Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 11:08:03 +0200 From: Hendrik Hasenbein <hhasenbe@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de> To: Lloyd Hayes <wyoming_antelope@yahoo.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Installing problems. No Desktop. Message-ID: <40CEBC73.6080605@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de> In-Reply-To: <40CE5B1F.3060709@yahoo.com> References: <40CE5B1F.3060709@yahoo.com>
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Lloyd Hayes wrote:
> I installed FreeBSD on an older Gateway laptop. 128 MB/ 233 MHz/ 800x600
> screen/ 6 GB Hard driver with 4 GB on the hard drive set aside for
> FreeBSD. Windows 98 SE is installed in the other 2 GB. FreeBSD appears
> to be installed correctly, but I cannot get the KDE desktop to come up.
> In fact, all I can get is the command line. I can pull up the
> installation files. But that is pretty much it. I am very familiar with
> DOS commands, but UNIX commands appears to be nothing like them, and I
> don't know any UNIX commands. It seems that I can not pull up even the
> directory.
The commands are very similar at the command line, but you invoke a
directory listing with 'ls' instead of 'dir'. Copy and move just lost
their vocals ('cp', 'mv').
> I have managed to get my mail saying that I have incomplete
> modifications from trying to change things. I get to a point where I
> can't even figure our how to close the program, so I hit the power power
> which closes things down.
> But this is frustrating, and makes a good case for why people are
> staying with Windows. In going from the old C-64/C-128 to Apple, to IBM,
> to a CP/M operating system, the system commands reminded very much the
> same. Even in going from the old GEOS (On both the C-64/C-128 or the PC)
> to them MAC, to Windows, things stayed very close to the same between
> them. Here everything is completely different. It's like going from
> English to being told to fill out a form in Chinese without ever having
> seen or heard the language.
Your situation is more like being stuck in MSDOS 6.0 before starting
Windows 3.1(1). You have to start up the X-Windows system.
'XFree86 -configure' generates you a template config for your system.
After you have moved your config to /etc/X11 you should be able to fire
up kde by entering 'kdm'.
If all is successful you can enter the command in /etc/ttys for
automatic startup. There is a template line for xdm.
> I've installed the FreeBSD software 4 times coming to the same end. How
> do I get from this Chinese line item stuff to an environment that I can
> deal with? KDE seems to be installed, but is not coming up by default,
> nor by any other way or reason.
>
> I've tried several things, but I tried something to manually bring up
> KDE the other day by switching to it's directory. Whatever I was doing
> was something out of the FreeBSD Handbook. I was logged in as 'root'. I
> got errors saying that I did not have permission. This puzzled me. I
> didn't think this was supposed to happen while logged in as "root".
It is possible to restrict even root for security reasons.
> I have version 5.2.1 which I had downloaded a couple of weeks ago.
Hendrik
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