| Before you begin the installation, you should have available some information about your hardware in case the system can't automatically detect it or configure it without your help. Here is a list of the hardware information you may need during the FreeBSD installation: The type of video card and the amount of video RAM installed. The manual for your monitor. You need to know the horizontal and vertical refresh rates for setting up X, the graphical windowing system for FreeBSD. If you have a modem, the COM port (for example, COM1 or COM2) and IRQ (interrupt request number) it is using. The type of mouse you have (serial, PS/2, bus, or USB) and what port it uses. The memory address and IRQ of your Ethernet card, particularly if it's an old ISA card. The model and manufacturer of the card is also very important. (Most modern Ethernet cards are automatically detected and don't require you to know this information; they're also so inexpensive that it's often best to just get a new one if yours is even slightly outdated.) If you are connected to a network, you will also need to gather certain network information, such as your hostname, IP address, subnet mask, DNS servers, and gateway router. If you are unsure of these numbers, ask your network administrator or Internet Service Provider for this information. (If you are on a network that uses DHCP to assign network addresses automatically, you won't need this information.) The capacity of your hard drive. A FreeBSD installation with the X Window System (X11) and the ports collection will consume about 1.2 gigabytes of space.
If you don't have this information available and you currently have Microsoft Windows installed on your system, you can often get the numbers you need from the Device Manager in the Windows Control Panel. See your Microsoft Windows documentation or Windows Help for information on how to do this. Caution Users moving from FreeBSD 4.x to FreeBSD 5 or FreeBSD 6 should be aware that the "Binary Upgrade" option in Sysinstall is broken when trying to make a major version jump like this. If you want to upgrade from FreeBSD 4 to FreeBSD 6, you should consider backing up your data and performing a fresh installation from scratch; if this is not feasible, try performing a source upgrade instead. This is relatively easy to do. Chapter 19, "Keeping Up to Date with FreeBSD," discusses upgrading from source in detail.
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