Date: Tue, 18 Apr 2000 08:57:58 +1000 From: "Doug Young" <dougy@gargoyle.apana.org.au> To: "Gail Pickett" <gmpicket@icx.net> Cc: <freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG>, "m l mack" <mlmack@speakeasy.org> Subject: Re: newbies Message-ID: <020901bfa8c0$61498aa0$847e03cb@ROADRUNNER> References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0004171801040.16556-100000@poseidon.com>
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> I have been living with and learning FreeBSD for six months now, and I am > indebted to the FreeBSD mailing list archives for the wealth of > information and usable answers provided within. I am still trying to get > my machine completely set up; I guess this is an on going process that > never ends. When I manage to figure unix stuff out (not only FreeBSD .... SCO & Solaris are much the same) its amazing how simple most of it really is ..... its only the typically martian documentation that makes concepts difficult to grasp > > Overall the handbook, tutorials and manpages are excellent. I would like > to see more examples included with the manpages. Many manpages, the > first time I look at them, are like reading greek; an example or two of > the most commonly used variations of a command would save lots of time and > errors. > I typically find the handbook doesn't cover the stuff I'm working on, Greg Lehey's "Complete FreeBSD" is fairly good, although by his own admission its aimed at people already familiar with some breed of unix .... manpages are generally useless ..... eg WTF are those lines of rubbish at the start for ??, and they rarely if ever provide ALL the info one needs > I spent four days setting up userland ppp. Mostly because my machine's > BIOS was incorrectly setting the speed for the serial port that the > modem uses. The instructions were great, but they covered some hundred > pages (I cheated and printed them out with the MS Windows machine at > work) - ppp manpage, pendantic ppp primer, example ppp.conf file, etc. > The ONLY way I suggest members of our non-profit internet access group setup ppp is with the ppp_script.sh file. I went through weeks of frustration messing with that stuff before I found the script file .... it sorted 99% of my ppp problems out in seconds > I have given up on my printer. I have noticed that over the six months of > not being able to print that my piles of paper cluttering my home have > just about disappeared. I have decided to go 'paperless' at home, with > the exception of my weekly grocery list. So some good has come out of not > being able to learn how to setup something for my FreeBSD machine. :) Printing appears to be another of the unbelievable weirdnesses endemic to the unixes ..... I've always believed that ghostscript was the most complicated way possible the geeks could devise of doing the job. Actually I never use FreeBSD in GUI mode as I don't like the amateurish KDE ... I prefer Solaris / CDE for anything but gateway use, and there is a quite nice printing application for it (and also for FreeBSD as I recall) available from 'www.cups.org". I've found the CUPS stuff quite straightforward to configure and its certainly light years ahead of that unintelligible ghostscript stuff :) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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