## Where do I start?
## Jim Mock <jim@freebsdzine.org>

Although newbies may have alot of questions, one of their first is usually
"I'm planning on installing from my Win95 partition.  What files do I need
to download?"  Since this question is asked a few times a week at least,
and there's nothing in the Handbook, I wrote a doc to be added to it,
however, it hasn't been included yet.  For that reason, I chose this topic
for the first Newbie's Corner article.

Although the /pub/FreeBSD/x.x.x-RELEASE directory is full of
sub-directories and files, to successfully complete a minimum install, you
only need one of them, which is _EVERYTHING_ in the bin directory, I 
highly recommend installing the manpages directory as well because if you
intend to use the operating system successfully, you _WILL_ need them.

Once you have everything downloaded (I suggest downloading to C:\FreeBSD),
be sure you've preserved the directory structures.  What I mean is that
the files from bin should be in C:\FreeBSD\bin\*.* and the files from
manpages should be in C:\FreeBSD\manpages\*.* and so on if you choose to
download other distributions.  If you're doing this over a ppp connection,
I suggest only getting those two and installing anything else you want
later.

You will also need to create a boot floppy.  Follow the instructions in
the Handbook.  Read those, and you shouldn't have any problems creating
the boot floppy.

After you make the boot floppy, reboot your system and boot from it.  Go
through the kernel configuration, and make the slices.  When you're
prompted to select the install media, choose Install from a DOS partition,
and you should be on your way.

As I mentioned earlier, it's easier to start out by downloading everything
from bin and manpages and installing other distributions later.  You might
be thinking.. "How do I do that?" It easier than you may think.  Once
you've successfully installed FreeBSD and can boot into it, installing
other distributions is a snap.  Log in as or su to root and at the prompt,
type /stand/sysinstall.  This will bring up the install program and you
can add distributions from here.  To do so, choose Configure, then 
Distributions, then choose the distribution you'd like to install.  For
example, if you wanted to install the X-Windows distribution, you'd scroll 
down to XFree86, press the spacebar to mark it, and then choose the
components of it you'd like to install.  Pretty simple, huh?  At that 
point, you'll once again be asked which install media you want to use.  If
you can connect to the 'net with your FreeBSD installation, you can choose
that, or you can download the additional distributions that you want to
your DOS drive as you did before.

Hopefully those who read this will have some of their questions answered.
The best places to get help if you're stuck are the Handbook, the FAQ, and
the freebsd-questions mailing list which can be mailed at 
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org.  Another good reference is the search
engine at http://www.freebsd.org/search/.  From there you can search 
through the entire FreeBSD web site (including Handbook and FAQ) and
through the mailing list archives which is extremely helpful.  Chances
are, you're not the first person to ask a question about something and you
can find alot of helpful replies by searching the lists.

- Jim

$Id: newbie.txt,v 1.1 2000/02/16 08:07:41 jim Exp $