Date: Sat, 10 Apr 2004 12:50:24 -0500 From: Jason Dusek <jdusek@cs.uiowa.edu> To: "Newbies@BSD" <freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org> Subject: The FreeBSD Xperience Message-ID: <407833E0.9040708@cs.uiowa.edu>
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Well, since we're telling stories... My experience with BSD began when I couldn't get Linux to work. My father had given me a laptop to fiddle with, but it was so old that I couldn't boot it from the CD. At work, we have a few machines just lying around doing nothing, so I asked my boss if I could try installing Linux on one. Bob (my boss) said that he would rather have me fiddle with FreeBSD, since it's safer. First I had to get the boot floppies. I decided to do the install on a Windows machine. This should be easy, I said to myself - I'll just download the boot images, use the imaging utility provided on the website, and then I'll shut off Windows and never use it again. I got the boot images and the utility without a hitch, but when it came to copying the images to a disk, I was in for a suprise! The computer just sat there for twenty minutes. When I tried to check on the floppies - I went to A\: in the Windows file manager - the computer promptly crashed and cut power to itself! Behold the power of FreeBSD! Eventually, I found a guru who gave me the disks. For the next couple of weeks I installed and reinstalled, fiddling with the partitions and other shit. Eventually I got everything but X set up the way I liked it. For some reason, I just could not get X to work. So I went back to my Solaris box, and just sshed whenever I needed to use the BSD machine. This state of affairs persisted for more than a month. Then I found another, better machine - one of the casualties of our transfer from SPARC to i386. It had been one of the test cases for 1386 Solaris, and Bob just hadn't been able to make it work quite right... I talked them into letting me have it. I got X to work, and fooled around with Window Maker for awhile until I decided to get GNOME. Then my troubles really began. After I had a GNOME configuration that I really liked, I just copied all my .gnome* files into /usr/shar/skel/. Then I added some new users. This is not a good idea though, because, as I later found out, the .gnome* files have your home directory hard coded into them for whatever reason. But it worked for awhile. I enabled GDM, and then all hell broke loose. I spent several days blowing away all my users, and then putting them back again. It turns out that there was some evil config left over in, of all places, /var/tmp. Someday I would like to write a script that 'exports' my config files properly. I have been reading 'FreeBSD Unleashed' to help me through the install on the second machine, and I'm at about the middle of the book. Soon I'll setup mail and Apache. Ahaha! I've gone mad with the power (to serve)! -- --~:~\\ Jason Dusek \\~:~://|||//|||| ---~:~\\ The Hydra Project \\~:~://|||//||| ----~:~\\ The University of Iowa \\~:~://|||//|| ----
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