Like most OSes still in their youth, you must partition the hard drive. With FreeBSD you partition the hard drive and then create slices within the partition. By partitioning the disk, you can designate which sections of your hard drive are for use with FreeBSD and which aren't. You can, of course, specify the entire disk, or, if you have blank space on your hard drive, you can use just a part of a drive that already has data on it. Using the auto-partitioner is a must if you don't already have an idea of reasonable sizes for your slices, but if you insist on doing it all yourself, you can. FreeBSD uses a file system called UFS and can employ SoftUpdates, arguably comparable to journaled file systems in that they efficiently use metadata, but possibly better, depending on your point of view.
While this part is still fairly easy, selecting packages to install is a daunting task even for a seasoned user, and having installed the software over 10 times, I was still choked up at this step. Unfortunately, there are no pre-selected installation options, as you find in most prominent Linux distributions - something needed in future releases to speed up this process. You must manually select the packages you wish to install. For a first timer, it's pretty confusing. Having installed the last three versions of FreeBSD, I can tell you it's changed very little. You'll want to make sure you install the bash shell, Gnome, and KDE at a minimum, but unless you have serious space constraints, you're better off installing too much than too little. The biggest plus of FreeBSD - and truthfully, the only reason it's not extinct - is its Linux Binary Compatibility, which is essential to using FreeBSD as a workstation. By adding this package, you can use almost any application that can properly compile in Linux.
