Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 23:16:52 -0700 From: Studded <Studded@san.rr.com> To: David Wolfskill <dhw@whistle.com> Cc: FreeBSD-Newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: What do newbies want? Message-ID: <353450D4.2320915B@san.rr.com> References: <199804142342.QAA00806@pau-amma.whistle.com>
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I hesitated to respond to this because it might sound like I'm invalidating your experience. However I hope you'll see that's not my intention. David Wolfskill wrote: > Fewer forced references to bizarre PC hardware and M$ "software". > Rather, use of more usual UNIX terminology. I'm still quite unclear > about how "slices" work; I was unable to build a FreeBSD system except > by setting up the disks in dedicated mode. I noticed here and below that you seem to come from a System V background. SysV is not "more usual" than BSD, it's just different. BSD/UFS slices are relatively equivalent to DOS partitions. They aren't necessary at all if you *want* a dedicated disk. > Basically, I don't have time in my life to learn M$ stuff just so I can > understand how to make, use, and administer FreeBSD systems. You don't need to know any microsoft anything to use freebsd. We use microsoft examples in the documentation sometimes to ease people's transition since most PC users are coming from that background. > For that matter, "gratuitous change" reduction would be useful -- I'm > forever checking things on other kinds of systems, then trying to do a > tail -f /var/adm/messages -- which sn't very useful on a FreeBSD box. > (Yeah, I could make a symlink, but I administer a bunch of the boxes. I > suppose I could hack up an amd map, but that would be cruel & unusual.) I'm not sure what you mean by a "gratuitous change." BSD systems put logs in /var/log. SysV puts a lot of things in /var/adm and some in /var/log. I use a lot of different systems too, you learn to adapt. :) > Although I am beginning to unnderstand that the "ports" concept may be > useful for some folks, I'm still rather uncomfortable with it, since I > want o have a single source repository for site-installed software, I don't understand how /usr/ports doesn't live up to that. All the sources are in /usr/ports/distfiles, and the extracted sources are in their own directories. If you're talking about something else, please let me know. > I'm accustomed to doing the various configuration & make things that > need to be done anyway. When I install a port, I usually take a look at the patches first, then do 'make patch' to d/l, extract and patch the sources, then take a look at the readme's and such to see if there are any configuration file options that I want to twiddle. Then I go back to the ports directory and do 'make install clean' when I'm satisfied that things are how I want them. The good thing is that you can make ports as flexible as you want them to be. Use it without input, or configure to your heart's content. :) > It isn't clear that the "ports" approach is all > that useful if FreeBSD isn't the only UNIX flavor around.... I don't know what this means. > As a > consequence, it rarely even occurs to me to see if a "port" exists -- I > fire up ncftp & go to the site where something is, get it, unpackit, & > do the usual stuff.... That's the great thing about freebsd, you can make your life as difficult as you want it to be. :) Doug -- *** Chief Operations Officer, DALnet IRC network *** *** Proud operator, designer and maintainer of the world's largest *** Internet Relay Chat server. 5,328 clients and still growing. *** Try spider.dal.net on ports 6662-4 (Powered by FreeBSD) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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