Navigating the Sysinstall Program

After the kernel has finished booting (and assuming you didn't run into any problems), you will be placed into the FreeBSD Sysinstall program. The first screen you see looks like Figure 2.1.

Figure 2.1. The main Sysinstall menu.

You can't use the mouse in Sysinstall, but the program is easy to navigate. Table 2.1 lists the navigation keys you can use in Sysinstall.

Table 2.1. Navigation Keys

Navigation Key	Command
Up arrow	Moves up to the previous option in the menu.
Down arrow	Moves down to the next option in the menu.
Left/right arrow	Toggles between the choices at the bottom of the menu. For example, on the main menu the left and right arrow keys toggle between Select and Exit Install.
Spacebar	In menus where multiple options can be selected, the spacebar toggles the current highlighted option on and off.
Tab key	Has the same effect as the left and right arrows in menus. You can tab between fields in screens in which you need to fill in blanks.

In addition, you can also select most options by typing their highlighted letterusually the first letter in the option name.

If you want to read more about using Sysinstall, you can press Enter on the highlighted option Usage, but because it will all be explained here, I suggest you press the down arrow to move to the second option and then select it to begin a standard install.

After you select the Standard option, a message will inform you that you need to set up a DOS-style (fdisk) partitioning scheme for your hard disk. After you read this message, simply press Enter to continue.