Date: Sun, 8 May 2011 22:13:16 -0400 From: Alejandro Imass <ait@p2ee.org> To: John or Judy Hixson <johnorjudy@earthlink.net> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Newbie Needing Help Message-ID: <BANLkTimE3ZnORQDsBrT=wEKc6KCDWSaMyg@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <C9F6205F-EFEC-484C-B97E-01046AF89502@earthlink.net> References: <C9F6205F-EFEC-484C-B97E-01046AF89502@earthlink.net>
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On Sun, May 8, 2011 at 8:17 PM, John or Judy Hixson <johnorjudy@earthlink.net> wrote: > At the risk of being told to get out of here and never come back (until you know enough to not need to come back), I need help on some very elementary stuff. I haven't found anywhere else to ask these questions and am therefore taking my chances. > Hey John welcome to FreeBSD. Good honest questions are almost always answered. If you try to be a smart ass your newbiness will shine right through and people will avoid you. But making simple honest questions like you've done will get you help here for sure. FreeBSD is much like any Unix so may I suggest you first read on some generic Unix, and mostly anything in that respect will apply to FreeBSD, Linux and any and all Unixes, mostly anyway. The first need to change is your Windoze vocabulary, so the "command line" is called a "shell". Next you will need to eventually master a text editor. The are literally hundreds of text-editor in the Unix world but there are two predominant editor cultures: the vi guys and the Emacs people. <culutural note> In Unix, freeBSD and the Linux world there seem to be these tribal/religious wars about things: vi vs. emacs, gnome vs. kde, MySQL v.s PostgreSQL, anything vs. sendmail, top posting vs. bottom posting, etc. etc. etc. In almost everything you will find zealots in the *NIX world. </cultural note> I am an Emacs fan myself, but you will need to learn vi regardless of the editor you later decide to use. This is because vi is installed as part of the base system in almost all *nix flavors. You will probably even need vi to configure your base system in order to install anything else, so do yourself a favor and get a vi tutorial. The same goes with pagers: "less" is is better than "more" (pun intended) but more will probably be part of any Unix system whereas less will probably need to installed unless you are in the Linux world where less is actually more, or is it less ? ;-) Anyway, get yourself a tutorial and soft introduction on Unix in general, and on vi so you can move around. I think that Chapter 3 of the FBSD Handbook does a great job: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/basics.html Good luck, -- Alejandro Imass
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