Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1998 08:43:29 -0800 From: "John M. Purser" <jpurser@wilcofarmers.com> To: "FreeBSD Newbies (E-mail)" <freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: One step forward.... Message-ID: <01BD5893.418C6A40.jpurser@wilcofarmers.com>
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Hello all, Just a progress report. I installed FreeBSD Saturday (2.2.2). I had a spare disk (EIDE 814 megs) and the Walnut creek CD set. I had installed this about 6 months ago but gave up as I just couldn't seem to DO anything with this mysterious system. Well I've been reading a lot since then so Saturday I decided to give it another whirl. The install went smoothly (they always do!) and again I was left with a couple of account names, a command prompt and no idea about what to do next. I played around with ls and the man pages and cal. Fun stuff but it gets old fast! I switched back to Win95, logged into the FreeBSD website and printed out the entire FreeBSD handbook on an Okidata 391. This takes a while and was still printing when I went to bed that night. The next morning I ran down to a local bookstore (Borders in Salem Oregon) and was stunned to find The Walnut Creek distribution of FreeBSD 2.2.5 with new manual and 4 CDs. I bought it ASAP, hauled it home and installed it. Once again, no problems. I started looking through the new manual and was amazed to find actual directions for how to do things like set up a desktop and connect to the Internet. If you haven't seen the latest manual then I think you're really missing something, especially for a newbie! I figured that the easiest thing I could possibly do is load and run a game. Couldn't be that big a deal right? I decided on Doom because unlike 99.9% of the rest of the ports collection I had at least heard of it before. Turns out you need Lynux emulation to run Doom. No problem, there's a chapter on that in the manual. Followed the directions and that's when I found out that my CD was a "Device Not Configured". Well that's real helpful. I spent three full days trying different things, whining to the newsgroup ...FreeBSD.Misc, and combing the archives before I ran across a line that said the /CD-ROM was a separate file system and had to be mounted. I mounted it and boom I could read my CD. That happened this morning. I used add_pkg to add the lynux libraries then tried the next step in the emulation directions and found that the directory I was trying to cd to didn't exist. I did eventually find a similar directory but the make there can't find lynux_lib.tar.gz (I think) and it really really wants it. It even tries to got the FreeBSD ftp site but since I was trying to set up the game to get enough confidence to set up the internet portion it can't dial out. I've tried 5 or 6 other things (cussing, screaming, spitting, begging, tantrums, and threats) before economic necessity drove me to work where I promptly sat down and killed time writing this letter. As Dilbert said "What did people do to look busy before computers?" Well that's my response to Sue's "First time..." letter. I guess until I actually accomplish what I set out to do on some level it will still be my first time. On the brighter side the pine e-mail program came right up and if I ever get to the point where I can connect to my ISP I should have no trouble responding to this group in proper fashion. John Purser To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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