I just started using FreeBSD yesterday... Ran into alot of the same problems... First off....
Linux does NOT support the new UFS2 file system yet.... If you want to be able to mount it, you'll have to reinstall from scratch, unless you can figure out a way to convert the file system back to the oldfs... Make your slice/s in the first fdisk screen. Quit out of that. Then when you get to the "Disk Label" screen where you make the partitions out of the slice?, Create it, then get on the highlighted slice and press Z. Change the switch to -01...
I still can't mount the damn thing tho. I can... I just can't see any files. Atleast I don't get that Bad Magic crap in dmesg. mtab reports a clean mount, and I get no errors when I do mount it, I just can't see squat. Maybe you'll have better luck....Once you switch to UFS1, you only have to mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/FreeBSD cause your kernel sees that it's the old fs...
The reason why you can't mount Linux in FreeBSD is because it's not possible in your case. Primary Partitions only. If that aint a serious flaw, I don't know what is.... Can't even install it unless it's on a Primary (I tried over and over again). Can't read or see anything unless they are on a primary... I had to wipe my entire extended partition (3 linux &1 20gb vfat) so I could recreate my shared on a primary..... Phftttt....
For some reason, I don't quite believe that you can't mount a logical volume. Please let me know if I'm wrong but I read it in the handbook somewhere and posed this question on the bsd forums and no one disputed me so...... It must be true I guess.... Ya' know, I haven't even tried now that I think about it...
The swap question is a good one.... I know about the linux using bsd as well.....
Also, Your trying to mount an entire extended partition with that command.... Your trying to classify an entire extended partition as one slice... /dev/hda8 would be ad0s8.... Ya' know? According to your layout, you wouldn't even have an hda2 listed in cfdisk.... Your layout confuses me....
You must have an extended partition sandwiched in between 2 primaries...... Oh well....
Reply back because I think I just confused the hell out of myself.....
Also, for the shell question... chsh -s /path/to/shell
cd ~/Desktop
ln -s /usr/share/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/index.html Handbook