From owner-freebsd-newbies Wed Mar 8 10:46: 0 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Received: from odin.acuson.com (odin.acuson.com [157.226.230.71]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8CE1C37B647 for ; Wed, 8 Mar 2000 10:45:57 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from djohnson@acuson.com) Received: from acuson.com ([157.226.69.47]) by odin.acuson.com (Netscape Messaging Server 3.54) with ESMTP id AAA4F92; Wed, 8 Mar 2000 10:46:12 -0800 Message-ID: <38C69F74.840D05B2@acuson.com> Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2000 10:44:04 -0800 From: David Johnson Organization: Acuson X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (X11; U; SunOS 5.5.1 sun4m) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Caleb Walker Cc: freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD References: <38C6012E.E1A8ADA5@computech-ca.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Caleb Walker wrote: > > Hello my name is Caleb Walker I am trying to learn the UNIX operating > system right now. I am a Windows NT Network Engineer in California. I > am very interested in helping others and being involved in helping > forward FreeBSD UNIX. Please let me know what I can do. Step One: Learn Unix. Notice that I didn't say "learn FreeBSD". Picking up a book on FreeBSD is great, but a book on just plain Unix is even better. You never know when the next computer you have to work on will have IRIX, Solaris, Linux or something else. You're in luck, though, because the various BSDs are closer to the atypical Unix than some other unices. Step Two: Don't fear the command line. You don't have to love it, but don't try to avoid it. You will learn much more about Unix by fiddling with it, than by watching some GUI front end do the fiddling for you. Learn vi. Learn sh and csh. Then use bash or tcsh. Step Three: Now that you've learned FreeBSD, don't get too gung-ho over it. Don't get into fights with Linux users (even if they start it). FreeBSD does not have the popularity of Linux in part because it was too low-key about itself. But taking the opposite extreme won't help either. Some of the rabid Linux advocates do more harm than good. When people ask you have FreeBSD, don't gloss over the rough spots and don't exaggerate the easy parts. Finally, don't make fun of your former MSCE colleages, or any non-Unix user. Hope some of this helps, David To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message