Primary DOS Partition menu option,
then press enter. After you press enter, you receive the
following message:</para>
<screen>Do you wish to use the maximum available size for
primary DOS partition?</screen>
<para>After you receive this message, use one of the
following methods, depending on the file system that you
selected. </para>
</section>
<section>
<title>For a FAT32 File System</title>
<para>If you press Y for the FAT32 file system (in step 2)
and you want all of the space on the hard disk to be
assigned to drive C, press Y, then press enter. Press ESC,
and then press ESC to quit the fdisk tool and return to a
command prompt.</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>For a FAT16 File System</title>
<para> If you press N for the FAT16 file system (in step
2), you can accept the default 2 GB size for the partition
size, or you can customize the size of the
partition.</para>
</section>
</section>
<section>
<title>Customizing Partition Size</title>
<para>If you want to customize the size of the partitions
(drive letters) on the hard disk, press N, then press
enter. A dialog box is displayed in which you can type the
size that you want for the primary partition in MB or
percent of disk space. Note that for computers that are
running either Windows 98 (SE) or Windows ME, Microsoft
recommends that you make the primary partition at least 500
MB in size. Type the size of the partition that you want to
create, then press enter. Press ESC to return to the Options
menu. To assign drive letters to the additional space on the
hard disk, press 1, then press enter. Press 2 to select the
Create Extended DOS Partition menu option, then press
enter. You receive a dialog box that displays the maximum
space that is available for the extended partition. You can
adjust the size of the partition or use the default
size. Note that the default maximum space is recommended,
but you can divide the space between multiple drive
letters. Type the amount of space that you want, press
enter, then press ESC. The Create Logical DOS Drive(s) in
the Extended DOS Partition menu is displayed. This is the
menu that you can use to assign the remaining hard disk
space to the additional drive letters. Type the amount of
space that you want to assign to the next drive letter in
the Enter logical drive size in Mbytes or percent of disk
space (%) box, then press enter. After this, you have to
activate the partition from which you plan to boot. This,
usually, is the drive C. So, press 2 to select the Set
active partition menu option, and then enter the number of
the partition you want to make active.</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>Format Partition</title>
<para>After you create the partitions, you must format the
partitions for accessing and using them. If you are using a
Windows 95 Startup disk, a command prompt is displayed and you
can skip to step 2. If you are using a Windows 98 Second
Edition or a Windows ME Startup disk, select the Start
computer without CD-ROM support menu option when the Windows
98 Startup menu is displayed. When a command prompt is
displayed, type <screen>format c:</screen>, then press
enter. This command formats drive C (or your
<emphasis>active</emphasis> drive). For all other partitions,
type format drive: (where drive is the letter of the partition
that you want to format).</para>
<warning>
<para>Readers must note that I speak about
<emphasis>partitioning a hard disk</emphasis> using
Microsoft fdisk utility in general here in this section in
order to provide the absolute newbies with general
information on how to partition and format a new hard disk
drive.</para>
</warning>
</section>
</section>
<section>
<title>Sections D, E, F</title>
<para>Section D: Installing MS Windows NT (4.0)</para>
<para>Section E: Installing MS Windows 2000
(Professional)</para>
<para>Section F: Installing MS Windows XP
(Home/Professional)</para>
<para>For installing any one of these 3 above-mentioned
operating systems, first use fdisk tool to partition your hard
disk. Then comes choosing the filesystem type.</para>
<para>During a new installation of Windows NT, 2000 or XP, you
may have to choose which file system your computer should
use. On my other PC, I use Microsoft Windows XP Professional
which supports: </para>
<para>FAT32: An enhanced version of the file allocation table
(FAT) system that is standard on all Windows operating systems
starting with later (32-bit) versions of Windows 95. The FAT32
system can be used on large hard disks, from 512 megabytes (MB)
to 32 gigabytes (GB).</para>
<para>NTFS: The NT file system (NTFS) is used with the Windows
NT, Windows 2000, and Windows XP operating systems. NTFS
provides enhanced reliability, stability, and security, and
supports large hard disks of up to 2 terabytes (TB).</para>
<warning>
<para>Very <quote>important</quote> information: the
conversion to NTFS is one-way only; if you convert your FAT or
FAT32 file system to NTFS you cannot convert your hard disk
back to FAT later.</para>
</warning>
<para>If you are not sure which file system to use, I would
suggest using FAT32. If you want to change your file system,
here are a few recommendations:</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>Use FAT32 if your hard disk is smaller than 32
GB.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Use FAT32 if you want to install more than one
operating system on your computer.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Use NTFS if your hard drive is larger than 32 GB and
you are running only one operating system on your
computer.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Use NTFS if you want enhanced file security.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Use NTFS if you need better disk compression.</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<para>You can choose any filesystem type that you wish. After
choosing the filesystem, proceed with the Windows NT/2000/XP
installation normally. After installation, feel free to
configure your new system.</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>Summary of the Actual Steps</title>
<para>Enough said about the different Microsoft operating
systems. Now let us look more closely how exactly we would
partition the hard disk. As mentioned above, we use Microsoft
fdisk, then create a Primary DOS Partition of about 2000MB (2
GB) or so. On my PC, I have a primary partition of 999MB which
contains Microsoft Windows 98 (SE). I have used such a small
space because I hardly do any work on Windows, thereby reserving
space for FreeBSD and Linux! Readers can choose a bit more space
if they feel like doing so. After creating this partition, do
not forget to format it using the format tool. On my system, I
have a FAT32 Primary partition.</para>
<para>After creating this Primary Partition (say, of 999MB), we
do not need to create any more partitions using the Microsoft
fdisk utility. For example, I have a 20.0 GB Maxtor HDD. I
create a primary partition of about 1000MB using fdisk. The
obvious question from the reader is: what about the rest 19GB?
What happens to it? Well the answer is simple. I leave it
untouched because I would be dividing this available space into
2 halves for installing FreeBSD or OpenBSD or NetBSD and Linux
while using the FreeBSD Partition editor or OpenBSD Partition
editor or NetBSD partition editor respectively, while installing
FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE or OpenBSD 3.2-RELEASE or NetBSD 1.6.1. So,
no need to worry. Just take the ride with me. I promise, by the
time you are done reading this guide, not a single MB on your
hard disk will be wasted.</para>
<para>Thus, before we finally move on to the next section where
we install and configure FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE or OpenBSD
3.2-RELEASE or NetBSD 1.6.1, I would like to round off this
chapter with a partition check. I have the following partition
table on my computer after this step (as observed from Microsoft
fdisk):</para>
<screen>
Display Partition Information Partition
Status Type Volume_Label Mbytes System Usage
C:1 A PRI DOS WIN 1000 FAT32 5%
</screen>
<para>Once this done, reboot your computer and using a bootable
Microsoft Windows CD-ROM (depending on your Windows operating
system of choice), install the operating system as usual. Do the
usual system configuration and log into Windows to check whether
everything works. That is all for this section, now take a
break, have a coffee and proceed to the next chapter, Chapter 3:
Installing FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE.</para>
</section>
</chapter>
<chapter>
<title>Installing FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE</title>
<para>This Chapter focuses on installing FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE and
multi-booting the system so that it can coexist successfully with
the already existing Windows operating system. Like the Windows
installation, it too focuses on a CD-ROM based
installation. Experts may proceed as usual without help. As for
the newbies out there, make sure you check out the Frequently
Asked Questions for FreeBSD 2.X, 3.X and 4.X at The FreeBSD
Documentation Project at <ulink url="http://www.freebsd.org"/>. For a
step-by-step FreeBSD Installation procedure with screenshots,
please refer to Chapter2 : Installing FreeBSD of the FreeBSD
Handbook at
<ulink url="http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/index.html"/>.
These and other documentation available on the FreeBSD Project
homepage provide exhaustive and extensive coverage of all aspects
related to the FreeBSD software. Make sure you grab as much
information as you can from this site before proceeding with this
guide.</para>
<para>Readers must note that at the time of writing, 2 parallel
branches of the FreeBSD operating system exist. The latest -STABLE
release is the FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE while the latest -CURRENT
release is the FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE. In this Chapter, we would
discuss some theoretical aspects of installing FreeBSD
5.1-RELEASE, disk partitioning (better known as slicing in FreeBSD
terminology) and then move on to the actual installation
itself. </para>
<section>
<title>Slicing in FreeBSD</title>
<para>Before installing FreeBSD, it would be a good idea to take
a brief tour of what FreeBSD calls <quote>slicing.</quote> If
you already know this stuff, feel free to skip this part and
read the section entitled <quote>Summary of Installation
Steps.</quote></para>
<para>The FreeBSD operating system partitions (a hard disk) and
labels partitions according to a particular chosen scheme which
is similar to other BSD-based UNIX systems such as NetBSD,
OpenBSD, Ultrix, Digital Unix and SunOS. Let us see how the
FreeBSD software slices your hard disk and then creates
partitions in it for use. Each partition that contains a
filesystem is stored in what FreeBSD calls a
<emphasis>slice.</emphasis> Slice is FreeBSD's term for what
were earlier called partitions. Slices are numbered, starting at
1, through to 4 (in Windows terminology, they would be called
<emphasis>primary partitions</emphasis>, starting at 1, through
to 4). Thus, the reader must note that <emphasis>a primary
partition</emphasis> in Windows refers to a
<emphasis>slice</emphasis> in FreeBSD terminology, and
<emphasis>an extended partition containing logical disk drives
in it</emphasis> is simply called as
<emphasis>partitions</emphasis> in FreeBSD. A logical disk drive
within an extended partition may also be called <emphasis>a
logical slice inside a physical slice</emphasis> in FreeBSD. It
may appear a bit awkward at times, but the sooner the reader
gets used to these terms, the better!</para>
<para>Now, the important part. There exists a few operating
systems which can boot even if their corresponding boot files
are stored within a logical disk drive of an extended
partition. For FreeBSD, this mechanism does not work. FreeBSD
necessarily needs one of the slices (that is, the 4 entries in
the partition table on your computer's hard drive, which in
Windows terminology would be called a <emphasis>primary
partition</emphasis>). It then uses a program called
<application>disklabel</application> for making up to eight
partitions in this slice.
<warning>
<para>Readers must note a very significant fact: You
<quote>cannot</quote> install FreeBSD in an extended partition
made by Linux (or DOS/Windows).</para>
</warning></para>
<para>FreeBSD labels hard disks and partitions as follows:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>First IDE hard disk (Primary Master) - /dev/ad0</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Second IDE hard disk (Primary Slave) - /dev/ad1</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Third IDE hard disk (Secondary Master) - /dev/ad2</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Fourth IDE hard disk (Secondary Slave) - /dev/ad3</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
where /dev is the directory under the root <quote>/</quote>
directory in FreeBSD which contains all the device special files
associated with devices. I assume readers are using a FreeBSD
4.X-RELEASE or later. IDE hard disks are named as wd* before
FreeBSD 4.0-RELEASE.</para>
<para>What about SCSI drives? Well, FreeBSD labels that too!
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>First SCSI hard disk (Primary Master) - /dev/da0</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Second SCSI hard disk (Primary Slave) - /dev/da1</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Third SCSI hard disk (Secondary Master) - /dev/da2</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Fourth SCSI hard disk (Secondary Slave) - /dev/da3</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
where /dev is the directory under the root <quote>/</quote>
directory in FreeBSD which contains all the device files
associated with devices.</para>
<para>Now, let us talk about the partitioning scheme under
FreeBSD. It is just like in Linux, only the way the partitions
are named is different. In FreeBSD, we first consider a
particular hard disk, whether IDE or SCSI. Then, we consider the
partitions on it. For example, the partitions on an IDE drive
are named in the following way (/dev/ad0 is used as an
example):
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>First primary partition - /dev/ad0s1</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Second primary partition - /dev/ad0s2</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Third primary partition - /dev/ad0s3</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Fourth primary partition - /dev/ad0s4</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist></para>
<para>These above mentioned drives may contain partitions as
well. FreeBSD labels them too and each label has its own
corresponding mount point. Let us consider an example. A
computer has /dev/ad0 as its hard disk named, contains 2 slices;
the first slice is a FAT32 partition and the second a BSD/i386
partition containing 4 logical slices [logical disk drives] in
it. So in this case, what would the partition table look like
and mean? Let us see how FreeBSD labels this scheme. FreeBSD
would represent this as:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>/dev/ad0</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>/dev/ad0s1</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>/dev/ad0s2</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>/dev/ad0s2a</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>/dev/ad0s2b</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>dev/ad0s2e</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>/dev/ad0s2f</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
where ad0s2a refers to the first partition (a) on the second
slice (s2) on the first IDE disk (ad0). In the above example,
/dev/ad0s1 is the slice containing FAT32 filesystem and
/dev/ad0s2 is the second slice on the hard disk drive under
scrutiny. Readers must note that FreeBSD labels slices from
/dev/ad0s1 onwards to /dev/ad0s4, with a maximum of 8 possible
logical slices named as a through h. In this example, the
logical slices a, b, e and f have their corresponding mount
points in FreeBSD.</para>
<para>Here, the mount points are as follows:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>a = / (the root directory)</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>b = swap filesystem</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>e = /var</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>f = /usr</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
For more exhaustive information, refer to the FreeBSD
Handbook.</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>Filesystems in FreeBSD</title>
<para>Microsoft Windows operating systems use FAT16, FAT32, NTFS
4.0 and NTFS 5.0 filesystems. The recently released NTFS 5.0 is
implemented in all of the Windows 2000 operating systems. The
Linux Kernel uses the Third Extended native filesystem, denoted
as ext3fs. Linux also supported the ext (now obsolete and no
longer supported) and ext2 filesystems. The Second Extended
filesystem (ext2fs) is an advanced hierarchical filesystem
developed for the Linux operating system, which included
advanced features like a maximum file size of 2.0 GB, a maximum
file name length of 255 characters and support for three
time/date stamps. These are the date of creation, date of last
modification and date of last access. The Third Extended
filesystem has all these features, and additionally it
implements IBM's Journaled File System architecture (JFS)
functionality. The JFS architecture ensures the integrity of
data stored on a hard disk in the event of an unplanned
shutdown, such as one caused by a power outage. A journaled
filesystem maintains a log of all read and write events; this
log enables the disk to be restored to its last stable state and
additionally allows incompletely written data to be restored to
the maximum possible extent.</para>
<para>The FreeBSD operating system essentially uses the UNIX
File System (UFS) architecture for its underlying
filesystem. The University of Berkeley made more advancements to
it, referred to as the Berkeley Improvements or Berkeley
Extensions. This filesystem, currently used by FreeBSD as its
native filesystem is often called the <emphasis>Fast
Filesystem</emphasis> or FFS, because access reads and writes to
data stored in FFS are very fast. The architecture is a little
more complex than Linux's ext2fs. It offers a better way to
insure filesystem data integrity, mainly with the softupdates
option. This option decreases synchronous I/O and increases
asynchronous I/O because writes to a UFS filesystem are not
synced on a sector basis but according to the filesystem
structure. This ensures that the filesystem is always coherent
between two updates.</para>
<para>The FreeBSD filesystem also supports file flags, which can
stop a would-be intruder dead in his or her tracks. There are
several flags that you can add to a file such as the immutable
flag. The immutable (schg) flag would not allow any alteration
to the file or directory unless you remove it. Other available
flags are append only (sappnd), cannot delete (sunlnk), and
archive (arch). When you combine these with the kernel security
level option, you have an impenetrable system. In short, the
FreeBSD Kernel uses UFS = UFS+FFS+Softupdates+dirpref+dirhash
functionality for storing and retrieving data on disks. </para>
</section>
<section>
<title>Summary of Installation Steps</title>
<para>Having covered the partitioning scheme and filesystems
FreeBSD, it's time for us to move on to the actual FreeBSD
installation. For a complete step-by-step coverage of FreeBSD
installation, please consult the installation guide available on
the FreeBSD Project web site. As in the previous Chapter, here
also I will be mentioning only the significant steps for the
installation. Use these steps to install FreeBSD on your
computer and configure it for multi-booting:
<orderedlist>
<listitem>
<para>We have a computer running a Microsoft Windows
operating system. On my PC, it is Windows 98 (SE). I put a
bootable FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE CD-ROM in the CD-ROM drive and
reboot the system.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>The computer boots, reads the CD-ROM, displays the
usual hardware probing messages and presents you with a
screen where you can choose from a list of options. Proceed
to the FreeBSD System Installation and Configuration
Utility. In FreeBSD it is called the /stand/sysinstall
utility.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Once the /stand/sysinstall screen appears, select a
Novice, Custom or Express install. I choose the Custom
installation because it provides the optimum
flexibility. For novice users, I would suggest using the
Recommended installation. Proceed as usual until you reach
the FreeBSD Fdisk editor.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Select the unused space and create 2 approximately
equal partitions. Thus, 2 slices would be created (in
addition to the one that already exists). One would be used
for installing FreeBSD and the other for Red Hat Linux
later. Readers with intermediate and/or expert FreeBSD
knowledge should find this easy to do. After creating these
2 partitions, there should be no free space on your hard
disk. Exit saving all the changes and proceed as usual to
the FreeBSD Disk label editor. Readers must note: while
creating the Linux slice, the filesystem ID should be
131. This creates a Linux native filesystem (ext2fs
filesystem). Otherwise, the default FreeBSD UFS filesystem
would be created.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>The next screen allows you to install a boot
manager. Since Microsoft Windows 98 (SE) overwrites the
Master Boot Record (MBR) rendering any other operating
system unbootable, you should choose to install the FreeBSD
boot manager in the MBR of your hard disk. I have installed
FreeBSD alongside another operating system on the same hard
disk, and I want FreeBSD to boot the other operating system
when I start the computer. That is the reason I installed
the FreeBSD boot manager into the MBR. Once done, we enter
the Sysinstall Disklabel Editor.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>The Sysinstall Disklabel Editor represents the already
existing Windows FAT32 partition. Readers must note that
FreeBSD names this partition as a FreeBSD slice but without
an appropriate mount point. Here, I would create the logical
partitions for the FreeBSD slice (which is
/dev/ad0s2).</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>On my PC, the Windows FAT32 partition is named
/dev/ad0s1 (C: in DOS). In other words, it is the first
slice on the IDE hard disk of my computer. Disklabel can
automatically create partitions for you and assign them
default sizes if you press the key A. Depending on the size
of the disk (and purpose of installing FreeBSD), the
defaults may or may not be appropriate. For me, it works
most of the time. To quote from the FreeBSD Handbook,
<blockquote>
<para><quote>... Beginning with FreeBSD 4.5, the default
partitioning assigns the /tmp directory its own partition
instead of being part of the / partition. This helps avoid
filling the / partition with temporary
files...</quote></para>
</blockquote>
This is an important consideration if you have a lot of
temporary files to deal with. I create a /, swap, /usr, /var
and other usual partitions in my FreeBSD slice (named as
/dev/ad0s2).</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Once the slices are created and partitions within the
FreeBSD slice set and done, we proceed to choose what to
install on the system. Depending on the intended use and
resources at your disposal, you must make the correct choice
of what to install and what not to install. For example,
Mr. A wants to check out FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE for fun. Well,
a Minimal Install is the best choice for him. It saves him
both time and hard disk space. His brother, Mr. B is a
hot-shot Kernel Developer. He wants access to documentation,
full system binaries and the Kernel source code. He would go
in for a Kern-Developer canned distribution set. If you have
enough resources at your disposal or if it so happens you do
not want to use the pkg_add tool to install packages later
or from the ports collection manually, you can always go for
the <emphasis>All</emphasis> install option. This would
install everything on the system. Thus, we see that the
predefined options range from installing the smallest
possible configuration (Minimal) to everything (All). Those
who are new to UNIX and/or FreeBSD should almost certainly
select one of these canned options. Readers must note: if a
graphical user interface (GUI) is desired then a
distribution set that is preceded by an X should be
chosen. The configuration of XFree86 and selection of a
default desktop is part of the post-installation
steps.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Next, choose the installation media from the list of
available choices. I assume you are doing a Local CD/DVD-ROM
installation just like me. Using the arrow keys highlight
<emphasis>Install from a FreeBSD CD/DVD</emphasis>, and
press Enter to proceed with the installation. If it so
happens that you want to undertake a different kind of
installation, choose the appropriate option and follow the
steps.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Next appears the <emphasis>Committing to the
Installation</emphasis> screen. You are asked whether you
are sure about installing FreeBSD on this system or
not. Select [ Yes ] and press enter to proceed. The
installation can now proceed. Readers must note: this is
absolutely the last chance for aborting the installation to
prevent changes to the hard disk.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>The installation time will vary according to the
distribution chosen, installation media used, and the speed
of the computer. There will be a series of messages
displayed indicating the status. The installation is
complete when the following message is displayed:
<screen>Congratulations! You now have FreeBSD installed on
your system</screen></para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Next comes the post-installation steps. This usually
involves chores such as Network Device Configuration,
Configure Gateway, Configure Internet Services, Anonymous
FTP, NFS Server, NFS Client, Setting Up A Security Profile,
System Console Settings, Setting The Time Zone, Adding Users
and Groups, and so on. For an exhaustive covering of each
and every step along with helpful screenshots, refer to the
FreeBSD Handbook at <ulink url="http://www.freebsd.org"/>.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Once you have completed the post-installation steps,
exit the /stand/sysinstall system installer utility, take
out the CD-ROM, and reboot the system. When your computer
reboots, since you have installed the FreeBSD boot loader
into the MBR of your hard disk, you would normally get the
following prompt on your screen. It displays something like:
F1 DOS, F2 FreeBSD, F3 Linux; each one in a separate
line. The Default: F1 is also shown. FreeBSD uses a 3-stage
bootstrap by default, and this is actually the preceding
bootblock, named /boot/boot0, which lives on the MBR, the
special part of the disk that the system bootstrap looks for
and runs, and it simply shows a list of possible slices to
boot from.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Press F1 to boot into Microsoft Windows. On my
computer, I successfully booted into Windows 98 (SE). So far
so good! I rebooted and pressed F2 this time, and I
successfully booted into FreeBSD as well. Bingo! You already
have a dual-boot system which uses the FreeBSD boot loader
to boot 2 operating systems.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Depending on the configuration of your computer, you
will receive bootup messages on your screen when you boot
into FreeBSD for the first time. Though the messages scroll
off the screen too fast for you to read anything productive,
you can always read it later by using the
<screen>/sbin/dmesg | more</screen> command. Finally, you
will arrive at the login prompt. Login using the
username/password you set during installation. Readers must
note: the Linux slice is not ready yet, because we have not
defined the mount point of the root <quote>/</quote>
directory and swap filesystem. So, to do this and more, we
proceed to the chapter, Chapter 6: Installing Red Hat Linux
8.0 (Psyche). Readers must note that if you have already
installed FreeBSD, you can skip the next 2 chapters and
proceed with the Linux installation directly.</para>
</listitem>
</orderedlist></para>
</section>
</chapter>
<chapter>
<title>Installing OpenBSD 3.2-RELEASE</title>
<para>This Chapter focuses on installing OpenBSD 3.2-RELEASE and
multi-booting the system so that it can coexist successfully with
the already existing Windows operating system. Like the Windows
and FreeBSD installation, it too focuses on a CD-ROM based
installation. Experts may proceed as usual without help. As for
the newbies out there, make sure you check out the Frequently
Asked Questions for OpenBSD on The OpenBSD Project homepage at
<ulink url="http://www.openbsd.org"/>. For a step-by-step OpenBSD
Installation procedure with screenshots, refer to the
<quote>Installing OpenBSD</quote> Online manual at the OpenBSD
Project homepage. These and other documentation available on the
OpenBSD 3.2-RELEASE CD-ROM provide exhaustive and extensive
coverage of all aspects related to OpenBSD. Make sure you grab as
much information as you can before proceeding with this
guide.</para>
<para>Since both FreeBSD and OpenBSD operating systems are
BSD-derivatives, UNIX related information present in the
/usr/share/doc directory on both systems provide very high quality
technical information on how to install, use and customize a UNIX
system. If you are not yet a FreeBSD/OpenBSD wizard, my humble and
honest advice would be to read the Unix User's Supplementary
Documents (USD), Unix System Manager's Manual (SMM) and the Unix
Programmer's Supplementary Documents (PSD) on these
systems.</para>
<para>Note: I assume the reader executing this Chapter possesses a
sound knowledge of BSD-style hard disk partitioning and labeling
schemes, device naming conventions and so on. If you have no idea
at all of what I am talking about or of OpenBSD in general, I
strongly suggest you go back to the earlier section and read
through its entire contents. Though the material is FreeBSD
specific, most of it applies to OpenBSD as well since OpenBSD like
any other BSD out there follows the slicing scheme.</para>
<para>A few significant points to remember: in Linux, an entry
like /dev/hda1 refers to a partition which in FreeBSD is likely to
be labeled /dev/ad0s1. The OpenBSD counterpart would be /dev/wd0a
for the first hard disk drive, /dev/wd1a for the second hard disk
drive and so on. OpenBSD disklabel allows up to 16 partitions. It
can detect and represent all primary partitions that exist on the
hard disk. OpenBSD disklabel sees all partitions within an
extended partition but it does not list the extended partition
container. Readers must note that OpenBSD reserves the c:
partition which represents the entire hard disk, i: through p: are
reserved for partitions belonging to other operating systems other
than OpenBSD (for example Windows or Linux partitions), with a:,
b: and d: - h: available for OpenBSD specific partitions. Thus the
word <emphasis>partition</emphasis>, without qualification,
usually refers to a UNIX disk area on which a filesystem will be
mounted.</para>
<section>
<title>Summary of Installation Steps</title>
<para>For a complete step-by-step coverage of OpenBSD
installation, consult the <emphasis>Installing OpenBSD
Manual</emphasis> available on the OpenBSD Project web site. As
in the previous Chapter, here also I will be mentioning only the
significant steps for the installation. Use these steps to
install OpenBSD on your computer and configure it for
multi-booting:</para>
<orderedlist>
<listitem>
<para>We have a computer running a Microsoft Windows
operating system. On my PC, it is Windows 98 (SE). I put a
bootable OpenBSD 3.2-RELEASE CD-ROM in the CD-ROM drive and
reboot the system.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>The computer boots, reads the CD-ROM, displays the
usual hardware probing messages on the screen and presents
you with an interactive text based installation
program. Readers must note: There are several ways to
install OpenBSD onto a disk. The easiest way, should your
computer support it, is to boot off the CD-ROM. Otherwise,
you can boot from a 3.5 inch 1.44MB floppy disk. You should
now be ready to install OpenBSD.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Read the questions that appear on the screen and
answer them accordingly. Think twice before committing to
the installation. If any question offers a default answer,
it will be displayed in brackets ([ ]) after the
question. If you wish to stop the installation, you may hit
Control-C at any time, but if you do, you will have to begin
the installation process again from scratch.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Next, you will be asked for your terminal type. You
should just hit return to select the default (vt220). vt220
refers to Console rather than serial/dial-up or
network/pseudo terminals.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>After entering the terminal type you will be asked
whether you wish to do an <screen>(I)nstall or an
(U)pgrade</screen>. Enter 'I' for a fresh install or 'U' to
upgrade an existing installation.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>You will be presented with a welcome message and asked
if you really wish to install (or upgrade). Assuming you
answer yes, the install program will then tell you which
disks of that type it can install on, and ask you which it
should use. Check whether OpenBSD correctly assigns the
corresponding device file to your hard disk or not. OpenBSD
assigned my first IDE hard disk a label /dev/wd0.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>When OpenBSD asks you whether you want to assign the
whole hard disk for installing OpenBSD or not, select a [no]
and press enter. I select a no here, because I am preparing
a multi-boot system that would run 3 operating
systems.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Proceed with the installation as usual until you reach
the OpenBSD fdisk. If fdisk is invoked on your behalf, it
will start by displaying the current partitions defined and
then allow you to modify this information, add new
partitions and change which partition to boot from by
default. Here, I have to create a slice with
<quote>Partition ID#</quote>: A6 which would be used later
for installing OpenBSD 3.2. Readers must note: FreeBSD
partition ID is A5 and is different from OpenBSD partition
ID A6. So while creating the slice, the ID should be A6 and
not A5.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>I had output like this on my screen after I
successfully created my OpenBSD slice.</para>
<screen>
Disk:wd0 geometry: 1274 / 255 / 63 [ 20466810 Sectors ]
Offset:0
Starting Ending LBA Info:
# Id C H S C H S Size
0: 0B 0 1 1 249 254 63 4016187 Win95 FAT32
*1: A6 250 1 1 1273 254 63 16450497 OpenBSD
</screen>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Try to understand the geometry. It represents the
actual physical geometry or arrangement of my hard disk. The
number of sectors available are given. The 2 sections
containing the <quote>Starting</quote> and
<quote>Ending</quote> C (cylinder), H (heads) and S
(sectors) are also given. I started out with the first slice
with ID: 0B only available. The information under LBA Info
shows me that it is a Microsoft Windows 95 FAT32 filesystem
partition. Hey! That's the one I created when I installed
Microsoft Windows 98 (SE) in it.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>I then create a new slice, with filesystem ID#: A6 to
represent an OpenBSD slice, mention the Starting and Ending
cylinders, heads and sectors and finally (very important)
set the slice bootable by setting the appropriate flag from
the command line. This is shown by the asterisk (*) before
the starting of the second slice (#1:) is represented as
(*#1:). It tells the MBR code to execute the OpenBSD boot
loader because it will in turn boot my other operating
system.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Enter a <emphasis>quit</emphasis> and not an
<emphasis>exit</emphasis> on the command line and exit
the OpenBSD fdisk partition editor.
<important> <para>DO A <emphasis>quit</emphasis>, not an
<emphasis>exit</emphasis>.</para>
</important></para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Next, the disk label which defines the layout of the
OpenBSD file systems must be set up. The installation script
will invoke an interactive editor allowing you to do this. I
create a swap of about a few thousand bytes, and provide the
rest to the <quote>a</quote> partition; ie., to the root
directory on the filesystem. The install program will now
label your disk and ask which filesystems should be created
on which partitions. It will automatically select the 'a'
partition to be the root file system. Next it will ask for
which disk and partition you want a filesystem
created. </para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>After all your filesystems have been created, the
install program will give you an opportunity to configure
the network. Next, you are prompted to configure your
network interfaces, default route and IP address of the
primary name server and the host table.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Once all these are done, you will be able to extract
the distribution sets onto your system. When installing from
a CD-ROM, you will be asked which device holds the
distribution sets. This will typically be cd0. Next you will
be asked which partition on the CD-ROM the distribution is
to be loaded from. This is normally partition
<quote>a</quote>.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Next you will have to identify the filesystem type
that has been used to create the distribution on the CD-ROM,
this can be either FFS or ISO CD9660. The OpenBSD CD
distribution uses the CD9660 format.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>You will also have to provide the relative path to the
directory on the CD which holds the distribution, for the
i386 this is 3.2/i386.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>When all the selected distribution sets have been
extracted, you will be allowed to select which time zone
your system will be using, all the device nodes needed by
the installed system will be created for you, and the
filesystems will be unmounted. For this to work properly, it
is expected that you have installed at least the base32,
etc32, and bsd distribution sets. </para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>A message will appear on your screen telling you that
OpenBSD 3.2 operating system has been successfully installed
on your computer. Type in halt to halt the system and
reboot.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>When I reboot for the first time, I get the following
prompt on the screen: F1 DOS, F2 BSD each in one line. I
press the F1 functional key to boot into Windows 98 (SE) and
check whether everything is working or not. As it so
happens, it does! I reboot and this time, I press F2, which
boots me into OpenBSD 3.2. </para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Depending on the configuration of your computer, you
will receive bootup messages on your screen when you boot
into OpenBSD for the first time. Though the messages scroll
off the screen too fast for you to read anything productive,
you can always read it later by using the
<screen>/sbin/dmesg | more</screen> command. Finally, you
will arrive at the login prompt. Login using the
username/password you set during installation. Check that
everything is in place and try exploring the new
system.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>We still have Linux to install and configure. So, we
proceed to the next chapter, Chapter 6: Installing Red Hat
Linux 8.0 (Psyche).</para>
</listitem>
</orderedlist>
</section>
</chapter>
<chapter>
<title>Installing NetBSD 1.6.1</title>
<para>This Chapter focuses on installing NetBSD 1.6.1 and
multi-booting the system so that it can coexist successfully with
the already existing Windows operating system. Like the Windows,
FreeBSD and OpenBSD installations, it too focuses on a CD-ROM
based installation. Experts may proceed as usual without help. As
for the newbies out there, make sure you check out the
documentation available on the NetBSD Homepage at <ulink
url="http://www.netbsd.org"/>. These and other documentation
available on the NetBSD 1.6.1 CD-ROM provide exhaustive and
extensive coverage of all aspects related to NetBSD. Make sure you
grab as much information as you can before proceeding with this
guide.</para>
<warning>
<para>Note: I hereby assume the reader executing this Chapter
possesses a sound understanding and knowledge of BSD-style hard
disk partitioning and labeling schemes, device naming
conventions and so on before proceeding any further. If you have
no idea at all of what I am talking about, or in general of
NetBSD, I strongly suggest you to go back to the Chapter
covering FreeBSD.</para>
</warning>
<para>A few significant points to remember: NetBSD labels hard
disks similar to OpenBSD with /dev/wd0 for the first hard disk,
/dev/wd1 for the second hard disk and so on. NetBSD disklabel
allows up to 16 partitions. It can detect and represent all
primary partitions that exist on the hard disk. NetBSD disklabel,
though, sees all partitions within an extended partition but it
does not list the extended partition container. Readers must note
that NetBSD reserves the c: partition which represents the entire
hard disk, i: through p: are reserved for partitions belonging to
other operating systems other than NetBSD (for example Windows or
Linux partitions), with a:, b: and d: - h: available for NetBSD
specific partitions.</para>
<section>
<title>Summary of Installation Steps</title>
<para>For complete step-by-step coverage of NetBSD installation,
consult the documentation available on the NetBSD Project web
site. As in the previous Chapter, here also, I will mention only
the significant steps for the installation. Use these steps to
install NetBSD on your computer and configure it for
multi-booting:
<orderedlist>
<listitem>
<para>We have a computer running a Microsoft Windows
operating system. On my PC, it is Windows 98 (SE). I put a
bootable NetBSD 1.6.1 CD-ROM in the CD-ROM drive and
reboot the system.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>The computer boots, reads the CD-ROM, displays the
usual hardware probing messages on the screen and presents
you with an installation program. Readers must note: there
are several ways to install NetBSD onto a disk. The
easiest way, should your computer support it, is to boot
off the CD-ROM. Otherwise, you can boot from a 3.5 inch
1.44MB floppy disk. You should now be ready to install
NetBSD. </para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>3. The blue-colored NetBSD 1.6.1 Installation Tool is
called sysinst. At the very beginning, you receive a
<screen>Welcome to sysinst</screen>. Select the option
<screen>Install NetBSD to hard disk</screen> and press
enter.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>4. This presents you a confirmation screen, select Yes
and press enter.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>5. Your hard disk is detected and NetBSD labels it
correspondingly. On my PC, my first IDE HDD gets labeled as
wd0. Hit enter to continue.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>6. Next appears the Disk Geometry screen where your
hard disk geometry is matched with the BIOS geometry. If
sysinst was unable to uniquely match the disk you chose with
a disk known to the BIOS, you have to set the disk geometry
by hand. In my case, the disk matches the following BIOS
disk:</para>
<screen>
BIOS# cylinders heads sectors
0 1023 255 63
</screen>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>7. Thus I select, <screen>This is the correct
geometry</screen> and press enter. Next comes the screen
where you have to make the choice that you would like to
multi-boot your system and not (dangerously) dedicate your
system. Select <screen>Use only part of the disk</screen>
instead of <screen>Use the entire disk</screen> and press
enter.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>8. Proceed to choose the <quote>size unit to
use</quote>. I chose <quote>Megabytes</quote> as my size
specifier.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>9. Proceed with the installation as usual until you
reach the NetBSD fdisk where you can view the DOS
Partition table on your computer. I have a computer system
which was running Windows 98 (SE), NetBSD 1.6 and FreeBSD
5.1-RELEASE. The DOS partition table was as follows:
<screen>
Total disksize 19541 MB.
Start(MB) Size(MB) End(MB) Kind
0: 0 9774 9774 Windows FAT32, LBA
1: 9773 3001 12775 NetBSD
2: 12774 6766 19540 old NetBSD/FreeBSD/386BSD
3: unused
</screen></para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>10. Edit partitions 1 and 2 by making
<quote>Kind</quote> as <quote>unused</quote>, then selecting
<quote>Partition OK</quote> and press enter.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Select unused partition 1, then <quote>Kind</quote>,
then <quote>NetBSD</quote> and finally <quote>Start and
size</quote>. Mention the <quote>Start:</quote> value as
<quote>-0</quote> and <quote>size:</quote> to the value you
would like to set. I chose about 4000 MB. Make sure you
select <quote>Set active</quote> and press enter and
<quote>Partition OK</quote> finally.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>The new DOS Partition table on my PC looks like this:
<screen>
Total disksize 19541 MB.
Start(MB) Size(MB) End(MB) Kind
0: 0 9774 9774 Windows FAT32, LBA
1: 9773 4001 13774 NetBSD
2: unused
3: unused
</screen></para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para> Select <quote>Exit</quote> and press enter.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>The next screen tells you that you have more than one
operating system installed on your computer. When asked to
install a bootselector, answer <quote>Yes</quote>.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>This brings you to the <quote>Bootselection menu
items</quote> screen. Here, you can change the simple menu
entries for matching partition entries that are displayed
when the system boots. Also, you can specify the timeout (in
seconds) and the default action to be taken (if no selection
is made in the bootmenu). By default, the Boot menu timeout
is set to 10 seconds, which I change to 100 seconds. The
default boot menu action is set to <quote>Boot off partition
0</quote>.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>16. Edit menu entries 0 and 1, to label
<quote>Windows</quote> and <quote>NetBSD</quote>
respectively, then exit.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>17. Next appears the NetBSD Disklabel screen. Here you
are expected to set up your NetBSD disklabel. Four options
are mentioned: Standard, Standard with X, Custom and Use
existing.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>18. Choose the installation type: <quote>Standard with
X</quote> which requires about 450.00 MB HDD space.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>19. The next screen displays the BSD-disklabel
partitions. Since for most people in most situations this
suits the best, keep the changes as it is and select
<quote>Partitions are OK</quote> and press enter</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>20. A name is prompted for your NetBSD disk, I entered
<quote>ghosh</quote> and continue.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>21. /sbin/newfs runs to create the new
filesystems.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>22. You are prompted to install either a normal set of
bootblocks or serial bootblocks. Since we are using the BIOS
console device as the console, you must select <quote>Use
normal bootblocks</quote> and press enter.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>23. This completes the first part of the NetBSD
installation procedure. Sysinst has written a disklabel to
the target disk, and newfs'ed and fsck'ed the new partition
on the disk. The next step is to fetch and unpack the
distribution filesystems.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>24. I chose <quote>Custom Installation</quote> of
NetBSD distribution sets.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>25. In the next screen, choose all that you would like
to install and press <quote>Exit</quote>.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>26. Enter the type of installation media. Select
<quote>cdrom</quote> and device:cd0 and
directory:/i386/binary/sets and continue.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>27. The following .tgz files are untarred and
installed onto your hard disk: base.tgz, etc.tgz, comp.tgz,
games.tgz, man.tgz, misc.tgz, text.tgz, xbase.tgz,
xfont.tgz, xserver.tgz, xcomp.tgz and xcontrib.tgz.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>28. A message appears as <quote>All selected
distribution sets unpacked successfully</quote>. Next,
device files are made automatically, and you are prompted
for a few necessary post-installation configuration
steps.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>29. You need to set timezone, I chose
<quote>Europe/Moscow</quote>.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>30. Next, choose the password cipher. The options
available are: DES or MD5. I prefer MD5 to DES.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>31. I set the root password and then finally a message
appears on your screen telling you that NetBSD 1.6.1
operating system has been successfully installed on your
computer. Reboot your computer to boot from hard
disk.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>32. When I reboot for the first time, I get the
following prompt on the screen: F1 Windows, F2 NetBSD each
in one line. I press the F1 functional key to boot into
Windows 98 (SE) and check whether everything is working or
not. As it so happens, it does! Then I reboot and this time,
I press F2, which boots me into NetBSD 1.6.1. </para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>33. Depending on the configuration of your computer,
you will receive bootup messages on your screen when you
boot into NetBSD for the first time. Though the messages
scroll off the screen too fast for you to read anything
productive, you can always read them later by using the
<quote>/sbin/dmesg | more</quote> command. Finally, you will
arrive at the login prompt. Login using the
username/password you set during installation. Check that
everything is in place and try exploring the new
system. </para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>34. We still have Linux to install and configure. So,
we proceed to the next chapter, Chapter 6: Installing Red
Hat Linux 8.0 (Psyche).</para>
</listitem>
</orderedlist></para>
</section>
</chapter>
<chapter>
<title>Installing Red Hat Linux 8.0 (Psyche)</title>
<para>This Chapter focuses on installing Red Hat Linux 8.0 and
configuring it for booting with the already existing operating
systems on the computer. It focuses on a CD-ROM based
installation, so it is ideal for users (both new and old) who
want a quick and simple installation solution. If you are an
experienced Linux user, just shoot ahead of this Chapter and
install Red Hat Linux on your system. You may skip all the
contents of this Chapter if you have enough practical
experience. However, if you are a complete Linux newbie, or you
just decided to taste Linux for fun, you may want to gather more
information on how to install Linux with another already
existing operating system on the computer. Red Hat Linux offers
excellent Installation tools while installing but while
multi-booting your computer with 3 operating systems, it is
always advisable to use the <quote>Custom</quote> installation
which makes the story for the Linux newbies a little
difficult. Using Linux fdisk or Disk Druid is easy and if you
are using the Official boxed-set version from Red Hat, make sure
you use the Official Red Hat Linux x86 Installation Guide
enclosed with the package. Otherwise, you can always refer to
the Distribution specific Installation Manuals at the Official
Red Hat website. Red Hat's official website is located at <ulink
url="http://www.redhat.com"/>. Make sure you refer to the Red Hat
Frequently Asked Questions for answers to questions and problems
that may occur before, during or after the installation. You
will find the FAQ online at: <ulink
url="http://www.redhat.com/support/resources/faqs/rhl_general_faq/s1-contact.html"/>.</para>
<para>Red Hat Linux has some exciting and important installation
features. Large improvements were made in the install process
when version 6 arrived. Now, in the latest versions 8.0 (Psyche)
and 9, Red Hat Linux's installation is very smooth with Anaconda
doing most of the dirty jobs for you. Some of the important
installation features include <quote>Kudzu</quote> and the
<quote>Kernel 2.4</quote>.</para>
<section>
<title>Disk Drive and Partition Naming In Linux</title>
<para>Before shooting ahead with the installation of Red Hat
Linux, let us take a brief tour of the disk drive and
partition naming conventions in Linux. Worthwhile mentioning,
I discussed in detail the drive and partition naming
convention in FreeBSD earlier when I talked about installing
FreeBSD.</para>
<para>Linux uses a special way of naming hard drives and the
partitions that you make within them. In UNIX (always
remember, the Linux kernel is a re-implementation of UNIX)
terminology, UNIX systems (and more specifically the Kernel)
cannot read and understand <quote>devices</quote>. To the UNIX
kernel, everything is abstracted as a <quote>file containing
ASCII characters</quote>. That means a sentence like <quote>I
have a 30.0 GB C: drive</quote> in Linux does not make any
sense at all. So, let us see how our hard drives and
partitions are named under Linux.</para>
<para>* First IDE hard disk (Primary Master) - /dev/hda</para>
<para>* Second IDE hard disk (Primary Slave) - /dev/hdb</para>
<para>* Third IDE hard disk (Secondary Master) - /dev/hdc</para>
<para>* Fourth IDE hard disk (Secondary Slave) - /dev/hdd</para>
<para>where, /dev is the directory under the root
(<quote>/</quote>) directory in Linux which contains all the
device files associated with devices.</para>
<para>What about SCSI drives? Well, Linux labels that too!</para>
<para>* First SCSI hard disk (Primary Master) - /dev/sda</para>
<para>* Second SCSI hard disk (Primary Slave) - /dev/sdb</para>
<para>* Third SCSI hard disk (Secondary Master) - /dev/sdc</para>
<para>* Fourth SCSI hard disk (Secondary Slave) - /dev/sdd</para>
<para>where, /dev is the directory under the root
(<quote>/</quote>) directory in Linux which contains all the
device files associated with devices.</para>
<para>Now, let us talk about the partitioning scheme under
Linux. In Linux, we first consider a particular hard disk,
whether an IDE or a SCSI hard disk. Then, we consider
partitions on the disk. For example, the partitions on an IDE
drive are named in the following way (/dev/hda is used as an
example): </para>
<para>* First primary partition - /dev/hda1</para>
<para>* Second primary partition - /dev/hda2</para>
<para>* Third primary partition - /dev/hda3</para>
<para>* Fourth primary partition - /dev/hda4</para>
<para>What if we have an <quote>extended partition</quote>
under Linux which contains a few logical disk drives in it?
Well, the Linux kernel maps those partitions to the
corresponding <quote>block</quote> device files stored in the
/dev directory. Let us consider that the /dev/hda in our above
example, contains 1 primary partition and 1 extended
partition, which in turn has 5 logical disk drives in it. In
this case, what would the partition table look like and mean?
Let us see how Linux labels this scheme. Linux would represent
this as:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>/dev/hda</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>/dev/hda1</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>/dev/hda2</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>/dev/hda5</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>/dev/hda6</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>/dev/hda7</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>/dev/hda8</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>/dev/hda9</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
where, /dev/hda1 is the only primary partition and /dev/hda2 is
the only extended partition on the hard disk under
scrutiny. Note that Linux labels primary partitions from
/dev/hda1 to /dev/hda4, with logical disk drives extending from
5 to 16. Thus, in the above example, hda5 to hda9 are the 5
logical disk drives existing on the extended partition. In fact,
recently on one of my friends' computers, I partitioned the hard
disk and installed Microsoft Windows Millennium (ME), Microsoft
Windows XP Professional and Red Hat Linux 8.0 (Psyche). Linux
fdisk, when executed, shows exactly the same partition table as
given above. He uses one IDE hard disk and has 1 primary
partition labeled as C: drive under Windows which contains WinXP
(FAT32 filesystem), with hda5 and hda6 labeled as D: and E:
drives under Windows (where hda5 actually contains Windows ME
edition (FAT32 filesystem)) with hda7, hda8 and hda9 used for
Linux. hda7 is the /boot partition, hda8 is the
<quote>root</quote> <quote>/</quote> filesystem and hda9 is the
<quote>swap</quote> filesystem. This was a simple example of how
the partition table looks like in Linux. If you have quite a few
partitions and plan to install a few operating systems, be ready
to see a more complex partition table when you execute a command
like <quote>/sbin/fdisk /dev/hda</quote> (with /dev/hda being
the Primary Master on your computer).</para>
<para>For example, when I executed the Linux fdisk on my
friend's computer, it gave an output similar to this:
<screen>
Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 5005 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdc1 * 1 1275 10241406 c Win95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hdc2 1276 5005 29961225 f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hdc5 1276 2550 10241406 b Win95 FAT32
/dev/hdc6 2551 3825 10241406 b Win95 FAT32
/dev/hdc7 3826 3831 48163+ 83 Linux
/dev/hdc8 3832 4213 3068383+ 83 Linux
/dev/hdc9 4214 4246 265041 82 Linux swap
</screen></para>
</section>
<section>
<title>Filesystems in Linux</title>
<para>After our brief discussion on the drive and partition
labeling schemes in Linux, let us talk a bit about the Linux
filesystem.</para>
<para>Microsoft Windows operating systems use either FAT16,
FAT32, NTFS 4.0 or the most recently released NTFS 5.0
filesystems.</para>
<para>The GNU/Linux Kernel originally used the <quote>First
Extended filesystem</quote>, commonly denoted as ext or
extfs. It has now been superceded by ext2 and ext3
filesystems. Kernel 2.4, currently uses Linux's native
<quote>Third Extended filesystem,</quote> commonly denoted as
<quote>ext3</quote> or <quote>ext3fs</quote>. Though Kernels
2.2.x and 2.4.x support ext2fs and ext3fs, the latest stable
release, ie. Kernel 2.4.20, uses the <quote>ext3fs</quote> as
the default filesystem. ext3fs is an extension to ext2fs
functionality as is NTFS 5.0 to NTFS 4.0 in Windows. The
significant difference between the <quote>ext2fs</quote> and
<quote>ext3fs</quote> filesystems is that ext3fs is a
<quote>journaling filesystem</quote> while ext2fs is not. We
will discuss these filesystems in detail later when we compare
them with the Unix Filesystem (UFS) which is the native
filesystem under FreeBSD.</para>
<para>The <quote>Linux Programmer's Manual</quote> has a
section called <quote>FILESYSTEMS(5)</quote>. It explains
which filesystem types Linux supports. One can access all the
details by simply typing in <quote>man fs</quote> at the
command prompt on a Linux workstation. It includes the
following filesystems: minix, ext, ext2, ext3, xia, msdos,
umsdos, vfat, proc, nfs, iso9660, hpfs, sysv, smb,
ncpfs. When, as is customary, the filesystem is mounted on
/proc, and you can find in the file /proc/filesystems which
filesystems your kernel currently supports. If you need a
currently unsupported one, either you can insert the
corresponding module or just recompile the kernel to create a
new one. Then, just install the new custom kernel to access
the filesystem of your choice. In order to use a filesystem,
you generally have to mount it.</para>
<para>Below is a short description of a few of the available
filesystems. minix is the filesystem used in the Minix
operating system, the first to run under Linux. It has a
number of shortcomings: a 64MB partition size limit, short
filenames, a single time stamp, etc. It remains useful for
floppies and RAM disks. The ext is an elaborate extension of
the minix filesystem. It has been completely superseded by the
second version of the extended filesystem (ext2) and has been
removed from the kernel (in 2.1.21). The ext2fs is the high
performance disk filesystem used by Linux for fixed disks as
well as removable media. The second extended filesystem was
designed as an extension of the extended file system
(ext). ext2 offers the best performance (in terms of speed and
CPU usage) of the filesystems supported under Linux. The ext3
is a journaling version of the ext2 filesystem. It is easy to
switch back and forth between ext2 and ext3. The xia was
designed and implemented to be a stable, safe filesystem by
extending the Minix filesystem code. It provides the basic
most requested features without undue complexity. The xia
filesystem is no longer actively developed or maintained. It
was removed from the kernel in 2.1.21. msdos is the filesystem
used by DOS, Windows and some OS/2 computers. msdos filenames
can be no longer than 8 characters, followed by a period and
an optional 3 character extension. umsdos is an extended DOS
filesystem used by Linux. It adds capability for long
filenames, UID/GID, POSIX permissions, and special files
(devices, named pipes, etc.) under the DOS filesystem,
without sacrificing compatibility with DOS.</para>
<para>vfat is an extended DOS filesystem used by Microsoft
Windows 95 and Windows NT. VFAT adds the capability to use
long filenames under the MSDOS filesystem. The proc filesystem
is not a general filesystem. It is a
<quote>pseudo-filesystem</quote> which is used as an interface
to kernel data structures rather than reading and interpreting
/dev/kmem. In particular, its files do not take disk
space. iso9660 is a CD-ROM filesystem type conforming to the
ISO 9660 standard. Linux supports High Sierra, the precursor
to the ISO 9660 standard for CD-ROM filesystems. It is
automatically recognized within the iso9660 filesystem support
under Linux. Linux also supports the System Use Sharing
Protocol records specified by the Rock Ridge Interchange
Protocol. They are used to further describe the files in the
iso9660 filesystem to a UNIX host, and provide information
such as long filenames, UID/GID, POSIX permissions, and
devices. It is automatically recognized within the iso9660
filesystem support under Linux. The hpf is the High
Performance Filesystem, used in OS/2. This filesystem is
read-only under Linux due to the lack of available
documentation. sysv is an implementation of the System
V/Coherent filesystem for Linux. It implements all of Xenix
FS, System V/386 FS, and Coherent FS. nfs is the network
filesystem used to access disks located on remote
computers. smb is a network filesystem that supports the
Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, used by Windows for
Workgroups, Windows NT, and Lan Manager. To use smbfs, you
need a special mount program, which can be found in the ksmbfs
package. The ncpfs is a Network filesystem that supports the
NCP protocol, used by Novell NetWare.</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>Summary of Installation Steps</title>
<para>Now that we have covered quite a lot on partitioning
schemes and filesystems under Linux, it is time to move on to
the actual Linux installation. For a complete step by step
coverage of Red Hat Linux installation, consult the
distribution specific installation guides on Red Hat's
official website. All types of installations with appropriate
screenshots (including additional tips and tricks) are
provided. Here, I will only mention the significant steps for
the installation. Use these steps to install Red Hat Linux on
your computer:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>1. Place your Red Hat Linux 8.0 bootable CD-ROM on
your CD-ROM drive and then restart the computer. I assume
here that the reader has a Red Hat Linux 8.0 distribution
release CD. If you have older distributions, that is no
problem at all. You can always use them. The basic
installation steps are the same for all the distribution
releases. Make sure that your computer is bootable from
the CD-ROM in the BIOS setup. If you cannot boot from the
CD-ROM drive, alternative boot methods are also
available. Refer to the Red Hat Installation Guides for
more information on making <quote>local</quote>,
<quote>network</quote> and <quote>PCMCIA</quote> boot
disks.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>2. After a short delay, the Red Hat Linux 8.0 screen
containing the boot: prompt should appear. The screen
contains information on a variety of boot options. Either
press <quote>Enter</quote> for entering a GUI-based
installation setup or type <quote>linux text</quote> at
the boot: prompt for entering a ncurses based text based
installation type. I prefer text based
installations. Watch the boot messages to see whether the
Linux kernel detects your hardware. If it does not
properly detect your hardware, you may need to restart the
installation in expert mode. Enter the
<quote>expert</quote> mode using the following boot
command: boot: linux expert and press enter.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>3. Proceed as usual configuring language, keyboard
and the mouse. Then appears the <quote>Welcome to Red Hat
Linux</quote> screen. Proceed forward until you reach the
<quote>Install</quote> or <quote>Upgrade</quote>
screen. Since we are installing Linux for the very first
time, we select <quote>Install</quote>. The question that
arises here is which installation type to consider and
why? Red Hat Linux 8.0 provides 4 options: Workstation,
Server, Laptop and Custom. We do not consider the
Workstation, Server and Laptop setups owing to obvious
reasons, because they do not provide the user with custom
features and functionality. Thus, we proceed with the
<quote>Custom</quote> installation.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>4. Proceed as usual and at the partitioning screen,
you will be asked to choose between <quote>fdisk</quote>
and <quote>disk druid</quote>. For Linux experts, fdisk is
the obvious tool of choice. Disk druid is Red Hat's
graphical tool for viewing, editing, adding and deleting
partitions on hard disk drives. Choose as you wish. I
chose <quote>disk druid</quote> for this guide. At the
next screen, you will be shown the entire hard disk
geometry. Make an effort to understand what is being shown
on the screen and try to analyze it with the information
of this chapter above where I have discussed partitioning
in detail. Try mapping the partitions shown to Windows
terminology.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>5. On my system, Disk Druid represents a /dev/hda as
/dev/hda1, /dev/hda2 and a /dev/hda3 partitions
initially. /dev/hda1 is the FAT32 partition which (on my
computer) contains Microsoft Windows 98 (SE), /dev/hda2 is
the FreeBSD (or OpenBSD or NetBSD) slice and /dev/hda3 is
the Linux partition. Readers must note: the /dev/hda3
partition is the slice I created in FreeBSD disk label
editor by assigning 131 to the underlying
filesystem.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>6. I keep /dev/hda1 and /dev/hda2 as it is, and delete
/dev/hda3. As a result, I get some free space. Then I add
a /boot of about 100MB as ext2fs, then a swap of about
128MB and finally a root (<quote>/</quote>) by assigning
to it the remaining space on the drive. That is all that
needs to be done. Thus, we have something like this:
<screen>
Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 2491 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 1 125 1004031 b Win95 FAT32
/dev/hda2 * 126 1399 10233405 a5 FreeBSD
/dev/hda3 1400 1412 104422+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda4 1413 2491 8667067+ f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5 1413 1428 128488+ 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda6 1429 2491 8538516 83 Linux
</screen>
As shown above, /dev/hda3 is mounted as /boot, /dev/hda5
is the Linux swap filesystem and /dev/hda6 is mounted as
/.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>7. Proceed with the installation until you reach the
screen prompting you to choose the boot loader. This is a
very important step in this installation, and in fact the
most important. A boot loader is literally the first
software program that runs when you switch on your
computer. The Master Boot Record (MBR) is a special area on
your hard drive that is automatically loaded by your
computer's BIOS. It is the earliest point at which the boot
loader (whether LILO or GRUB) can take control of the entire
boot process. GRUB, when run, reads instructions passed to
it from its own configuration file (for example, the
configuration file for the Linux Loader (LILO) is
/etc/lilo.conf, and for GRUB /boot/grub/grub.conf), passes
significant instructions to the BIOS, and then loads the
appropriate operating system boot files into the computer's
memory. This, in turn enables the correct filesystems to be
mounted at the correct mount points, which in turn then
prepares the computer for later use. Thus, the boot loader
is vital for proper booting of the operating system.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>8. You can use either of the 2 available boot loaders
in Linux. Linux Loader (LILO) or the GNU Grand Unified Boot
loader (GRUB). The reader is free to choose whichever he/she
likes. I prefer GNU GRUB for the reasons outlined in the
FAQ. Readers must note that I am omitting the design,
implementation and configuration details of GRUB in this
guide as they exist beyond the scope of this guide. A lot of
information is available out there on the Internet on these
and other <quote>free</quote> as well as
<quote>proprietary</quote> boot loaders. Check them out if
it is required.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>GRUB is a very powerful x86-based boot loader which
can be used to boot a number of operating systems. GRUB
supports directly all GNU/Linux distributions, FreeBSD,
NetBSD, OpenBSD, Sun Solaris and others. It supports booting
other proprietary operating systems as well using the
<quote>chain loading</quote> technology. Whether you have
Microsoft Windows 95/98 (SE)/Millennium Edition/NT/2K/XP as
the initially installed operating system on your computer
and then FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE or OpenBSD 3.2-RELEASE or
NetBSD 1.6.1, simply lay back and relax because GRUB is
there with all its power and dynamic functionality to take
care of things. If you have Microsoft Windows 95/98
(SE)/Millennium Edition which do not have boot loaders by
default (unlike Microsoft Windows NT/2K/XP), then <quote>Add
GRUB to the MBR</quote>.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>9. After startup, you will receive the GRUB screen
prompting you to select the OS. If you have Microsoft
Windows NT/2K/XP, which uses by default the <quote>NT Boot
loader</quote> for booting the operating system software,
then go ahead and <quote>Add GRUB to the MBR</quote>. Do not
panic! It would cause no problems at all. In this case,
after successful startup, you will receive the GRUB screen
prompting you to select the OS. You will have 2 entries in
the list, for example, I have <quote>Windows</quote> and
<quote>Linux</quote>. Selecting <quote>Linux</quote> and
pressing enter loads the Red Hat Linux boot files to the
computer's memory and the computer bootstraps itself into
Linux. Whereas, on the other hand, selecting
<quote>Windows</quote> and pressing enter utilizes the
<quote>chain loading</quote> mechanism, and invokes the
<quote>FreeBSD boot loader</quote>. The FreeBSD boot loader
then loads Microsoft Windows 98 (SE) into the computer's
memory.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>10. That explains pretty much everything. After adding
GRUB to your Master Boot Record (MBR), proceed with the
installation as usual. The reader must note that he/she may
install GRUB in one of two places, either the MBR or in the
boot sector of the active partition. If you plan to use
another boot loader on your system (for example, OS/2's Boot
Manager, or Windows NT's NT Boot loader, or any commercial
boot loaders like System Commander and Partition Magic), add
GRUB to the <quote>first sector of your root
partition</quote> and then configure the other boot loader
to start GRUB (which will then boot Red Hat Linux). </para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>11. Once you have created the partitions and installed
GRUB in the MBR, all that is left is to proceed with the
installation as usual, selecting packages for installation
as you wish (you can install them later as well using the
RPM command from the command line) and so on. Finally,
finish with the Red Hat Linux installation. When prompted to
create a <quote>bootdisk</quote>, make sure you create
one. It comes handy during system crashes. You can always
create a <quote>setup bootdisk</quote> later using the
/sbin/mkbootdisk command from the command line interface
(CLI) mode.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>12. Depending on the number of packages that you had
chosen earlier as well as your computer's resources, it will
take some time for the installation to complete. Sit back
and relax while the packages are being installed. Or run to
your nearby Burger King to grab a burger or two! For the
experts out there, after reading through all this, if you do
feel that something was wrongly stated/explained, make sure
you drop me a line or two. For the absolute newbies, I have
a simple advice: Practice, practice and practice till you
get it right. There is no shortcut to success.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>13. After all packages have been successfully
installed and configured, and your Red Hat Linux
Installation is complete, the Linux CD-ROM would be ejected
from the CD-ROM drive, and the computer would automatically
reboot. As mentioned above, after successful startup, you
will receive the GRUB screen prompting you to select the
operating system for booting. Depending on your
configuration during the installation, you will have 2
entries in the list, for example, I have
<quote>Windows</quote> and <quote>Linux</quote>. Check
whether both operating systems are working properly or not
by booting into each of them one after another.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>14. If everything works fine, well, it is time for
rejoicing. If in case, something goes wrong somewhere, then
depending on what exactly went wrong and where, many things
could be done. The reader should note everything in case
something goes wrong somewhere. Write down on paper a short
report if required. This helps a lot in later diagnosis. Now
it is time for configuring FreeBSD within the Red Hat Linux
environment which would enable GRUB to boot FreeBSD too via
the <quote>chain loading</quote> mechanism.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>15. Log into Red Hat Linux, and open the
/boot/grub/grub.conf file using the vi editor. Be very
careful while editing it. Since GRUB reads the
/boot/grub/grub.conf file while bootstrapping the computer,
typos inside the /boot/grub/grub.conf file can result in
disasters. Readers must note: GRUB does not have any utility
like LILO uses the /sbin/lilo -v -v command from the command
prompt for checking the /etc/lilo.conf, so be extra careful
while using GRUB to boot operating systems. Now add an entry
for FreeBSD before the <quote>Windows</quote> entry. Your
/boot/grub/grub.conf file after editing should resemble
this:
<screen>
default=0
timeout=150
splashimage=(hd0,2)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Linux (2.4.18-3)
root (hd0,2)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.18-3 ro root=/dev/hda6
title FreeBSD
root (hd0,a)
kernel /boot/loader ro root=/dev/hda2
title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
</screen></para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>As shown, the first block is for booting Linux, the
second for FreeBSD and the last one is for booting Windows
98 (SE). Readers must note the entry following the word
<quote>root</quote> in the 2nd line of the first and second
blocks. It defines the exact location on the computer's hard
disk where the boot files required for booting the operating
systems are located. On the Linux system, we can see that
(hd0,2) refers to the 3rd partition which is /dev/hda3. As
we already know, /dev/hda3 refers to the /boot partition
which contains the boot files. Similarly, on the FreeBSD
system, we can see that (hd0,a) refers to the /dev/ad0s2a
which refers to the root <quote>/</quote> filesystem and
which on the Linux system is mapped into /dev/hda2. The
rootnoverify mentioned for the Windows block tells the Linux
Kernel not to mount the /dev/hda1 partition since it is not
a Linux filesystem.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>17. Now when you reboot, you have a multi-boot system
enabling you to boot into any one of three operating
systems: Windows (98 (SE) on my computer), FreeBSD
5.1-RELEASE or OpenBSD 3.2-RELEASE or NetBSD 1.6.1, and Red
Hat Linux 8.0. That is all that needs to be done for
preparing a fully featured multi-boot system. If you would
like to know how to mount different filesystems on various
operating systems, proceed to the next chapter, Chapter 7:
Mounting Filesystems.</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist></para>
</section>
</chapter>
<chapter>
<title>Mounting Filesystems</title>
<para>Your computer now has a Microsoft Windows operating system,
either FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE or OpenBSD 3.2-RELEASE or NetBSD 1.6.1,
and Red Hat Linux 8.0 installed and co-existing peacefully
together. Is that all? Is that enough? I am sure, no! One of the
most important reasons that I have Microsoft Windows + FreeBSD
4.8-RELEASE + Red Hat Linux 8.0 all running on my computer (on
which I prepared a part of this guide you are currently reading)
is because I spend most of my time doing things on FreeBSD and on
Linux, but I need access to Windows owing to my projects at the
university. So I need to access data stored on my Windows
partition from time to time. Every time I am working on FreeBSD
and I need to access some data on my Windows partition, I cannot
afford to reboot my computer, log into Windows, copy the files on
a floppy and then logout, reboot once again, log into FreeBSD, and
then copy the contents of the floppy on to my /home/ghosh
directory on the FreeBSD system. A process like this is neither
cute nor logical. Thanks to the <quote>mount</quote> command on
UNIX systems, I do not have to go through this ugly process every
time I need access to some data on my Windows partition.</para>
<para>The mount command is one of the most important commands
available on a UNIX system. It allows the user of a UNIX system to
mount filesystems (which may or may not be physically located on
the same computer). That is, in other words, the mount command
allows you to mount both a local filesystem (one that is present
physically on the same computer) or a remote filesystem using the
appropriate path for accessing the remote node. The mount command
first appeared in Version 1 AT&amp;T UNIX. See the manual page for
the mount command on your FreeBSD or OpenBSD or Linux system for
an in depth analysis of all possible options that can be passed to
the mount command.</para>
<para>Though it is a very powerful command on a Unix or Unix-like
system, the mount command itself is very simple to use. The syntax
for the mount command is: mount -t filesystem device_name
mount_point. It means you are instructing the mount command to
consider the device file named device_name which is of the
filesystem type specified by the switch -t filesystem, and then
graft it onto the existing FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD/Linux system at
the directory named as the mount point. As cute as that!</para>
<section>
<title>Mounting Filesystems In FreeBSD</title>
<para>For mounting Linux Second Extended filesystem (ext2fs) on
a FreeBSD system, I have to build and install a custom FreeBSD
Kernel. Building and installing a custom kernel in FreeBSD is
easy. I log in as <quote>root</quote> and execute these steps to
build one:</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>I execute this from the command line:
<screen>cd /usr/src/sys/i386/conf</screen> If there is not a
/usr/src/sys directory on your system, the kernel source has
not been installed. The easiest way to do this is by running
/stand/sysinstall as root, choosing Configure, then
Distributions, then src, and then sys.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>2. I create a copy of the original Kernel
configuration file provided there as a sample by executing:
cp GENERIC GHOSH. Here, I have named the would-be kernel
GHOSH. Feel free to name it otherwise.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>3. I open the GHOSH text file using ee or vi
editor. Though the general format of the configuration file
is quite simple, full explanation of all the possible kernel
options is beyond the scope of this guide. Refer to the
FreeBSD Handbook for more details. Add the following line:
'options EXT2FS' which provides support for identifying
ext2fs Linux native filesystem. Tinker with the other
options if you feel like or simply leave them alone.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>4. Save it and exit. When done, I type the following
to compile and install the new kernel: /usr/sbin/config
GHOSH.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>5. Then execute:<screen>cd ../../compile/GHOSH</screen>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Execute:<screen>make depend</screen> followed by
<screen>make</screen> and finally finish off by executing
<screen>make install</screen></para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>7. The new kernel will be copied to the root directory
as /kernel and the old kernel will be moved to
/kernel.old. Reboot your system to use the new
kernel. </para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<para>Once done, I try mounting a Linux partition using the
command: mount -t ext2fs /dev/ad0s3 /mnt/linux. Assuming
/dev/ad0s3 is the FreeBSD slice representing a Linux filesystem
and /mnt/linux directory exists, the filesystem should mount at
the specified directory acting as the mount point.</para>
<para>For mounting MSDOS partitions as well as Windows formatted
FAT16 and/or FAT32 filesystems, I execute the following command:
mount -t msdos /dev/ad0s1 /mnt/windows where, /dev/ad0s1 is the
FreeBSD slice that represents the Windows 98(SE) partition on my
computer and /mnt/windows directory exists. For unmounting, I
execute: umount /mnt/windows simply (note: no "n" in
umount). For mounting MSDOS based floppies, I execute: mount -t
msdos /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy. And for unmounting, I execute:
umount /mnt/floppy. For people who have NTFS filesystem, they
can try mounting using the command: mount -t ntfs /dev/fd0
/mnt/floppy and unmount using umount /mnt/floppy. Readers must
note: there is limited writing support for NTFS
filesystems!</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>Mounting Filesystems In Linux</title>
<para>Mounting a FreeBSD filesystem, ie. UFS (Unix FileSystem)
under Linux requires building and installing a custom Linux
kernel. Building a Linux kernel is an easy job, and you may
refer to any documentation you have access to. Here, I am just
specifying the main steps. For building a custom Linux kernel, I
log in as root and execute the following steps:
<orderedlist>
<listitem>
<para>I execute: cd /usr/src/linux-2.4. If the
/usr/src/linux-2.4 directory does not exist on your system,
then the kernel-source package has not been installed. For
kernel compilation, you need to have kernel-source, make,
dev86, gcc and a few dependencies installed.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>I make a backup (copy) of the original Makefile by
executing: cp Makefile Makefile.bak. You can always refer to
the original Makefile by accessing it as
Makefile.bak.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>I open the Makefile using vi or any text
editor. You may change the EXTRAVERSION value to anything of
your choice. For example, on my system, the initial Linux
Kernel was 2.4.18-3. Since then I built numerous others as
2.4.18-3ghosh, 2.4.18-3smp, 2.4.18-3_dummy, 2.4.18-3bsd and
so on. Thus, the EXTRAVERSION code helps to distinguish
between a large number of available Linux Kernels on a
system.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>I save and exit the Makefile. Then, execute: make
mrproper. It cleans the compilation folders of any junk that
was created while compiling Linux kernels on the same system
earlier. Readers must note that all the commands executed
(including this one) should be executed from within the
/usr/src/linux-2.4 directory.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Execute make menuconfig. Readers may also use
xconfig if they have access to X11 or the X Window
System.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Once inside menuconfig, tinker with the options
available. Make sure you enter the <screen><quote>File
systems</quote></screen> section, then select the
<screen><quote>UFS file system support
(read-only)</quote></screen> and <screen><quote>UFS file
system write support (DANGEROUS)</quote></screen>
options. Thus, you should have something like this:
<screen>&lt;*&gt; UFS file system support
(read-only)</screen> and <screen>[*] UFS file system write
support (DANGEROUS)</screen> The config Kernel-level options
are as: <screen>CONFIG_UFS_FS</screen> and
<screen>CONFIG_UFS_FS_WRITE</screen> for the read-only and
write support respectively. Also, enter the <quote>Partition
types</quote> section and select the <screen>[*] BSD
disklabel</screen> (FreeBSD partition tables) option
i.e. the CONFIG_BSD_DISKLABEL option. This allows you to
access and read the FreeBSD disk labels in the FreeBSD
slices.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>With these three options enabled, I save the
configuration file and exit. Now execute: <screen>make dep
&amp;&amp; clean</screen></para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Execute make bzImage &amp;&amp; modules for
creating the zipped (compressed) Linux kernel image file and
the corresponding modules.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Execute make modules_install for installing the
newly created modules into their own corresponding
directories.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Copy the bzImage file to the /boot directory. If
required, you can also create an initial RAM-disk file image
using the mkinitrd command.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Open the /boot/grub/grub.conf file using the vi
editor and make a corresponding entry into it. Save and
exit. Reboot to check whether the new Kernel is properly
working or not.</para>
</listitem>
</orderedlist></para>
<para>Once the newly built custom Linux kernel is installed, you
can start using it to mount UFS filesystems. Use this command:
mount -t ufs /dev/hda2 /mnt/bsd, assuming /dev/hda2 is the
FreeBSD slice and /mnt/bsd exists. Unmount using the command:
umount /mnt/bsd.</para>
<para>For mounting Windows 95/98/ME FAT32 filesystems on Linux,
use the command: <screen>mount -t vfat /dev/hda1
/mnt/windows</screen> The /mnt/windows directory must exist on
the system.</para>
<para>Unmount by executing: <screen>umount
/mnt/windows</screen></para>
<para> For readers who are using the NTFS filesystem, there's
bad news! They have to include the NTFS filesystem support in
the configuration file and build a custom Linux kernel. Readers
must note: NTFS writing support is DANGEROUS and limited!</para>
</section>
</chapter>
<chapter>
<title>Troubleshooting</title>
<para>Though FreeBSD, OpenBSD and GNU/Linux operating systems are
very fine pieces of software, when dual or multi-booting PCs with
all (or combinations) of them, one can run into problems. It may
range from easy to detect and troubleshoot to really weird
ones. Troubleshooting, as known (and appreciated) by all UNIX
veterans is not an exact art. In this Chapter, I have listed some
problems that I have had (and continue to face) while dual and
multi-booting systems with varying operating systems and
hardware.</para>
<para>Readers must note that depending on the particular hardware
and distributions/releases used, they may experience slightly
different versions of the problems listed below. If you encounter
a new problem altogether or can contribute to this guide by
providing a better solution to one of the problems listed below,
make sure you drop me a line at:
subhasish_ghosh([A][T])linuxwaves[DOT]com.</para>
<para>My experience with multi-booting systems saw some weird
kinds of failure and often erratic behavior, but mostly from
Linux's fdisk and installation procedure. I often made notes of
them for diagnosing and troubleshooting later. As I can conclude,
amongst Linux distributions (which includes Red Hat, Slackware,
SuSE and Mandrake), OpenBSD and FreeBSD releases, FreeBSD's fdisk,
disklabel and overall installation procedure (/stand/sysinstall)
is the best of them all with no errors and abrupt
crashes. Initially, I thought that there must be some exact way of
installing all these operating systems or an exact order that
needs to be followed, but with passing years, I have learned the
truth. Assuming the hardware support is fine, installation CD-ROMs
okay, the erratic behavior of installation programs is due to
unerased data from previous installs. Before committing yourself
to creating a multi-booting system, make sure you start
installation on a freshly formatted hard disk. Read on to follow
the details of the procedure! Some of the common questions from
readers include: </para>
<qandaset>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>I created an extended partition with logical disk
drives or sub-partitions within it. When I installed
FreeBSD, it completely ignored the inner partitions within
that partition. Is that normal?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>Yes, it is normal. FreeBSD operating system software
can only detect and represent primary hard disk partitions
which it calls <quote>slices</quote>. An extended partition,
though it would be represented in FreeBSD fdisk, will not
represent the constituents of the container.</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>I installed FreeBSD and OpenBSD operating systems on
my PC successfully. When I tried installing Red Hat Linux,
Linux's fdisk displayed a <quote>too many partitions</quote> error
message. What does it mean? What can I do now? OR, I deleted
earlier installs of FreeBSD, OpenBSD and/or NetBSD operating
systems on my PC. When I tried installing Red Hat Linux,
Linux's fdisk displayed a <quote>too many partitions</quote>
error message. What am I supposed to do now?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>As you can see, this error message flagged by Red Hat
Linux fdisk tool can occur under a variety of conditions. I
encountered both of them while multi-booting PCs. When this
message is displayed, Linux's fdisk cannot make any changes
to the disk. Personally speaking, I strongly feel that this
message: <quote>too many partitions (16, maximum is
8)</quote> usually appears whenever you have unerased data
from previous installs of FreeBSD and/or OpenBSD and/or
NetBSD operating systems. This usually happens whenever
those data partitions where deleted, but the Master
Partition Table (MPT) contained in the Master Boot Record
(MBR) was not overwritten. Since this problem does not seem
to occur on clean hard disks, I conclude that it only
appears if you have old BSD disk label data on your hard
disk.</para>
<para>Once this error gets flagged, there is nothing much
you can do about it because whatever you do or whatever you
type in, nothing gets written to disk. If it happens that
you are performing a clean install and you get this error,
do a <quote>fdisk /mbr</quote> from the MS-DOS prompt, and
try installing Red Hat Linux once again. If it happens that
you have FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD installed on your system
already, then (sorry dude!) erase all earlier installs, wipe
the disk clean using the <quote>dd</quote> utility, or
whatever you have at your disposal, and start installing
everything all over again.</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>I was performing a new install of Red Hat Linux on my
PC which earlier had multiple installs of FreeBSD and/or
OpenBSD and/or NetBSD. I got a <quote>too many
partitions</quote> error from the Red Hat Linux fdisk. Can't
I perform a full install of Red Hat Linux on my hard disk to
remove the BSD disklabel data on my hard disk?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>No, you cannot. Once this error gets flagged, even
fdisk's 'o' option which normally clears all partition
information would not function. Even if you are successful
in doing a complete Linux only <quote>full disk</quote>
install using the Disk Druid disk-partitioning tool, this
would not erase the old and already exiting BSD disklabel
information. Sooner or later, you would land in
trouble.</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>I deleted all exiting partitions containing data on my
PC. But I want to be sure and wipe my disk clean with some
<quote>professional</quote> disk wiping utility. Which ones
can I use? How would I use them?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>Third-party partition managers and security software
which are specifically designed to erase disks can be used
for this purpose. Personally, I do not have any experience
using any third-party tools for wiping hard disks because I
prefer using the UNIX-based dd utility.</para>
<para>UNIX's dd can also be used to wipe the disk clean
absolutely. It writes zeroes to the disk surface which is
accessible from the FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Linux install
CDs. This is easily accessed from the OpenBSD install CD by
selecting the shell option rather than install or using
[Ctrl+C] to exit the OpenBSD install at any time. The
OpenBSD command to clear the first IDE hard disk is
<quote>#dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/wd0c</quote>. Red Hat
Linux's install CD's rescue mode is a single user
prompt. You do not have to mount the system as you are going
to erase it, not <quote>rescue</quote> it. Once you get the
<quote>#</quote> prompt <quote>dd if=/dev/zero
of=/dev/hda</quote> will clear the first disk. FreeBSD's
<quote>Fixit</quote> option from the main install menu
provides access to a single user prompt; the second of the
four install CDs is needed. The command <quote>dd
if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0</quote> appears to clear the first
disk. Once this done, you can rest assured that your hard
disk is wiped clean. </para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>I wiped my hard disk clean using UNIX dd utility. I
then performed a fresh install of Red Hat Linux on my PC
followed by a FreeBSD install. I installed the FreeBSD boot
manager into the MBR. Now my system does not boot! What
happened? Where did I go wrong? OR I wiped my hard disk
clean using UNIX dd utility. I then performed a fresh
install of Red Hat Linux on my PC followed by an OpenBSD
install. I installed the OpenBSD boot manager into the
MBR. Now my system does not boot! What happened? Where did I
go wrong?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>Nothing went wrong anywhere. But you made a small yet
fatal mistake at the very beginning. Always remember that
when you write zeroes to the hard disk surface using UNIX dd
utility, it includes the Master Boot Record (MBR) area
also. The MBR area which has address (0,0,1): Cylinder
address 0, Head address 0 and Sector address 1, that is, in
other words, the first 512 bytes of the hard disk which
contains the Master Partition Table (MPT) and the Initial
Program Load (IPL) code. When this area gets overwritten
with zeroes, different operating systems react and behave in
different ways. They react strangely because they expect the
standard IPL code, but instead they find none.</para>
<para>For example, Red Hat Linux fdisk reports the zeroed
partition table as invalid and can recreate an empty
one. The only IPL code it will install is LILO or GRUB and
not standard IPL code. OpenBSD simply shows an empty
partition table and it causes a lot of problems booting on
such hard disks. The only operating system that which is
reported to boot flawlessly from a completely zeroed disk
without error is FreeBSD. However, I did encounter a
situation in which (owing to strange reasons) FreeBSD
booting got locked and it simply would not boot.</para>
<para>To prevent all this from happening, just boot from a
Windows 9x or DOS v6 boot disk with FDISK.EXE on it. Once
the system is booted to an MS-DOS prompt, enter the
following: <quote>A:\>fdisk /mbr</quote>. It reinitializes
the MBR to its normal state and rewrites the MPT and creates
the standard IPL. Continue installing the operating systems
as usual.</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>I installed Red Hat Linux on my PC, but while
installing LILO to the Master Boot Record (MBR), I got an
error that said the installation program could not write
this info to the MBR. What has happened?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>You have either locked the MBR of your hard disk on
your PC or a virus-scan software is enabled which prevents
writing to the MBR. You have to access your computer
system's BIOS and verify that the MBR is not write
protected. Depending on the system, you may already have
another boot loader in the MBR that conflicts with LILO. Try
performing a <quote>fdisk /mbr</quote> from the MS-DOS
command prompt and installing LILO.</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>I was installing OpenBSD 3.2 on my PC the other
day. After creating partitions in OpenBSD fdisk, when I
saved the changes and exited from fdisk using the option
<quote>quit</quote>, it flagged some warning as: <quote>wd0:
no disk label</quote> in bright white on blue. What does
that mean? Did I do something wrong?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>Absolutely no. You did nothing wrong. When you exit
the OpenBSD fdisk (saving the changes using the option
<quote>quit</quote>), and the OpenBSD slice is not at the
same offset as a previously installed OpenBSD system, fdisk
displays <quote>wd0: no disk label</quote> message. Though
it looks like a warning message or an apparent error, rather
it is an important message flagged by OpenBSD installation
procedure which assures you that though the data and OpenBSD
specific partitions have been created, the OpenBSD disklabel
has yet to be setup. The disklabel defines the layout of the
OpenBSD file systems on the OpenBSD partitions on the hard
disk.</para>
<para>In dual and multi-booting systems, this message is
almost a prerequisite for a correct OpenBSD installation. If
it so happens that after saving changes to OpenBSD fdisk,
you were not flagged this message, it means that OpenBSD
disklabel is reading and using information from a previous
install. This is a dangerous situation because if disklabel
is using old disklabel data and any partition information
has changed since its initial creation, disklabel's behavior
becomes erratic and you may encounter strange problems. To
prevent this from happening, make sure you wipe the disk
clean before performing a clean install of OpenBSD.</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>I have FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE and OpenBSD 3.2-RELEASE
operating systems installed on my PC. I tried installing Red
Hat Linux on the free hard disk space that I have, but each
time I tried using fdisk or Disk Druid disk-partitioning
tool it flagged strange error messages. Why is this
happening? What can I do to install Red Hat Linux on my
system?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>An honest answer to this question is: <quote>Nobody
knows why!</quote>. Over the years while performing dual and
multi-booting installations, I have noticed that Red Hat
Linux's fdisk and Disk Druid flags the most number of error
messages whenever OpenBSD operating system is in the
vicinity. OpenBSD fdisk handling of the partition table is
different than FreeBSD and Linux and does not conform with
the standards. This may be one of the many possible
explanations.</para>
<para>For example, let me describe a real situation. This
happened a couple of weeks back (at the time of writing this
Guide). I installed OpenBSD 3.2 followed by FreeBSD 4.8 on a
test PC. Then I tried installing Red Hat Linux 8.0 (Psyche
edition) on to the remaining hard disk space. Note, I do not
have any faulty hardware on my system, I meet all hardware
compatibility requirements, I wiped my disk clean before
starting the installs using the UNIX dd utility, the memory
(physical RAM) available on my system is correct and the Red
Hat Linux 8.0 installation CD-ROMs are okay. However, each
time I tried to install Red Hat onto my system (each time
using different boot time command line options), Linux's
fdisk started with several dialog boxes. The first said
<quote>Invalid partition on /tmp/hda</quote>. When I ignored
the error, a new dialog displayed <quote>Unable to align
partition properly. This probably means that another
partitioning tool generated an incorrect partition table,
because it didn't have the correct BIOS geometry. It is safe
to ignore, but ignoring may cause (fixable) problems with
some boot loaders</quote>. Fdisk then displayed the
<quote>too many partitions</quote> error. Error, error and
error was all I got! So, I switched to Red Hat Disk Druid to
try my luck!</para>
<para>Red Hat's Disk Druid displayed an <quote>Invalid
partition on /tmp/hda</quote> message and when ignored,
showed the OpenBSD partition as unused and /dev/hda as a
BSD/386 partition. I forced the <quote>auto
partitioning</quote> process but it crashed miserably after
some time with an <quote>unhandled exception</quote>. I did
not save the crash dump to a floppy because I had no plans
to send a bug report.</para>
<para>This happened with Red Hat Linux 8.0 (Psyche). I met
with the same problems with Red Hat Linux distributions 7.3
and 7.1. However, when I tried installing Red Hat Linux 7.0,
it installed painlessly without any shouts and cries. Could
someone out there (or more specifically, Red Hat Inc.)
please explain what exactly happened or what is so special
about Red Hat Linux 7.0 that the others do not have? I am
still trying to figure out this problem!</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>I read the Problem Report (PR) above. I have FreeBSD
and OpenBSD operating systems installed on my PC as well. I
would like to install a Linux distribution other than Red
Hat on my system. Which one do you suggest?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>If you have already read and understood the PR above,
it makes no sense at all which Linux distribution you try
installing on your system. I met with similar problems when
I tried installing Mandrake 9.0 as well as SuSE 7.0 on my
test computer. Mandrake Linux managed creating partitions,
formatting them, but it too crashed miserably while
installing packages. SuSE 7.0 crashed at the very beginning!
In the near future, I would like to test Red Hat Linux 9's
integrity on such systems.</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>While installing FreeBSD 4.X-RELEASE on my computer
the FreeBSD fdisk (or disklabel) used an 'X' partition name
instead of a /dev/ad[0-3]s[1-4]n labeling scheme. Hey, what
happened? What does that 'X' represent?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>FreeBSD operating system software allows 7 partitions
per slice (c: is reserved for the whole hard disk
space). FreeBSD fdisk uses an 'X' partition instead of a
valid partition name such as <quote>/dev/ad0s1a</quote> if
you have created too many of them on your PC. If you have a
partition labeled as 'X', you must delete it immediately
without proceeding any further. If you do not delete this
partition, FreeBSD disklabel will let you proceed with the
entire installation, and then when you are finally done with
the full installation, when your system comes up, you will
encounter an error and would be dropped into single user
mode for maintenance. In other words, if you do not delete a
partition which is labeled as 'X', FreeBSD will not complete
the boot sequence. Instead it displays error messages and
drops into single user mode.</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
<qandaentry>
<question>
<para>I installed OpenBSD on my system which also has
Windows running on it. After rebooting, when I pressed F2 on
the screen, which reads <quote>BSD</quote>, OpenBSD would
not boot. I received a <quote>Bad Magic</quote> error
message. What does it mean? What can I do?</para>
</question>
<answer>
<para>It means that you have successfully installed OpenBSD
on the hard disk of your PC, but made a fatal mistake while
doing so. The boot files required for booting OpenBSD fall
outside the 1024th Cylinder on your hard disk. Check to see
whether the first operating system on your PC (whether
Windows, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Linux) is so configured that it
takes enough space to cross the 1024th cylinder limit. If
so, you cannot install OpenBSD on the same hard disk. You
may install successfully, but OpenBSD would not boot as it
requires boot files to lie within the first 1024 Cylinders
of the hard disk. </para>
<para>Technically speaking, bad magic means the following:
The magic number is a short integer, which identifies a file
as a load module and thereby enables the kernel to
distinguish run time characteristics about it. For example,
use of particular magic numbers on a PDP 11/70 informed the
kernel (of UNIX SVR2) that processes could use up to 128K
bytes of memory instead of the usual 64K bytes, but the
magic number still plays an important role in current paging
systems. The values of the magic numbers were the values of
PDP 11 jump instructions; original versions of the system
executed the instructions, and the program counter (pc)
register jumped to various locations depending on the size
of the header and of the type of executable file being
executed. OpenBSD operating system software, which is an
actual BSD-derivative uses the same style for booting. When
the jump instructions are missing, or in other words, they
lie beyond 1024 Cylinders on the hard disk, you receive
bogus values for jump instructions, thereby setting bogus
values for the magic number. Hence, you receive a <quote>bad
magic</quote> error and OpenBSD does not boot.</para>
<para>Try installing OpenBSD on another hard disk. Better,
try working with FreeBSD or NetBSD operating systems which
do not have the 1024th Cylinder inconsistency. Or, try
shrinking the already existing partition (caution: You may
loose invaluable data!). Best of all, get another PC, and
dump OpenBSD on it and work!</para>
</answer>
</qandaentry>
</qandaset>
</chapter>
<chapter>
<title>Conclusion</title>
<para>So folks, this brings us to the end of our journey of
creating a multi-boot system configured with three modern
operating systems. Assuming that you followed every step of this
guide and everything went well, allow me to congratulate you on
your success. If, in case something went wrong, make sure you read
documentation and manuals of the relative operating
system. Otherwise you can always refer to the Online manuals and
resources.</para>
<para>Make sure you browse these links:</para>
<para>* Distribution specific Official Red Hat Linux Installation
and Upgrade manuals</para>
<para>* Linux Kernel resources</para>
<para>* Linux Loader (LILO) and other boot loader questions</para>
<para>* Red Hat Linux Hardware questions</para>
<para>For referring to Online manuals dealing with
<quote>multi-booting</quote> specifically, I consider these some
of the <quote>very</quote> best:</para>
<para>* Installing and Using FreeBSD With Other Operating
Systems</para>
<para>* An excellent page explaining booting process and
methodologies.</para>
<para>Ultimately, though, the responsibility for any errors or
omissions you might find is mine and mine alone. Please address
your ire to me at subhasish_ghosh([A][T])linuxwaves[DOT]com. For those who
would like to send PRs (Problem Reports), make sure you send
enough valid and related information for me to work with. I cannot
help you if you just send mails with messages like <quote>This
screwed up!</quote>, <quote>That doesn't work!</quote> and so
on. Send detailed PRs. You may very well find your comments,
suggestions and corrections reflected in the next version of this
guide. Thank you!</para>
</chapter>
</book>
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