Booting FreeBSD for the First Time

When your system restarts, one of two things should happen: Either you get a boot menu asking you which operating system you want to boot, or, if FreeBSD is the only operating system on the drive, the system begins to boot straight into FreeBSD. If this is not the case, and your system either hangs or boots right into some other operating system without giving you the option of starting FreeBSD, see Appendix C.

A full-screen textual FreeBSD boot menu, providing several options for booting FreeBSD in various modes and sporting the "daemon" mascot or a FreeBSD logo, is the first interactive part of the boot process. You saw this menu during installation; as you did before, press Enter to accept the default option, Boot FreeBSD.

You should subsequently get a long series of cryptic messages going past your screen as the kernel finds and initializes your system hardware. Kernel messages are in a bright white color. After the kernel is finished loading, it will pass control to a program called init, which starts up various other processes and programs in the system. These messages have a light gray color.

The boot process pauses, this first time, to request you to supply some random keyboard information. This rather strange request is necessary for the proper operation of the system's "entropy" generator, which is of interest primarily to those users for whom data security is paramount. Feeding random data to the entropy subsystem means that the random number generator that's part of FreeBSD can emit truly random numbers that can't be cracked or predicted. This random number generator lies at the heart of many secure systems in FreeBSD, such as the data path of the startup process itself. While the system is paused and waiting, you have the choice to either hammer on the keyboard randomly to input a pageful of garbage text (and then press Enter) for a system with good entropy and high security, or to simply press Enter to accept less rigorous entropy. (A third option is to simply wait 300 seconds, or five minutes; this is tantamount to choosing the second option.) If you are impatient, or data security doesn't thrill you, just hit Enter to continue.

FreeBSD then generates RSA and DSA encryption keys for your system (which are used for secure communication across networks or the Internet); this process takes several seconds more, but it too is only a one-time event. Eventually, after init is finished, you should be left with the following:

FreeBSD/i386 (simba.example.com) (ttyv0) login:

Your display, of course, will have the name of your host and network instead of (simba.example.com). If you didn't set up the network, it will have the system default hostname, which will probably be amnesiac.

Log in using the name root. After pressing Enter, type in the password you gave to root (once again, the password will not display on the screen).

Assuming you type the username and password correctly, you will see a welcome message that tells you a little bit about FreeBSD and where you can get help (as well as how you can change this message or get rid of it), and then you are left with a shell prompt, which will look something like this:

Copyright (c) 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1994         The Regents of the University of California.  All rights reserved. FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE #0: Thu Nov  3 09:36:13 UTC 2005 #

Here, # is the command prompt, and it means the shell is waiting for you to give it something to do. Fortunately for the shell, there's one more configuration task that must be done: setting up the X Window System.