The FreeBSD Xperience

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Date: Sat, 10 Apr 2004 12:50:24 -0500
To: "Newbies@BSD" <freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org>

Well, since we're telling stories...

My experience with BSD began when I couldn't get Linux to work. My
father had given me a laptop to fiddle with, but it was so old that I
couldn't boot it from the CD. At work, we have a few machines just
lying around doing nothing, so I asked my boss if I could try installing
Linux on one. Bob (my boss) said that he would rather have me fiddle
with FreeBSD, since it's safer.

First I had to get the boot floppies. I decided to do the install on a
Windows machine. This should be easy, I said to myself - I'll just
download the boot images, use the imaging utility provided on the
website, and then I'll shut off Windows and never use it again. I got
the boot images and the utility without a hitch, but when it came to
copying the images to a disk, I was in for a suprise! The computer just
sat there for twenty minutes. When I tried to check on the floppies - I
went to A\: in the Windows file manager - the computer promptly crashed
and cut power to itself! Behold the power of FreeBSD!

Eventually, I found a guru who gave me the disks. For the next couple
of weeks I installed and reinstalled, fiddling with the partitions and
other shit. Eventually I got everything but X set up the way I liked
it. For some reason, I just could not get X to work. So I went back to
  my Solaris box, and just sshed whenever I needed to use the BSD
machine. This state of affairs persisted for more than a month.

Then I found another, better machine - one of the casualties of our
transfer from SPARC to i386. It had been one of the test cases for 1386
Solaris, and Bob just hadn't been able to make it work quite right... I
talked them into letting me have it. I got X to work, and fooled around
with Window Maker for awhile until I decided to get GNOME. Then my
troubles really began. After I had a GNOME configuration that I really
liked, I just copied all my .gnome* files into /usr/shar/skel/. Then I
added some new users. This is not a good idea though, because, as I
later found out, the .gnome* files have your home directory hard coded
into them for whatever reason. But it worked for awhile. I enabled
GDM, and then all hell broke loose. I spent several days blowing away
all my users, and then putting them back again. It turns out that there
was some evil config left over in, of all places, /var/tmp. Someday I
would like to write a script that 'exports' my config files properly.

I have been reading 'FreeBSD Unleashed' to help me through the install
on the second machine, and I'm at about the middle of the book. Soon
I'll setup mail and Apache. Ahaha! I've gone mad with the power (to
serve)!

-- 
--~:~\\ Jason Dusek            \\~:~://|||//||||
---~:~\\ The Hydra Project      \\~:~://|||//|||
----~:~\\ The University of Iowa \\~:~://|||//||
----
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