Date: Fri, 9 Apr 2004 23:07:13 -0400 From: "Micheal Peters" <mikepeters@epnix.com> To: "FreeBSD Newbies Mail List" <freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org> Subject: The new user experience Message-ID: <20040410030738.CD39543D3F@mx1.FreeBSD.org>
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>From Kevin Kinsey 3:58 PM EDT Friday 9 April 2004 The waters are made somewhat murkier by the list charter, which more/less states that technical questions about FreeBSD aren't to be posted here. But, you can talk about the OS and your experiences with it, etc. And about problems in general terms, books on the subject, web sites, tutorials you've run across (or written) etc. Well if we can talk about our experiences I'll give the run down of the past 2 weeks :-) /******** NOTE: I fully intend to be long winded with this one and include a bit of history too, if you don't really care about what a total n00b sees, stop reading, delete this message (and any subsequent messages) and go on with your normal life. Otherwise sit back, and enjoy :-) Also note, supposively English is my primary language; actually Bad English would be a better description. I'll try to maintain proper spelling and punctuation, but I can't give any guarantees. ********/ A Little History So a few months ago maybe as close to a year ago, I don't remember exactly what brought up the conversation but I had asked one of my Co-workers about the various *nix's. I think he was working on a MRTG server and I thought it was pretty cool how he could start the system with 2 floppy disks, and from their completely install an OS. No CD's or anything like that, just 2 disks and an internet connection. I do believe that's when the *nix's conversations occurred. He mentioned various Linux's and how they where probably a good starting place for someone with no experience UNIX. Now, it's not that I have absolutely no experience with it. I have some, however briefly, when I made the attempt to attend college (note the word attempted. I guess the attempt would have gone better had I attended most of my classes though out the year. Naaaa! lol) but that was from a users point of view, not an admin. We talked about a few other things: routers and switches are very UNIX like when you log into them, most of the web hosts I've dealt with where running some type of *nix.. And so on. Well that day I decided, I needed to learn (and re-learn) some type of *nix. Of course then came the big question.. Which one? Well, before I could answer that question, I needed to figure out WHAT I was going to run it on. Well my father had a old PC that he gave to my then 4 year old, when he got a new PC. Oddly enough, even though most Pre-school type software can run on some ancient stuff. It was becoming obvious that this PC was just not good enough. The monitor couldn't display very clearly (in windows, but did fine at command prompt) the CD was only a 2x. Some things would talk for ever to load, well forever for a 4 year old, and he couldn't play his truly favorite game, Star Wars Pod Racer. So the idea that he had his own PC ended up getting dropped as more and more of his programs where added to my PC (ok, ok, I'm married, it was OUR PC lol). So now I had a computer I could use, it was set up on my wife's desk. A mighty 486/200 with 64MB RAM, A sound blaster sound card (SB 64 I think) the previously mentioned 2x CDROM and 2 HD's can't remember the size. Ok, with that all set, it was time to find an OS. To The Web James I hoped on to the first PC, and hit the web. First stop FreeBSD.org. This was the OS that my co-worker was installing that started this whole thing off. The website, looked decent enough, professional I guess, well professional enough that I thought I could trust the OS, that it wasn't some fly-by-night-install-a-few-back-doors-in-your-computer-so-we-pwne-it-when-yo ur-on-the-web, type of thing. Well, I completed a cursory inspection of the site, and added FreeBSD to my list of possibilities. I did, however, want to see what else was out there. I checked out some the other BSD's. They didn't seem as friendly on their website as FBSD did (actually, as I'm writing this, I checked out OpenBSD, and NetBSD's web site. Either I'm looking at it from a different point of view, or they made some changes. Because if I had to make the choice today... I would have been much harder to make). While I mulled over the BSD's, I decided to give the Linux's a shot. (Now, before I finish/start this paragraph, I'm sure the various linuxes are great OS's. I'm not mocking anybody that uses them, or the OS itself, just stating what was going though my mind at the time. So please, don't flame me for what I say the next couple of lines.) I surfed over to a few Linux sites, and I was pretty much overwhelmed with what I saw. It seems to be that there are roughly 50..thousand flavors of Linux, so to chose a small handful of possibilities on my own, was next to impossible. Granted, there where the names that I knew. Diabian, Red Hat, Lindows, Mandrake.. and so one. So I thought I'd just stick with those. Well to look though the sites, yeah, they where "free" but to truly get "official" support, something a newbie would probably need, you needed to cough up some cash for some of them. And, to make matters worse, the system requirements. well, if I had a system to could match them, I'd be running windows on that PC for my son's stuff. So Linux was written off. And The Winner Is.. What I was left with where the 3 main BSDs; Free, Open, and Net. The final decision was based on, to read the website at the time, what they where geared for. Open's goal was to be the most secure, which would be great if I was making a firewall or a router out this box. Net Seemed to be about Networking/Networks, but I was looking for something a little more Generic, the swiss army knife of the BSD's. FreeBSD seemed to be the only one that fit the bill. It's been quite a few months since then, but it also seemed like (at least from looking at the advertising) that FreeBSD was the only one that had the install from floppy and use the net for the rest option. Granted, Open and Net, probably had that capability, but it wasn't apparent from their web pages, where was my only source of information at the time. So now that I had my choice of OS, and my PC, I scurried off to FIND some floppy disks. It took me a bit, but I located the stash, downloaded the disk images, and the utility to make them. While the FTP was happening, I took a look at the section of the home page "For Newbies" and the install guide. Armed with my disks, and I had printed the install guide, I steped over to the other desk and got started. My Very First Install of FreeBSD With Disk one in the drive, and my printout in front of me, I powered up my system ready to install FreeBSD. Opps, fist mistake, booted into windows, restarted the system, went into BIOS, and added floppy disk to boot devices. Ok, now I really felt like a newbie, making a mistake like that. "Lets try this again", rebooting the system, this time the floppy disk kicked in and I was off. Basically, my first install was "by the book", the Handbook as it turns out, as the Install guide comes straight from what would eventually become a very frequent online stop, the FreeBSD handbook. There where a few confusing parts, like the partitions. There where a few lines as to what I was doing and why, but nothing really that said GOOD PRACTICE: Do This. Yes, I know, or have found out, that for every 1000 expert FBSD admins out there, there are 1000 different opinions on how to partition a drive. Some based on preference, some on what software that will be run, some on security practices and so on. What I needed was, what I found out later, some formulas, and better guidance then "eh, toss some numbers in here and see how it turns out". Actually it wasn't THAT bad, but I am coming from a Microsoft Windows environment, where everything is spoon feed. Partitions aren't really required (helpful maybe, but not required) on a workstation, and you only need to worry about one directory /windows (hehe ahh, make that \windows; guess some BSD stuff is starting to wear off on me). Plus to make things a little more confusing, I HAD to play with some of the options at the bottom of the screen; In particular the auto defaults. Now, in the handbook it suggests making /var about 50MB, but when I hit the auto defaults key it makes /var about 256MB. So at this time, well, I don't want to say I'm doubting the accuracy of the handbook, but more to the point of how dated is the material. Of course the handbook is current, but to this newbie, I was unsure, and I wanted answers NOW, so I could play with my new OS. What do I do? Hit the web, of course. ACK!!!! I went from not enough info, to way too much information. That was pretty much a mistake to do, so in the end I just let the auto defaults stick, and carry on, I could always re-install everything if I needed, to reset up the partitions. With the fdisk (disklable) out of the way, the next few steps where pretty simple. "What distributions do I want to install?" Everything. "Do I want to install the ports collection?", after a little reading as to what the ports collection can really do for me: Sure! "What Installation media?" FTP of course, that's why I chose this OS. And, after setting up my network connection for the cable modem, away it went. Happily downloading what it needed and installing. Knowing that this might take a little bit, I stepped away from the computer for a bit of a break. Ok, this is getting a little bit longer then even I had anticipated, I hope you all don't mind if a) I pause here for the day, and b) continue on another day (tomorrow probably, Monday at the latest). As far as timeline goes, I'm still a few months behind, present, the good news is, there are a lot of large gaps of time where I'm not using the BSD box, so I won't be writing a Complete novel. More like a full, but short story. If this sort of thing is completely off topic for this list, or just not allowed, Please, let me know and I'll stop.
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