DragonFlyBSD
This article describes my experiences with DragonFlyBSD.
Installation of the OS
I did a test installation of DragonFlyBSD 4.8 in a VirtualBox virtual machine. I elected to use DragonFlyBSD's own HAMMER file system.
Configuration
DHCP after first boot
When the system booted for the first time, dhclient em0 can be used to let DHCP configure the network interface.
Keyboard layout (temporary)
kbdmap can be used to change the keyboard layout. In my case, I have chosen "German ISO-8859-1" which obviously configured german.iso.kbd. This setting is temporary and gets lost on reboot.
Important software
pkg install nano wget dfc bash mc
For some reason, csh doesn't run programs in /usr/local/bin, but bash does. Once I started bash using /usr/local/bin/bash, I used chsh -s /usr/local/bin/bash to change my default shell.
Personal configuration
In ~/.profile I added
EDITOR=/usr/local/bin/nano export EDITOR
so that nano is used by programs like chsh.
Keyboard layout (permanent)
In order to make the beforementioned setting permanent, I added
keymap="german.iso.kbd"
to /etc/rc.conf.
Network configuration
Next, I add the line
ifconfig_em0="DHCP"
to /etc/rc.conf, so that dhclient gets started automatically at boot.
In order to get IPv6 enabled, it is first important to instruct the kernel to accept router advertisments. This can be done immediately by using sysctl net.inet6.ip6.accept_rtadv=1. To make this setting permant, it must be added to /etc/sysctl.conf. By using rtsol em0 such a RA will be received and processed. If rtsol should be started at boot time, rtsold_enable="YES" must be added to /etc/rc.conf as stated in rc.conf's man page.
Allow SSH
In /etc/ssh/sshd_config, I set up these settings:
PermitRootLogin yes PubkeyAuthentication yes PasswordAuthentication yes
Software installation
nginx
Installation works quickly by using pkg install nginx. After that, /usr/local/etc/rc.d/nginx start should start nginx, however, that did not work out. Instead, /usr/local/sbin/nginx worked. In order to let nginx start at boot time, I made an entry to /etc/rc.conf:
nginx="YES"
That way, nginx is also listed by service -e.