Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2001 11:25:00 +0900 From: "thebob@arion.ocn.ne.jp" <thebob@arion.ocn.ne.jp> To: <freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: My first experiences installing FreeBSD ( sorry a bit long) Message-ID: <200103050225.LAA11782@arion.ocn.ne.jp>
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Hi All I've been on this list for a couple of weeks and I was a bit perplexed cos some of the replies seemed to be in my opinion, a little uninformative. Well I just recieved FreeBSD Newbies First Aid Kit posting from the administrators and this cleared everything up for me. I am a bit of an old hand at mailing lists, and I always lerk for a bit, till I get the idea of the kind of content that is acceptable. On this list I think it served me well. Possibly the mail FreeBSD Newbies First Aid Kit should be sent as a welcome.... after saying this I've just reviewed the initial welcome to the list mail I recieved and it does point to a page with all the relevant info. But honestly, who really reads FAQ's. OK with that suggestion out of the way, I'll get on to my newbie experience with FreeBSD. I have a home LAN served by my Mac with a couple of PC'S (386i machines) on it. One of my PC's wasnt being used for much so I decieded to install FreeBSD. Among the many reasons for this choice was Mac OSX, which I had heard was using BSD as a conponent. Well first I thought about buying a CD version, but as I have a fixed rate 24 hour connection the FTP option sounded exellent, but I was a little sceptical if I could get it to work. I figured that the worst that could happen was that I would have to reformat the HD and reinstall Windows if I couldn't get it to run. My spare PC is a Cyrix 300 with 96Mb/RAM and a 12Gig HD and an Ethernet Card (Corega). Anyway it could talk to my network cos I'd used it under Windows. So how hard could it be. My situation was very good in the respect that I could read the online docs on one computer while installing on another. First thing was to make the 2 boot floppys from the images. Very easy, extremely well documented in the Read.me file. I didn't even know which one to use first. So my trouble shooting began. If you do it for no other reason,installing FreeBSD, will give you valuable trouble shooting experience. Well I was looking at this as a learning thing so I just kept at it. It took me a while to load the kernal defaults and get to the install screen but once I had got as far as the GUI, no mouse of course I began to love the clear discriptions and easy to follow tips. Getting as far as choosing an installation media type I got a little nervous. Am I really gonna let this thing download an OS from the command line over FTP. Well of course the first couple of times I didn't have the FTP setup correctly. I managed to enable DHCP on my server which helped a lot, and finally I entered the DNS of my ISP rather than my LAN and it started downloading. Excellent I was feeling very happy with myself. It took ages... more than 6 hours later, after responding to a few dialog boxes on the way I managed to boot the thing from its own HD and I settled back and felt proud of my self. The next step was loading X, well after typing startx a few times I realised it was not installed, researced the handbook, did a /stand/sysinstall a few times (kept forgetting the first "/" ) and accidentally started to install the thing again... Humm. This time I knew it would work but was not looking forward waiting so long. I was lucky to work out how to change to a more local server. I'm in Japan, so I decided to use their #3 server, it was in the middle of the list so I figured that it would have less traffic. and this time the bytes just flew in. A couple of hours later, I was back in sysinstall. This time I found the post install config menu, then install additional distrubution sets, and finally XFree86 Server. Since then I have had to configure a few more times, but the point is each time I have learnt valuable lessons on how to proceed. I haven't asked a single question, on a single list but I have learnt by my own mistakes. Now I'm new to all this but I think that some of my lessons will be usefull to all. 1. Use an old, non mission critical machine to practise on. 2 If you run into problems use your brain first, ask questions last. At least this way your questions will make sense. 3. Take your time. I'm sure that people do set up FreeBSD the first time correctly, but the people who do probably study the docs for just as long as it takes the rest of us to get it up and running. 4. When you do get a problem, look at it as test. I try to think that other people have done this, so can I. I'm not stupid just ignorant of FreeBSD, and once I solve this problem by my self I will be correcting that ignorance. I hope this ramble was interesting to some of you, and I'm interested in hearing what you have done, or want to do, with FreeBSD. Please reply, even if your reply is negative, I'm very thick skinned. All the best If you all try hard enough I'm sure you can work it out. thebob. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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