Date: Sun, 29 Oct 2000 11:14:39 -0500 (EST) From: Jaime <jaime@malkav.snowmoon.com> To: "nathan ." <neonlights_@hotmail.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: interested in freeBSD Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0010291059570.77227-100000@malkav.snowmoon.com> In-Reply-To: <F121HwEAPcDvk7eOdU800000e04@hotmail.com>
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On Sun, 29 Oct 2000, nathan . wrote: > i am interested in using Unix. At this moment i am operating on windows 98. > Could you possibly inform me of weather this is for me. I am interested in > learning programming etc, will this help??? Given what you've said, I should first warn you to buy another, seperate computer. When I first started learning how to install and manage Unix, I was only familiar with MacOS and a tiny bit of a VMS mainframe at my university. I bought a 486dx2/66 with 16MB of RAM and 212MB of hard drive space. I installed NetBSD 1.1 by hand, one floppy disk at a time. Two weeks later, I had a bootable system with a graphical interface. It didn't run as well as my Mac, so I didn't keep it. But that was a very intensive two weeks of study. These days, I'd suggest shelling out $200-$300 for a cheap Pentium system with at least 32MB of RAM and 1GB of HD space. An ethernet card and/or modem is a must. If your current computer has an ethernet card, buy a hub (a small one will cost about $40) and connect the two computers together. The first step after buying the hardware is to set some simple goals for yourself. Here's my recommendation: - Get the new computer to boot FreeBSD. Install it, make an account for yourself. Reboot after installing it. Login to both the root account and your new account. - Install XFree86 so that you can play with a graphical interface. This is a bigger step than it sounds like. It took me a full week to do the first time. - Now that you have a graphical interface, make it "pretty". This is a good chance to learn how the packages system works. Use the packages system to install xv (a basic graphics viewer) and a window manager. (See http://www.plig.org/xwinman for screen pictures of different window managers.) Play with this for a while. Its a pretty intensive step. - Now that you have a handle on the graphics, work on the networking. Configure your network settings so that the computer can "see" the Windows 98 computer when they're both connected to the hub. If you have a larger network that you connect to, ask its administrators for advise on how to proceed. You can use the hub's uplink port to connect both computers to the network at the same time. - Since you wanted to learn how to program, play around with your system's software now. Install different editors and other programming tools and try them all out. Find the ones that you like the most. I usually use xemacs and vi (xemacs is a package, vi is installed by default). The programming class at my job usually uses pico (installed when you install the package "pine"). - Write a simple program in whatever language you want. You have shell, perl, C, TCL, and more installed by default. You can install BASIC, Java, and others from the packages system. - Install Netscape, an ICQ/AIM/etc. program, and so forth and play around with networking stuff. This should be an easy step by now. - Install a few games and enjoy. My favorit is xkobo and its in the packages. At this point, you're probably not going to need that Windows 98 computer very often. Its still good for a few games and anything that requires printing, but the FreeBSD system should be able to do the rest and do it better. After that, you should be able to do a lot of stuff. Programming, web browsing, running a server for Windows computers, and more. Then you can explore what else is possible. If the above steps look odd or hard, make your own goals. Just keep subscribed to this mailing list. When you hit a problem, someone in here probably knows the answer. Good luck. Jaime To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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