Date: Sun, 29 Mar 1998 07:58:52 +1000 From: Sue Blake <sue@welearn.com.au> To: "John M. Purser" <jpurser@wilcofarmers.com> Cc: "Newbies (E-mail)" <freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Confusion and Progress Message-ID: <19980329075851.37521@welearn.com.au> In-Reply-To: <01BD5A12.DC3C6A60.jpurser@wilcofarmers.com>; from John M. Purser on Sat, Mar 28, 1998 at 06:29:25AM -0800 References: <01BD5A12.DC3C6A60.jpurser@wilcofarmers.com>
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On Sat, Mar 28, 1998 at 06:29:25AM -0800, John M. Purser wrote:
> Okay folks,
>
> Apparently there's something else that doesn't work the way I expect about
> FreeBSD. I'm not particularly complaining, just trying to feel my way around
> here.
>
> So "Newbies" is not where newbies are supposed to go in order to learn enough
> to not be newbies any more.
Not quite. Learning, and learning to learn, are part of -newbies.
Being instructed is not.
To escape newbiehood you'll need both, but unless you spend a lot more time
learning than being instructed you'll be a newbie forever. That's why some
of us spend more time here than on -questions.
> Okay.
>
> We're supposed to chat about our experiences.
>
> Okay.
>
> Does anyone know how I'm supposed to get experiences to chat about if I don't
> know enough to get any use out of my FreeBSD system?
Sure! You ask the question you just asked, here :-)
One thing that drives me craaaaaaazy is not knowing what to do first, and
what to do next. Every week someone points out yet another thing that I
"should have learned first" when it's too late. Nobody ever offers a
sequential list, so how am I supposed to know? How am I supposed to do it
right?
Every piece of documentation makes assumptions about prior knowledge though
the prerequisites are rarely stated. I'd like to see a step by step list of
documents to be read, concepts to become familiar with, etc, so that if I
did do all of those things in sequence nobody could ever blame me for being
slack.
Unfortunately nothing like that seems to have ever existed, and nobody has
been willing to put one together. If I knew more, apparently, I'd be able to
see why it'd be impossible to put together such a list. So we make do with
our own guesses. At least now there's other newbies going through the same
frustration who we can whinge to :-)
> I have managed to make a PPP connection to my ISP. I can't do anything with it
> but I connected.
It's a bit hard to know where you're up to from what you've said.
If the PPP is working you should be able to switch over to another virtual
console or xterm and fire up a web browser or whatever else you want to do.
Have you tried that? What happened?
Some people get this far and find their Internet apps don't work, and
they're told to type something after connecting. I vaguely remember what it
is but look at the mailing list archives and you'll find the acurate version.
You might have a good question for freebsd-questions in there somewhere, but
it looks like we'll have to extract it from you first :-)
Now if you're really looking for experiences you could try installing the
Midnight Commander package (mc) and see if that makes it easier to find your
way around all those files. I love the way it displays logs and man pages too.
--
Regards,
-*Sue*-
find / -name "*.conf" |more
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