Exploring FreeBSD: Installing the very first official release version 1.0
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 3 ต.ค. 2024
- In this video, I will install the very first version of FreeBSD (v1.0), which was released in 1993.
This version was based on 386BSD, which was developed by William Jolitz and his wife Lynne Greer Jolitz.
It is not so trivial to install the first version of FreeBSD, mainly due to the fact that it supported a very limited set of hardware; this is not surprising, as we were in the very early beginning of the modern era of PCs based on Intel CPUs.
This video is a bit long, because I had to suffer quite a lot to get everything working; while the video is only about 45min, the whole thing took more than 6 hours to shoot, and even more time to put together in a video, in a format that, not only hopefully makes sense, but that you can enjoy watching and discovering the roots of this wonderful operating system.
Comments and suggestions are more than welcome - please use the space down below.
If you would like me to do a follow-up video, in which I explore the original software, see if I can compile one or two programs from the ports collection, get network up and running, etc... then please leave a thumbs-up and also some comment :-
I hope you enjoy and... as always, have a great day!
Links:
386bsd.org/
#freebsd
Crikey - thanks for this, it certainly shows how things have changed....
Yes, but not only changed for change itself, but changed for the best :-)
this video is epic man, thanks for sharing 🙌
Thank you for stopping by, and I am really happy you liked it :-)
My first BSD was 2.2.1 i think maybe a little earlier. Have never seen 1 before. Thanks for sharing.
That is really awesome. If I remember correctly, I started with 4.x or 5.x; but I wanted to know/experience what it was like to get the very first release up and running :-)
@@BSDJedi I was introduced to FreeBSD at the end of first year university. Ended up knowing it really well. Made a diskless FreeBSD X server for a uni project. Managed to get NE2000 with a EPROM loading files via tFTP and NFS. Pretty fun project. So much easier these days. So seeing MFS root floppy brought back memories because at one point I was trialling booting from floppies and then NFS. However etherboot was a thing and that was a much smaller floppy than 2x1.44MB. not sure if 14 has support for floppy booting.
Compiling a kernel was worthwhile back in 2.2. mainly because I had 8MB of RAM. So every byte saved was able to be used. FreeBSD 1 may have been able to access your CD if it was SCSI but I think IDE support only came later. In those days I had a 2x Matsushita drive running off a sound blaster 16. That was the fashion at the time.
@@vk3fbab Indeed, it sounds like a cool project. At the university (I started in 97 at FEUP in Portugal), I was part of the sys admin group for the student's Linux systems. I also remember discussing programming EPROMs with me colleagues but, if I remember correctly, it had to do with the MAC addresses - dont remember why now we wanted to change the MAC addresses, and we could only do this by reprogramming the EEPROM. With later network cards you could do it from the command line... :-)
@@vk3fbab Nice, I think I read something on the FreeBSD 1.0 docs about the SCSI CD-ROM drives - maybe I can investigate if this is possible with PCem, or maybe with qemu... Back then, I also had the Sound Blaster card, and I distinctly remember that the CD-ROM connected to that card also; and yes, I think it was also a Matsushita. But I also remember a CD-ROM where you had to put the CD inside a "cover" that would be itself inserted into the drive - dont remember the model / brand though...
oh man, and now I have the song `Memories` stuck in my head.....
The really neat part, is you can use the same set of IIRC 4 commands, to build and install every single version of FreeBSD from 386BSD all the way to FreeBSD 14.
This IMO is a much neglected definition of stability. (I'll qualify that that # of commands figure, is excluding SCM work)
Oh wait... now I also have that song in my head... hahaha :-)
Very nice. I started at freebsd 4 if i remember well. I remember xf86 was much responsive with freebsd than linux. The x11 mouse pointer was very lagy under linux whereas it was like win95 cursor with freebsd...
Nice. I got introduced to Linux and FreeBSD through a radio amateur group which my father used to attend every week or so. In this group there were some colleagues that were also giving classes at the university; I was very young back then - I was not even in high-school; must have been like 12 or 14 years old... and this means that, since I was not having access to university, and internet access was mostly non-existing (we either used BBS, forwarded emails through AX.25, or had our own packet station like F6FBB), I had to learn things by myself - read documentation and come up with my own solutions... :-) [btw- the f6ffb webpage is still online, but the content is frozen from 96 - the last release...] A bit later, when I entered university, i got again acquainted with FreeBSD, and had the opportunity to work as a sys admin to the students‘s network (running Linux/Slackware).
👍
Thank you for the thumbs-up :-)