FreeSBIE: A FreeBSD Live CD
If you read my article the other day titled VSFTPd on FreeBSD, you’ll remember that the reason I went through the install of vsftpd was to move some data from an older machine to a newer machine for archival purposes. Well, last night I found myself in a similar situation except this machine wouldn’t even boot into Windows 98. Explorer.exe failed right off the bat but left a pretty turquoise background on the monitor for me to stare at wondering how I was going to get this non-profit’s data off the hard drive.
I did not want to remove the drive from the PC in question and install it in one of my PCs to burn the data to a CD so I was looking for some alternatives. Since the PC wouldn’t boot successfully into Windows, I couldn’t use my external USB hard drive to copy the data off like I ended up doing the other night and I couldn’t install an FTP client to move it either. My options were looking pretty grim until I thought about using a live CD.
Since I am currently a FreeBSD fanboy, I decided to hunt down a project I had heard about a while ago, FreeSBIE, a FreeBSD based live CD distribution. I downloaded the ISO, burnt it to a CD, and booted the old PC up without a hitch.
The cool thing about FreeSBIE in my opinion is that it comes with Fluxbox, my window manager of choice. Once I booted into Fluxbox and saw all of the necessary apps on the desktop and a lot more in the right-click menu, I was very excited and began to see the light at the end of the tunnel for getting the data copied to a machine for archival.
I opened up a terminal session and noticed that FreeSBIE automatically mounted the internal hard drive to /mnt/dos.1/ and I scp‘d the data to one of my FreeBSD servers. Once the data was moved from the old PC to my server, I used WinSCP to copy them to my Windows desktop to burn them to a CD. A very simple process in my opinion!
So, if you are interested in playing around with FreeBSD but don’t want to install it on a machine, give FreeSBIE a try. It is a very useful live distribution with a lot of good tools preinstalled and ready to go. It is based on an older version of FreeBSD, 5.3-RELEASE, but the functionality is basically the same as the newer releases of FreeBSD. Give it a try, I think you’ll be impressed! Until next time…