Preface

Written by users of the PC-BSD® operating system.

Version 10.1.2

Copyright © 2005 - 2015 The PC-BSD® Project.

Welcome to PC-BSD®! This Handbook covers the installation and use of PC-BSD® 10.1.2. This Handbook is a work in progress and relies on the contributions of many individuals. If you are interested in assisting with the Handbook, refer to the documentation README. If you use IRC Freenode, you are welcome to join the #pcbsd channel where you will find other PC-BSD® users.

Previous versions of the Handbook in various formats and languages are available from here.

The PC-BSD® Users Handbook is freely available for sharing and redistribution under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. This means that you have permission to copy, distribute, translate, and adapt the work as long as you attribute the PC-BSD® Project as the original source of the Handbook.

PC-BSD® and the PC-BSD® logo are registered trademarks of iXsystems. If you wish to use the PC-BSD® logo in your own works, ask for permission first from marketing@ixsystems.com.

AMD is a trademark of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.

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AppCafe® is a registered trademark of iXsystems.

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Linux® is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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Warden® is a registered trademark of iXsystems.

Windows® is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries.

Typographic Conventions

• Names of graphical elements such as buttons, icons, fields, columns, and boxes are enclosed within quotes. For example: click the “Browse Categories” button.
• Menu selections are italicized and separated by arrows. For example: Control Panel ‣ About.
• Commands that are mentioned within text are highlighted in bold text. Command examples and command output are contained in green code blocks.
• File names are enclosed in a blue box /like/this.
• Keystrokes are formatted in a blue box. For example: press Enter.
• bold text is used to emphasize an important point.
• italic text is used to represent device names or text that is input into a GUI field.

1. Introduction

Welcome to PC-BSD®!

PC-BSD® began in 2005 when Kris Moore presented the first beta version of a FreeBSD operating system pre-configured for desktop use. Since then, PC-BSD® has matured into a polished, feature-rich, free-of-charge, open source operating system that meets the desktop or server needs of the beginner to the advanced user alike.

PC-BSD® is essentially a customized installation of FreeBSD, not a forked derivative. Since the underlying FreeBSD system has been kept intact, you have a fully functional FreeBSD system under the hood. PC-BSD® provides a graphical installer which can be used to easily install a desktop or a server version of FreeBSD, known as TrueOS®. Other differences from FreeBSD include:

• PC-BSD® pre-configures at least one desktop environment during a desktop installation. Installed desktops appear in the login menu, allowing the user to select which desktop environment to log into.
• The PC-BSD® graphical installer supports additional features such as configuring ZFS and encryption during installation.
• PC-BSD® provides a graphical software management system for the desktop and a command line equivalent for the server.
• PC-BSD® provides a Control Panel of utilities for configuring the system. The graphical versions of these utilities are available on the desktop and the command line versions are available on both the desktop and server.
• PC-BSD® comes pre-configured with a number of automatic scripts to perform tasks such as connecting digital cameras or USB memory sticks.
• The PC-BSD® boot menu supports boot environments, or snapshots of the operating system, and the PC-BSD® Update Manager automatically adds a new boot environment to the boot menu before updating the operating system or software. This means that if an update fails, you can reboot into the previous version of the operating system, before the update occurred.

PC-BSD® started off as an independent project, but since October, 2006 PC-BSD® is financially backed and supported by the enterprise-class hardware solutions provider iXsystems.

1.1. Goals and Features

PC-BSD® provides the following features:

• Easy installation: to install either a graphical desktop or command-line server version of PC-BSD®, simply insert the installation media, reboot the system to start the installer, and answer a few questions in the installation menus.
• Automatically configured hardware: video, sound, network, and other devices are automatically configured for you.
• Intuitive desktop interface: PC-BSD® comes with a choice of Desktops to support your day-to-day computing needs.
• Easy software management: with AppCafe®, installing, upgrading, and uninstalling software is safe and easy.
• Lots of software available: in addition to its own software, PC-BSD® can install software that has been ported to FreeBSD (currently over 24,700 applications).
• Easy to update: PC-BSD® provides a built-in Update Manager that will notify you of available updates and allow you to apply operating system security fixes, bug fixes, and system enhancements as well as upgrade to newer versions of the operating system or installed software.
• Virus-free: PC-BSD® is not affected by viruses, spyware, or other malware.
• No defragmentation: PC-BSD® hard drives do not need to be defragmented and do not slow down over time. PC-BSD® uses OpenZFS which is a self-healing filesystem.
• Laptop support: provides power saving and swap space encryption and automatically switches between wired and wifi network connections.
• Secure environment: PC-BSD® provides a pre-configured firewall and a built-in host-based Intrusion Detection System.
• Easy system administration: PC-BSD® provides a Control Panel containing many graphical tools for performing system administration tasks.
• Localization: PC-BSD® supports a number of native languages and locales.
• Vibrant community: PC-BSD® has a friendly and helpful community.
• Professional support: professional email and phone support is available from iXsystems.

1.2. What’s New in 10.1.2

The following features or enhancements were introduced for PC-BSD® 10.1.2:

• PC-BSD® packages are now built with LibreSSL which has fewer vulnerabilities than OpenSSL.
• OpenNTPD has replaced the default NTP as it has fewer security vulnerabilities.
• Lumina has been updated to 0.8.4-Release-P1.
• The ability to login as a PersonaCrypt user has been added. This allows a user to use a removable, encrypted device as their home directory.
• The ability to log into a “stealth session” has been added. A stealth session creates an encrypted zvol as a temporary home directory for that login session. When the user logs out of a stealth session, the zvol is destroyed, along with the contents of the temporary home directory.
• Tor Mode has been added, making it possible to anonymously access Internet sites as this mode automatically forwards all Internet traffic through the Tor Project’s transparent proxy service.
• The pc-webkitviewer command line utility has been added for viewing URLs or local .html files. A desktop shortcut to this utility is provided for displaying the HTML version of this Handbook. Run this command without any options to view its usage.
• The pc-pdfviewer command line utility has been added for viewing PDF files. It includes a presentation mode for displaying the PDF as a presentation. Press Esc to leave a presentation or press F11 to start or end a presentation. The arrow keys can be used to navigate the presentation and the Home and End keys can be used to skip to the first or last page of the PDF, whether or not it is in presentation mode. If printing is configured, this utility can be used to print or provide a print preview of the PDF.
• The source for the PC-BSD® documentation and its translations has been moved from the documentation wiki to the PC-BSD® github repository. This means that the the documentation and its translations can be built with the operating system and documentation updates can be installed using Update Manager.
• The zsh shell has been added to the base system and is available for setting as a user’s default shell in User Manager.
• Kodi and PlexHome Theater can be installed from the MediaCenter category of the System Selection Screen of the installer.
• The options in the Advanced Mode screen of the installer have been streamlined.
• The utility ‣ zimport menu of the text installer now lets you mount and access a specified boot environment in order to perform maintenance.
• The ability to create a PersonaCrypt user and to specify a UID has been added to the Create a User Screen.
• The ability to Configure Audio Output has been added as a post-installation configuration screen.
• The “Lock” and “Suspend” buttons have been added to the Lumina “Log Out” screen.
• A “Settings” menu has been added to the right-click menu of the Lumina desktop.
• The Lumina Configuration Utility has been reorganized.
• The Lumina Search and Lumina Xconfig utilities have been added.
• The new AppCafe®, formerly called AppCafe® Remote, has replaced the old version of AppCafe®.
• The View ‣ Vulnerabilities and View ‣ Base updates history have been added to Update Manager.
• An end-of-life notice has been added to the output of the pc-updatemanager command to assist the administrator in making upgrade decisions.
• To save clutter in the boot menu when multiple boot environments exist, only the default boot environment and a link to the “Boot Environment Menu” appear. Click the “Boot Environment Menu” entry to see the complete list of available boot entries. Figures 8.4b and 8.4c provide example screenshots.
• The “Allow Stealth Sessions” checkbox has been added to Control Panel ‣ Login Manager ‣ Misc.
• The “UID” selection field has been added to Control Panel ‣ User Manager ‣ Add User.
• PersonaCrypt devices can be intialized and managed from Control Panel ‣ User Manager ‣ Advanced Mode.
• Mount Tray will automatically detect ZFS-formatted removable drives, providing the ability to import or export the ZFS pools from those devices when prompted, just like any other removable device.
• If the system has multiple audio outputs, the PC-BSD Mixer Tray will also display an “Output” menu for quickly changing the default audio output device.
• The list-audiodev, usingtormode, setdefaultaudiodevice, and setscreenbrightness options have been added to pc-sysconfig.
• IPFW is now the default firewall as it provides support for VIMAGE. Firewall Manager has been redesigned to use IPFW and its UI has been simplified to make it easier to use.
• The “Scrub schedule” screen has been added to the Life Preserver setup wizard and the Life Preserver “Configure” screen.
• The “Enable Offsite Backups” option has been added to the “File” menu of Life Preserver. This provides a wizard for configuring backups which are stored encrypted on a remote system.
• Life Preserver now does per-dataset replication rather than recursive replication. This change allows dataset exclusions and prepares the utility for resumable ZFS send/receive, once the FreeBSD version of OpenZFS supports this feature. This also makes replication more fault-tolerant, as it can restart from the specific dataset which was halted.
• The “Re-Initialize Replications” option has been added to the “Snapshots” menu of Life Preserver.
• The lpreserver-host-iscsi script has been added for configuring Configuring Encrypted Backups. This new functionality provides an extra measure of security to replicated backups by adding support for fully-encrypted backups, using stunnel and GELI-backed iSCSI volumes. This means that the data stored on the remote side is encrypted and only accessibly with the key file stored on the PC-BSD® client.
• The ability for Restoring the Operating System from an encrypted backup has been added.
• The “AppCafe” and “Check for Updates” buttons have been removed from the “Tools” tab of Warden® as AppCafe® is used for Managing Software in Jails and jail updates are managed using Update Manager.

1.3. PC-BSD® for Linux Users

PC-BSD® is based on FreeBSD, meaning that it is not a Linux distribution. If you have used Linux before, you will find that some features that you are used to have different names on a BSD system and that some commands are different. This section covers some of these differences.

BSD and Linux use different filesystems during installation. Many Linux distros use EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, or ReiserFS, while PC-BSD® uses OpenZFS. This means that if you wish to dual-boot with Linux or access data on an external drive that has been formatted with another filesystem, you will want to do a bit of research first to see if the data will be accessible to both operating systems.

Table 1.3a summarizes the various filesystems commonly used by desktop systems. Most of the desktop managers available from PC-BSD® should automatically mount the following filesystems: FAT16, FAT32, EXT2, EXT3 (without journaling), EXT4 (read-only), NTFS5, NTFS6, and XFS. See the section on Files and File Sharing for more information about available file manager utilities.

Table 1.3a: Filesystem Support on PC-BSD®

Filesystem	Native to	Type of non-native support	Usage notes
Btrfs	Linux	none
exFAT	Windows	none	requires a license from Microsoft
EXT2	Linux	r/w support loaded by default
EXT3	Linux	r/w support loaded by default	since EXT3 journaling is not supported, you will not be able to mount a filesystem requiring a journal replay unless you fsck it using an external utility such as e2fsprogs
EXT4	Linux	r/o support loaded by default	EXT3 journaling, extended attributes, and inodes greater than 128 bytes are not supported; EXT3 filesystems converted to EXT4 may have better performance
FAT16	Windows	r/w support loaded by default
FAT32	Windows	r/w support loaded by default
HFS+	Mac OS X	none	older Mac versions might work with hfsexplorer
JFS	Linux	none
NTFS5	Windows	full r/w support loaded by default
NTFS6	Windows	r/w support loaded by default
ReiserFS	Linux	r/o support is loaded by default
UFS2	FreeBSD	check if your Linux distro provides ufsutils; r/w support on Mac; UFS Explorer can be used on Windows	changed to r/o support in Mac Lion
ZFS	PC-BSD, FreeBSD

Linux and BSD use different naming conventions for devices. For example:

• in Linux, Ethernet interfaces begin with eth; in BSD, interface names indicate the name of the driver. For example, an Ethernet interface may be listed as re0, indicating that it uses the Realtek re driver. The advantage of this convention is that you can read the man 4 page for the driver (e.g. type man 4 re) to see which models and features are provided by that driver.

• BSD disk names differ from Linux. IDE drives begin with ad and SCSI and USB drives begin with da.

Some of the features used by BSD have similar counterparts to Linux, but the name of the feature is different. Table 1.3b provides some common examples:

Table 1.3b: Names for BSD and Linux Features

PC-BSD	Linux	Description
IPFW	iptables	default firewall
/etc/rc.d/ for operating system and /usr/local/etc/rc.d/ for applications	rc0.d/, rc1.d/, etc.	in PC-BSD the directories containing the startup scripts do not link to runlevels as there are no runlevels; system startup scripts are separated from third-party application scripts
/etc/ttys and /etc/rc.conf	telinit, init.d/	terminals are configured in ttys and rc.conf indicates which services will start at boot time

If you are comfortable with the command line, you may find that some of the commands that you are used to have different names on BSD. Table 1.3c lists some common commands and what they are used for.

Table 1.3c: Common BSD and Linux Commands

Command	Used to:
dmesg	discover what hardware was detected by the kernel
sysctl dev	display configured devices
pciconf -l -cv	show PCI devices
dmesg | grep usb	show USB devices
kldstat	list all modules loaded in the kernel
kldload <module>	load a kernel module for the current session
pbi_add -r <pbiname>	install software from the command line
sysctl hw.realmem	display hardware memory
sysctl hw.model	display CPU model
sysctl hw.machine_arch	display CPU Architecture
sysctl hw.ncpu	display number of CPUs
uname -vm	get release version information
gpart show	show device partition information
fuser	list IDs of all processes that have one or more files open

The following articles and videos provide additional information about some of the differences between BSD and Linux:

• Comparing BSD and Linux
• FreeBSD Quickstart Guide for Linux® Users
• BSD vs Linux
• Why Choose FreeBSD?
• Interview: BSD for Human Beings
• Video: BSD 4 Linux Users
• Why you should use a BSD style license for your Open Source Project
• A Sysadmin’s Unixersal Translator (ROSETTA STONE)