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FreeBSD As A Workstation For UNIX Newbies
JT writes: "OSNews features an article introducing the FreeBSD operating system to newbies and Windows users. The article describes the installation, its GUI, application base and it has some more information about Unix and *BSD in general." Since Linux (at least the varieties with cute installation routines) is often presented as the *nix beginner's best choice, it's good to see articles like this one pointing out a broader range of choices.
Unlike Red Hat, there is nothing on FreeBSD that takes away the true hacker-only nature of the system.
The partitioning, as the article points out is mostly manual, but only if you can't dedicate your drive... if you can dedicate you press one key and it does a default partition scheme, ditto mount points. This is not a problem for any but the types who can't RTFM long enough to find out what page of the FM they're on.
The package system vs. ports is slightly confusing, especially since so much stuff appears in both places, how do you know which to use when and why? I'm sure this confusion is cleared up by reading the Handbook in depth. Ditto the fact that the ports system isn't just a system for getting and compiling tarballs-- it's a whole packaging system unto itself, just a bit more CPU intensive than rpm.
Speaking of the handbook, here's my favorite line (from memory, may not be exact) "recompiling a kernel is a rite of passage for Unix users". There, they said it, plain and simple you *will* recompile the kernel... and they're right, the generic kernel has no support for sound, so off to the config files you go. Hello make and make install! FWIW, they're 100% right, compiling a custom kernel is just too important not to learn to do it on either BSD or Linux systems.
IMHO, FreeBSD is not a suitable system for a computing newbie, unless they have a patient, available hacker friend. It might be a good introduction to x86 Unix for someone who's used a Unix mainframe at school/work (where someone else was the sysadmin). And it might be a good introduction to Unix for an advanced Windows user. And for the hacker? Of course it's a great choice, especially that ports system. I've not seen a Linux distro with that level of commitment to the offsite code base.
But best of all, no one's running around saying it should be called GNU/BSD! And with good reason, if you're used to the GNU binutils and BASH, you're in for a bit of a surprise with FreeBSD.
I do not have a signature
Heh, funny thing:
/kernel.GENERIC. I RTFM page, just as you suggested, at http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/h andbook/kernelconfig-trouble.html and did boot kernel.GENERIC when the bootloader showed up. Too bad that didn't work...
/boot. How clever indeed.
No, I didn't type
Oops.
And I already knew that the bootloader was in
As for RTFM -- how the hell do you think I even got the kernel to compile right in the first place? It wasn't by guess-and-check, that's for sure. No, it was by reading Chapter 9 of the handbook at www.freebsd.org, following every word, and reading every word of LINT and determining what I needed based on what was in MYKERNEL and what wasn't (but was in LINT). If there's a better way than RTFM'ing, I don't know what it is.
Oops.
What's more, it was hardly meant as a troll post - it was a brief user's experience post. It just happens to be a bad experience, which follows past experiences (tried FBSD-4.3 in September - couldn't even get a kernel compile to work then, so we're making progress here).
I didn't even mention how the amazingly-useful updatedb binary (and the corresponding locate command) is stored in a directory that isn't even in root's path by default - thus, to find these normally-standard tools, you need to do a find / | grep updatedb. This shouldn't be necessary...
What amazes me most about the BSD community is just how arrogant its userbase semes to be (prisonernumber7 isn't the only BSD user I'm including), regardless of how much documentation somebody reads. I have yet to meet a helpful, non-egotistical BSD user. Linux users aren't much better (and in general, IMHO aren't quite as knowledgeable as *BSD users) but the difference is that Linux users are generally more smug about their OS choice rather than acting like complete assholes...
I didn't learn Linux by not reading documentation. On the contrary, that's all I did - I learned by reading docs I found online -- the HOWTO's in particular. In a little over a year I've gone from knowing nothing about any of the UNIX variants, to breezing through a Linux certification and simultaneously teaching other students in there (thanks to docs I'd read earlier on the 'net), to teaching a friend of mine how to run a Slackware box (and used a number of my own scripts to compile & install the latest KDE sources, along with tons of other packages, since it was Slack7.1, which is rather old).
If it weren't for the vast ocean of Linux documentation online, I would've never been able to setup a 486 as a router with some strong iptables rules and a DNS server...
I wanted to move on from Linux to FBSD because I'd read that it was even more stable, reliable, and faster than Linux, all while having a packaging system that puts Linux package-management to shame. And all of those things seem to be true.
But there's no useful info available (except in some big, recently-released book that sells for $50 in Borders that discusses using FBSD4.4) on how to exploit that power. And for as similar as FBSD and Linux are, there are far more differences than I was originally expecting.
Funny I couldn't find much documentation beyond the FBSD handbook. Yes there are several email lists and Usenet groups - but when you're looking for an answer to what should be pretty simple problems, it should be pretty easy to find - after all, it's been asked thousands of times in the years since FBSD was started, right?
So why is it that literally hundreds of searches on Google, manual sifting through Usenet, and searching through freebsd.org's mail archives don't turn up answers?
Christ man, you remind me of my roommate last semester. Snide, arrogant, and always "looking down" at those whom he talked to.
No wonder that one guy here is always posting that *BSD is dying...
Mod me down, I don't care - I'm going to play with a *nix that has real support without such absurd levels of geek chest-beating.
BSD just lost a potential user (and now an outspoken critic of BSD). But knowing BSD users, they don't care - they're too busy pretending they're God to help potential users understand how their system works.