Installing &os;This section documents the process of installing a new
distribution of &os;. These instructions pay particular emphasis to
the process of obtaining the &os; &release.current; distribution and
to beginning the installation procedure. The Installing
&os;
chapter of the &os;
Handbook provides more in-depth information about the
installation program itself, including a guided walkthrough with
screenshots.If you are upgrading from a previous release
of &os;, please see for instructions on
upgrading.Getting StartedProbably the most important pre-installation step that can
be taken is that of reading the various instruction documents
provided with &os;. A roadmap of documents pertaining to this
release of &os; can be found in README.TXT,
which can usually be found in the same location as this file; most
of these documents, such as the release notes and the hardware
compatibility list, are also accessible in the Documentation menu
of the installer.Note that on-line versions of the &os; FAQ and Handbook are also
available from the &os;
Project Web site, if you have an Internet
connection.This collection of documents may seem daunting, but the time
spent reading them will likely be saved many times over. Being
familiar with what resources are available can also be helpful in
the event of problems during installation.The best laid plans sometimes go awry, so if you run into
trouble take a look at , which contains
valuable troubleshooting information. You should also read
an updated copy of
ERRATA.TXT before installing,
since this will alert you to
any problems which have reported in the interim for your
particular release.While &os; does its best to safeguard against
accidental loss of data, it's still more than possible to
wipe out your entire disk
with this installation if you make a
mistake. Please do not proceed to the final &os;
installation menu unless you've adequately backed up any
important data first.Hardware Requirements&os; for the &arch.print; requires a 486 or better
processor and at least 24 MB of RAM.
You will need at least 150MB of free hard drive space for the
most minimal installation. See below for ways of shrinking
existing DOS partitions in order to install &os;.&os; for the &arch.print; supports the platforms
described in HARDWARE.TXT.You will need a dedicated disk for
&os;/alpha. It is not possible to share a disk with another
operating system at this time. This disk will need to be attached
to a SCSI controller which is supported by the SRM firmware or an
IDE disk assuming the SRM in your machine supports booting from
IDE disks.Your root filesystem MUST be the first
partition (partition a) on the disk to be
bootable.You will need the SRM console firmware for your
platform. In some cases, it is possible to switch between
AlphaBIOS (or ARC) firmware and SRM. In others it will be
necessary to download new firmware from the vendor's Web
site.&os; for the &arch.print; supports the platforms
described in HARDWARE.TXT.You will need a dedicated disk for
&os;/sparc64. It is not possible to share a disk with another
operating system at this time.&os; for the &arch.print; requires an
Athlon64, Athlon64-FX, Opteron or better processor to run.If you have an machine based on an
nVidia nForce3 Pro-150, you MUST use the BIOS setup to
disable the IO APIC. If you do not have an option
to do this, you will likely have to disable ACPI
instead. There are bugs in the Pro-150 chipset that
we have not found a workaround for yet.If you are
not familiar with configuring hardware for &os;, you should
be sure to read the HARDWARE.TXT file;
it contains important
information on what hardware is supported by &os;.Floppy Disk Image InstructionsDepending on how you choose to install &os;, you may need to
create a set of floppy disks (usually three) to begin the installation
process. This section briefly describes how to create these disks,
either from a CDROM installation or from the Internet. Note that in
the common case of installing &os; from CDROM, on a machine that
supports bootable CDROMs, the steps outlined in this section will
not be needed and can be skipped.For most CDROM or network installations, all you need to
copy onto actual floppies from the floppies/ directory are the
boot.flp and kernX.flp
images (for 1.44MB floppies).For a normal CDROM or network installation, all you need
to copy onto actual floppies from the floppies/
directory are the boot.flp and kernX.flp
images (for 1.44MB floppies) or boot-small.flp and
kern-small.flp images (for 1.2MB floppies).Getting these images over the network is easy. Simply fetch
the
release/floppies/boot.flp,
and all of the
release/floppies/kernX.flp
files from
or one of the many mirrors listed at FTP
Sites section of the Handbook, or on the
Web pages.
Get several blank, freshly formatted floppies and image copy
boot.flp onto one and the kernX.flp files
onto the others. These images are
not DOS files. You cannot simply copy them to a DOS or UFS floppy
as regular files, you need to image copy them to the floppy with
fdimage.exe under DOS (see the
tools directory on your CDROM or &os; FTP
mirror) or the &man.dd.1; command in UNIX.Get several blank, freshly formatted floppies and image copy
boot.flp onto one and the kernX.flp files
onto the others. These images are
not DOS files. You cannot simply copy them to a DOS or UFS floppy
as regular files, you need to image copy them to the floppy with
rawrite.exe under DOS (see the
tools directory on your CDROM or &os; FTP
mirror) or the &man.dd.1; command in UNIX.For example, to create the kernel floppy image from DOS, you'd
do something like this:C>fdimage boot.flp a:A>rawriteAssuming that you'd copied fdimage.exe and boot.flp into a directory
somewhere. You would do the same for the kernX.flp files, of course.Assuming that you'd copied rawrite.exe and boot.flp into a directory
somewhere. You would do the same for the kernX.flp files, of course.If you're creating the boot floppy from a UNIX machine, you
may find that:&prompt.root; dd if=floppies/boot.flp of=/dev/rfd0&prompt.root; dd if=floppies/boot.flp of=/dev/rfd0.1440or&prompt.root; dd if=floppies/boot.flp of=/dev/fd0or&prompt.root; dd if=floppies/boot.flp of=/dev/floppy&prompt.root; dd if=floppies/boot-small.flp of=/dev/rfd0.1200work well, depending on your hardware and operating system
environment (different versions of UNIX have different names
for the floppy drive).Floppy disk based install is not supported
on &os;/&arch;.Installing &os; from CDROM or the InternetThe easiest type of installation is from
CDROM. If you have a supported CDROM drive and a &os;
installation CDROM, there are 2 ways of starting the
installation from it:
If your system supports the CDBOOT standard for
bootable CDROM media and you have booting from CD enabled,
simply put the &os; installation CD in your CDROM drive and
boot the system to begin installation.Build a set of &os; boot floppies from the
floppies/ directory in every &os;
distribution. Read
for more information on creating
the bootable floppies under different operating systems.
Then you simply boot from the first floppy and you should
soon be in the &os; installation.The easiest type of installation is from
CDROM. If you have a supported CDROM drive and a &os;
installation CDROM, there is a next way of starting the
installation from it:
Build a set of &os; boot floppies from the
floppies/ directory in every &os;
distribution. Read for more
information on creating the bootable floppies under
different operating systems. Then you simply boot from
the first floppy and you should soon be in the &os;
installation.If you don't have a CDROM (or your computer does not
support booting from CDROM) and would like to simply install
over the net using PPP, SLIP or a dedicated connection,
you should start the installation by building
a set of &os; boot floppies from the files
floppies/boot.flp and
floppies/kernX.flp using the instructions
found in . Restart your computer using
the boot.flp disk; when prompted, insert
the other disks as required. Then, please go to
for additional tips on installing
via FTP or NFS.If you don't have a CDROM and would like to
simply install over the net using PPP, SLIP or a dedicated connection,
you should start the installation by building
a set of &os; boot floppies from the files
floppies/boot.flp and
floppies/kernX.flp using the instructions
found in . Restart your computer using
the boot.flp disk; when prompted, insert
the other disks as required. Then, please go to
for additional tips on installing
via FTP or NFS.The easiest type of installation is from
CDROM. If you have a supported CDROM drive and a &os;
installation CDROM, you can boot &os; directly from the
CDROM. Insert the CDROM into the drive and type the following
command to start the installation (substituting the name of the
appropriate CDROM drive if necessary):>>>boot dka0Alternatively you can boot the installation
from floppy disk. You should start the installation by building
a set of &os; boot floppies from the
floppies/boot.flp and
floppies/kernX.flp files using the instructions
found in . From the SRM console prompt
(>>>), just insert the
boot.flp floppy and type the following
command to start the installation:>>>boot dva0Insert the other floppies when prompted and
you will end up at the first screen of
the install program.Most &arch; systems are set up to boot automatically from
disk. To install &os;, you need to boot over the network or
from a CDROM, which requires you to break into the PROM
(OpenFirmware).To do this, reboot the system, and wait until the boot
message appears. It depends on the model, but should look about
like:Sun Blade 100 (UltraSPARC-IIe), Keyboard Present
Copyright 1998-2001 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.
OpenBoot 4.2, 128 MB memory installed, Serial #51090132.
Ethernet address 0:3:ba:b:92:d4, Host ID: 830b92d4.If your system proceeds to boot from disk at this point, you
need to press L1A
or StopA
on the keyboard, or send a BREAK over the
serial console (using for example ~# in
&man.tip.1; or &man.cu.1;) to get to the PROM prompt. It looks
like this:ok ok {0} This is the prompt used on systems with just one
CPU.This is the prompt used on SMP systems, the digit
indicates the number of the active CPU.At this point, place the CDROM into your
drive, and from the PROM prompt, type boot
cdrom.Detail on various installation typesOnce you've gotten yourself to the initial installation
screen somehow, you should be able to follow the various menu
prompts and go from there. If you've never used the &os;
installation before, you are also encouraged to read some of the
documentation in the Documentation submenu as well as the
general Usage instructions on the first menu.If you get stuck at a screen, press the F1 key for online
documentation relevant to that specific section.If you've never installed &os; before, or even if you
have, the Standard installation mode is the most recommended
since it makes sure that you'll visit all the various important
checklist items along the way. If you're much more comfortable
with the &os; installation process and know exactly what you
want to do, use the Express or Custom installation options. If
you're upgrading an existing system, use the Upgrade option.The &os; installer supports the direct use of floppy,
DOS, tape, CDROM, FTP, NFS and UFS partitions as installation
media; further tips on installing from each type of media are listed
below.Once the install procedure has finished, you will be able
to start &os;/&arch; by typing something like this to the SRM
prompt:>>>boot dkc0This instructs the firmware to boot the specified disk. To
find the SRM names of disks in your machine, use the show
device command:>>>show device
dka0.0.0.4.0 DKA0 TOSHIBA CD-ROM XM-57 3476
dkc0.0.0.1009.0 DKC0 RZ1BB-BS 0658
dkc100.1.0.1009.0 DKC100 SEAGATE ST34501W 0015
dva0.0.0.0.1 DVA0
ewa0.0.0.3.0 EWA0 00-00-F8-75-6D-01
pkc0.7.0.1009.0 PKC0 SCSI Bus ID 7 5.27
pqa0.0.0.4.0 PQA0 PCI EIDE
pqb0.0.1.4.0 PQB0 PCI EIDEThis example is from a Digital Personal Workstation 433au
and shows three disks attached to the machine. The first is a
CDROM called dka0 and the other two are
disks and are called dkc0 and
dkc100 respectively.You can specify which kernel file to load and what boot
options to use with the and
options, for example:>>>boot -file kernel.old -flags sTo make &os;/&arch; boot automatically, use these commands:>>>set boot_osflags a>>>set bootdef_dev dkc0>>>set auto_action BOOTInstalling from a Network CDROMIf you simply wish to install from a local CDROM drive
then see . If you don't have a CDROM
drive on your system and wish to use a &os; distribution CD
in the CDROM drive of another system to which you have network
connectivity, there are also several ways of going about it:If you would be able to FTP install &os; directly
from the CDROM drive in some &os; machine, it's quite
easy: You ensure an FTP server is running and then
simply add the following line to the password file
(using the &man.vipw.8; command):ftp:*:99:99::0:0:FTP:/cdrom:/sbin/nologinOn the machine on which you are running the install,
go to the Options menu and set Release Name to
any. You may then choose a Media type of
FTP and type in
ftp://machine
after picking URL in the ftp sites
menu.This may allow anyone on the local network (or Internet) to
make anonymous FTP connections to this
machine, which may not be desirable.If you would rather use NFS to export the CDROM
directly to the machine(s) you'll be installing from, you
need to first add an entry to the
/etc/exports file (on the machine with
the CDROM drive). The example below allows the machine
ziggy.foo.com to mount the
CDROM directly via NFS during installation:/cdrom -ro ziggy.foo.comThe machine
with the CDROM must also be configured as an NFS server, of
course, and if you're not sure how to do that then an NFS
installation is probably not the best choice for you unless
you're willing to read up on &man.rc.conf.5; and configure things
appropriately. Assuming that this part goes smoothly, you
should be able to enter: cdrom-host:/cdrom as the path for
an NFS installation when the target machine is installed,
e.g. wiggy:/cdrom.Installing from FloppiesIf you must install from floppy disks, either due to
unsupported hardware or just because you enjoy doing things the
hard way, you must first prepare some floppies for the
install.First, make your boot floppies as described in
.Second, peruse and pay special attention
to the Distribution Format section since it describes which
files you're going to need to put onto floppy and which you can
safely skip.Next you will need, at minimum, as many 1.44MB floppies as
it takes to hold all files in the bin
(binary distribution) directory. If you're preparing these
floppies under DOS, then these floppies
must be formatted using the MS-DOS
FORMAT command. If you're using Windows,
use the Windows File Manager format command.Frequently, floppy disks come factory
preformatted. While convenient,
many problems reported by users in the past have resulted
from the use of improperly formatted media.
Re-format them yourself, just to make sure.If you're creating the floppies from another &os;
machine, a format is still not a bad idea though you don't need
to put a DOS filesystem on each floppy. You can use the
&man.disklabel.8; and &man.newfs.8; commands to put a UFS filesystem on a
floppy, as the following sequence of commands
illustrates:&prompt.root; fdformat -f 1440 fd0
&prompt.root; disklabel -w fd0 floppy3
&prompt.root; newfs -i 65536 /dev/fd0After you've formatted the floppies for DOS or UFS, you'll
need to copy the files onto them.
The distribution files are sized so that a floppy disk will hold
a single file.
Each distribution should go into its own subdirectory on the floppy,
e.g.: a:\bin\bin.inf, a:\bin\bin.aa, a:\bin\bin.ab, ...The bin.inf file also needs to go on the first floppy of
the bin set since it is read by the installation program in
order to figure out how many additional pieces to look for
when fetching and concatenating the distribution. When
putting distributions onto floppies, the
distname.inf file must occupy the first
floppy of each distribution set.Once you come to the Media screen of the install, select
Floppy and you'll be prompted for the rest.Installing from a DOS partitionTo prepare for installation from an MS-DOS partition you
should simply copy the files from the distribution into a
directory called FREEBSD on the Primary DOS partition (C:). For example, to do a minimal installation of &os; from
DOS using files copied from the CDROM, you might do something
like this:To prepare for installation from an MS-DOS partition you
should simply copy the files from the distribution into a
directory called FREEBSD on the Primary DOS partition (A:). For example, to do a minimal installation of &os; from
DOS using files copied from the CDROM, you might do something
like this:C:\>MD C:\FREEBSDC:\>XCOPY /S E:\BASE C:\FREEBSD\BASEA:\>MD A:\FREEBSDA:\>XCOPY /S E:\BASE A:\FREEBSD\BASEAssuming that E: was where your CD was mounted.For as many distributions as you wish to install from DOS (and
you have free space for), install each one in a directory under
C:\FREEBSD - the BIN dist is only the minimal requirement.For as many distributions as you wish to install from DOS (and
you have free space for), install each one in a directory under
A:\FREEBSD - the BIN dist is only the minimal requirement.Once you've copied the directories, you can simply launch
the installation from floppies as normal and select DOS as
your media type when the time comes.Installing from QIC/SCSI TapeWhen installing from tape, the installation program
expects the files to be simply tar'ed onto it, so after fetching
all of the files for the distributions you're interested in,
simply use &man.tar.1; to get them onto the tape with a command something like
this:&prompt.root; cd /where/you/have/your/dists
&prompt.root; tar cvf /dev/sa0 dist1 .. dist2When you go to do the installation, you should also make
sure that you leave enough room in some temporary directory
(which you'll be allowed to choose) to accommodate the full
contents of the tape you've created. Due to the non-random
access nature of tapes, this method of installation requires
quite a bit of temporary storage. You should expect to require
as much temporary storage as you have stuff written on tape.When going to do the installation, the tape must be in
the drive before booting from the boot floppies. The
installation probe may otherwise fail to find it.Now create a boot floppy as described in and
proceed with the installation.Installing over a Network using FTP or NFSAfter making the boot floppies as described in the first
section, you can load the rest of the installation over a
network using one of 3 types of connections: serial port,
parallel port, or Ethernet.Serial PortSLIP support is rather primitive, and is limited
primarily to hard-wired links, such as a serial cable running
between two computers. The link must be hard-wired because
the SLIP installation doesn't currently offer a dialing
capability. If you need to dial out with a modem or otherwise
dialog with the link before connecting to it, then the PPP
utility should be used instead.If you're using PPP, make sure that you have your
Internet Service Provider's IP address and DNS information
handy as you'll need to know it fairly early in the
installation process. You may also need to know your own IP
address, though PPP supports dynamic address negotiation and
may be able to pick up this information directly from your ISP
if they support it.You will also need to know how to use the various AT
commands for dialing out with your particular brand of modem
as the PPP dialer provides only a very simple terminal
emulator.Parallel PortIf a hard-wired connection to another &os; or Linux
machine is available, you might also consider installing over
a laplink style parallel port cable. The data rate over the
parallel port is much higher than what is typically possible
over a serial line (up to 50k/sec), thus resulting in a
quicker installation. It's not typically necessary to use
real IP addresses when using a point-to-point parallel cable
in this way and you can generally just use RFC 1918 style
addresses for the ends of the link (e.g. 10.0.0.1, 10.0.0.2,
etc).If you use a Linux machine rather than a &os;
machine as your PLIP peer, you will also have to specify
in the TCP/IP setup screen's extra options for
ifconfig field in order to be compatible with Linux's
slightly different PLIP protocol.Ethernet&os; supports most common Ethernet cards; a table
of supported cards is
provided as part of the &os; Hardware Notes (see
HARDWARE.TXT in
the Documentation menu on the boot floppy or the top level
directory of the CDROM). If you are using one of the
supported PCMCIA Ethernet cards, also be sure that it's
plugged in before the laptop is powered on. &os; does
not, unfortunately, currently support hot insertion of
PCMCIA cards during installation.You will also need to know your IP address on the
network, the value for your subnet and the
name of your machine. Your system administrator can tell you
which values are appropriate to your particular network setup.
If you will be referring to other hosts by name rather than IP
address, you'll also need a name server and possibly the
address of a gateway (if you're using PPP, it's your
provider's IP address) to use in talking to it. If you want
to install by FTP via an HTTP proxy (see below), you will also
need the proxy's address.If you do not know the answers to these questions then
you should really probably talk to your system administrator
first before trying this type of
installation. Using a randomly chosen IP address or netmask
on a live network is almost guaranteed not to work, and will
probably result in a lecture from said system administrator.Once you have a network connection of some sort working, the
installation can continue over NFS or FTP.NFS installation tipsNFS installation is fairly straight-forward: Simply copy
the &os; distribution files you want onto a server
somewhere and then point the NFS media selection at it.If this server supports only privileged port access (this is
generally the default for Sun and Linux workstations), you
may need to set this option in the Options menu before
installation can proceed.If you have a poor quality Ethernet card which suffers from very
slow transfer rates, you may also wish to toggle the appropriate
Options flag.In order for NFS installation to work, the server must
also support subdir mounts, e.g. if your &os;
distribution directory lives on
wiggy:/usr/archive/stuff/FreeBSD, then
wiggy will have to allow
the direct mounting of /usr/archive/stuff/FreeBSD, not just
/usr or /usr/archive/stuff.In &os;'s /etc/exports file this is controlled by the
option. Other NFS servers may have different
conventions. If you are getting Permission Denied messages
from the server then it's likely that you don't have this
properly enabled.FTP Installation tipsFTP installation may be done from any mirror site containing a
reasonably up-to-date version of &os;. A full menu of
reasonable choices for almost any location in the world is
provided in the FTP site menu during installation.If you are installing from some other FTP site not listed in
this menu, or you are having troubles getting your name server
configured properly, you can also specify your own URL by
selecting the URL choice in that menu. A URL can
contain a hostname or an IP address, so something like the following would
work in the absence of a name server:ftp://216.66.64.162/pub/FreeBSD/releases/&arch;/4.2-RELEASEThere are three FTP installation modes you can use:FTP: This method uses the standard
Active mode for transfers, in which the
server initiates a connection to the client. This will
not work through most firewalls but will often work best
with older FTP servers that do not support passive mode.
If your connection hangs with passive mode, try this
one.FTP Passive: This sets the FTP "Passive" mode
which prevents the server from opening connections to
the client. This option is best for users to pass
through firewalls that do not allow incoming connections
on random port addresses.FTP via an HTTP proxy: This option instructs &os;
to use HTTP to connect to a proxy for all FTP
operations. The proxy will translate the requests and
send them to the FTP server. This allows the user to
pass through firewalls that do not allow FTP at all, but
offer an HTTP proxy. You must specify the hostname of
the proxy in addition to the FTP server.In the rare case that you have an FTP proxy that
does not go through HTTP, you can specify the URL as
something like:ftp://foo.bar.com:port/pub/FreeBSDIn the URL above, port
is the port number of the proxy FTP server.Tips for Serial Console UsersIf you'd like to install &os; on a machine using just a
serial port (e.g. you don't have or wish to use a VGA card),
please follow these steps:Connect some sort of ANSI (vt100) compatible terminal
or terminal emulation program to the COM1 port of the PC you
are installing &os; onto.Unplug the keyboard (yes, that's correct!) and then
try to boot from floppy or the installation CDROM, depending
on the type of installation media you have, with the
keyboard unplugged.If you don't get any output on your serial console,
plug the keyboard in again. If you are booting from the
CDROM, proceed to as soon as you
hear the beep.If booting from floppies, when access to the disk stops, insert
the first of the kernX.flp disks and press
Enter. When access to this disk finishes, insert
the next kernX.flp disk and press Enter,
and repeat until all kernX.flp disks have been
inserted. When disk activity finishes, reinsert the boot.flp
floppy disk and press Enter.Once a beep is heard, hit the number 6, then enterboot -hand you should now definitely be seeing everything on
the serial port. If that still doesn't work, check your
serial cabling as well as the settings on your terminal
emulation program or actual terminal device. It should be
set for 9600 baud, 8 bits, no parity.Question and Answer Section for &arch.print; Architecture UsersHelp! I have no space! Do I need to delete
everything first?If your machine is already running DOS and has little
or no free space available for &os;'s installation, all is
not lost! You may find the FIPS
utility, provided in the tools/
subdirectory on the &os; CDROM or on the various &os; ftp
sites, to be quite useful.FIPS allows you to split an
existing DOS partition into two pieces, preserving the
original partition and allowing you to install onto the
second free piece. You first defrag your DOS
partition, using the DOS 6.xx DEFRAG
utility or the Norton Disk Tools,
then run FIPS. It will
prompt you for the rest of the information it needs.
Afterwards, you can reboot and install &os; on the new
partition. Also note that FIPS will create the second
partition as a clone of the first, so you'll
actually see that you now have two DOS Primary partitions
where you formerly had one. Don't be alarmed! You can
simply delete the extra DOS Primary partition (making sure
it's the right one by examining its size).FIPS does NOT currently
work with NTFS style partitions. To split up such a
partition, you will need a commercial product such as
Partition Magic. Sorry, but this
is just the breaks if you've got a Windows partition hogging
your whole disk and you don't want to reinstall from
scratch.FIPS does not work on
extended DOS partitions. Windows 95/98/ME FAT32 primary
partitions are supported.Can I use compressed DOS filesystems from
&os;?No. If you are using a utility such as
Stacker(tm) or
DoubleSpace(tm), &os; will only
be able to use whatever portion of the filesystem you leave
uncompressed. The rest of the filesystem will show up as
one large file (the stacked/dblspaced file!). Do
not remove that file as you will probably regret
it greatly!It is probably better to create another uncompressed DOS
extended partition and use this for communications between
DOS and &os; if such is your desire.Can I mount my DOS extended partitions?Yes. DOS extended partitions are mapped in at the end
of the other slices in &os;, e.g. your D: drive might
be /dev/da0s5, your E: drive /dev/da0s6, and so on. This
example assumes, of course, that your extended partition is
on SCSI drive 0. For IDE drives, substitute ad for
da appropriately. You otherwise mount extended
partitions exactly like you would mount any other DOS drive,
e.g.:&prompt.root; mount -t msdos /dev/da0s5 /dos_dCan I run DOS binaries under &os;?Ongoing work with BSDI's &man.doscmd.1; utility will
suffice in many cases, though
it still has some rough edges. The
emulators/doscmd port/package
can be found in the &os; Ports Collection.
If you're interested in
working on this, please send mail to the &a.emulation;
and indicate that you're interested in joining this ongoing
effort!The emulators/pcemu port/package in the
&os; Ports Collection which emulates an 8088 and enough BIOS
services to run DOS text mode applications. It requires the
X Window System (XFree86) to operate.Can I run µsoft.windows; applications under &os;?There are several ports/packages in the &os; Ports Collection
which can enable the use of many &windows; applications.
The emulators/wine port/package
provides a compatibility layer on top of &os; which allow many
&windows; applications to be run within X Windows (XFree86).
Can I run other Operating Systems under &os;?Again, there are several ports/packages in the &os; Ports Collection
which simulate "virtual machines" and allow other operating systems to run
on top of &os;.
The emulators/bochs port/package
allows µsoft.windows;, Linux and even other copies of &os; to be run within a
window on the &os; desktop.
The emulators/vmware2 and
emulators/vmware3 ports/packages
allow the commercial VMware virtual machine software to be run on &os;.Can I boot from the ARC or Alpha BIOS Console?No. &os;, like Compaq Tru64 and VMS, will only boot
from the SRM console.Help! I have no space! Do I need to delete
everything first?Unfortunately, yes.Can I mount my Compaq Tru64 or VMS extended partitions?No, not at this time.What about support for Compaq Tru64 (OSF/1) binaries?&os; can run Tru64 applications very well using the
emulators/osf1_base port/package.What about support for Linux binaries?&os; can run AlphaLinux binaries with the assistance
of the emulators/linux_base
port/package.What about support for NT Alpha binaries?&os; is not able to run NT applications natively,
although it has the ability to mount NT partitions.