Installation Guide

This Guide is still under heavy development, feel free to help us to finish it.

Introduction

GhostBSD comes with a Graphical installer call GBI. GBI is a GTK graphical BSD installer program written by Eric Turgeon and introduced in 2011 for GhostBSD 2.5. GBI uses the pc-sysinstall back-end developed by Kris Moore of PC-BSD.

After reading this chapter, you will know:

• How to make a USB memory stick.
• How to install GhostBSD.
• How to start GhostBSD.
• The questions GBI will ask you, what they mean, and how to answer them.
• Troubleshooting the installer and live media.

Hardware Requirements

Minimum System Requirements

• 64-bit processor
• 4 GB of RAM
• 15 GB of free hard drive space
• Network card

Recommended System Requirements

• 64-bit processor
• 8 GB of RAM
• 30 GB of free hard drive space
• Network card
• Sound card
• 3D accelerated video card

Supported Processors

GhostBSD installs on any system containing a 64-bit (amd64) processor architecture. The amd64 name refers to AMD64 (“Hammer”) and Intel® EM64T architectures. The FreeBSD 12.0 Hardware Notes lists the amd64 processors known to work.

Supported Video Cards

GhostBSD uses X.org drivers for graphics support. During installation, graphics support will be configured automatically.

Support for the major graphic vendors is as follows

NVIDIA: if you want to use 3D acceleration, NVIDIA is currently the best supported as there is a native driver for GhostBSD.

Intel: 3D acceleration on most Intel graphics is supported. Due to the current KMS support, you will not be able to switch between the graphical console and a virtual console using Crtl+Alt+F#.

ATI/Radeon: 3D acceleration on most ATI and Radeon cards is supported.

Optimus: at this time Bumblebee[2] has not been ported to FreeBSD, meaning that there is no switching support between the two graphics adapters provided by Optimus. Optimus implementations vary, so GhostBSD may or may not be able to successfully load a graphics driver on your hardware. If you get a blank screen after installation, check your BIOS to see if it has an option to disable one of the graphics adapters or to set “discrete” mode. If the BIOS does not provide a discrete mode, GhostBSD will default to the 3D Intel driver and disable NVIDIA. This will change in the future when the NVIDIA driver supports Optimus.

Wireless Cards

GhostBSD supports many wireless networking cards. You can check if your card has a FreeBSD driver. If it does, it should "just work". Currently, there are some missing wireless drivers, typically for Broadcom and the newer Realtek series. N.B. USB wifi sticks may or may not be supported, it will depend on the chip used.