Re: FreeBSD for the common man(or woman) (was: > upgrade 7.2
- From: Chad Perrin <perrin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 8 Aug 2009 10:46:00 -0600
On Thu, Aug 06, 2009 at 02:56:41PM -0700, James Phillips wrote:
I was also attracted to BSD because I knew from my brief stint at
university that the BSD man-pages were actually kept up to date. Not
like the GNU system where man pages say stupid things like: "The full
documentation for dd is maintained as a Texinfo manual. If the info
and dd programs are properly installed at your site, the command:
info dd
should give you access to the complete manual.
dd (coreutils) 5.97 January 2007 DD(1)"
I actually saw text once (years ago) that basicly said: "If we receive
complaints about the quality of the man pages, they will be removed" I
have tried to use info. I don't have time to go through the info
tutorial every time I want to use a new command (think emacs-like
hyperlinking/scripting, vi-like keybindings)
Yeah, I hate that stuff. The GNU project is kind of like the Microsoft
of the open source community, that way.
Anyway, Initially, I wanted to set up a "File and everything else"
server. I don't know exactly when I installed FreeBSD 5.x, but I copied
my files of over to it March 14, 2006. I know this because I lost data:
the file creation times.
Following the FreeBSD Handbook, I got stuck on trying to get the
printer to work. The handbook was basicly instructing me to write my
own print driver! I checked the HP website: they will release the
details of the PCL language (version 4 or so) for a price. I finally
got it working by installing the Apsfiler package in the ports
collection (no, did not send the post-card yet; the print server is not
functional yet.)
After basicly using the server for my own use via ssh and FTP for a
while, I decided to try to get samba and NFS working. This time, I
narrowed the scope: Fileserving (SAMBA, NFS), Printing, and working
backups. November 18, 2007, I started my FreeBSD 6.2 installation. This
time I kept notes detailing what I had to do to configure each portion
of the system. Looking up commands I may need if things go wrong ahead
of time.
Initially, I was struggling with a chicken&egg problem with back ups: I
wanted to borrow a client computer's DVD drive. However, I wanted to
backup the client computers to the server. It was resolved by putting a
DVD burner in the server. I also made made few tweaks of the system to
better follow the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (such as symlinking
/usr/local/etc to /etc/opt).
Don't mess with the filesystem layout unless you *really* know what
you're doing!
The FHS isn't a Unix standard. It's a Linux distributions standard.
It's also not the bastion of good sense and best practices it pretends to
be. It's basically a series of political compromises between a bunch of
people who are jockeying for positions of power and making as little
change in their specific distributions as possible to consider themselves
"compliant".
FreeBSD doesn't have that problem. It uses a fairly well-organized
filesystem hierarchy based on some simple, well-tested principles of use.
It is *really* not a good idea to start moving stuff around without
knowing how FreeBSD uses its filesystem hierarchy, and it is *especially*
not a good idea to do so to try to make it conform with the Linux FHS.
FreeBSD is not Linux, after all.
In the specific case of creating /etc/opt, you shouldn't really be
damaging anything, but there's a very good reason that stuff is in
/usr/local/etc -- so that when using separate filesystems for separate
parts of the hierarchy, you don't separate the stuff installed in
/usr/local from its configuration data.
. . . and when I say "you shouldn't really be damaging anything", I use
the word "shouldn't" because I can't think of anything that'd hurt, and
*not* because I know it won't hurt anything.
I set up samba in read-only mode with little trouble. I'm not sure if I
can ever get read/write + user-level security working with win98. That
machine is slowly degrading while I try to get the fileserver working
the way I want. The last time I did a complete re-install (of win98) I
lost data due to a damaged disk that I copied the data to (and learned
that bzip2recover is a quick hack that needs to be re-written properly
according to the source code). I hope to replace windows with wine for
the most part, but wine simply installs the applications in the users'
home directory (breaking the FHS). This is only resolvable IMHO by
having wine use a real database back-end for the registry (allowing
user-level "views" of the data, while still isolating different users).
The FHS doesn't apply to FreeBSD (or any other BSD Unix, or any
commercial UNIX system, for that matter), so it's not "breaking"
anything. That's a bit like saying that Python is breaking the XHTML 1.1
standard because it doesn't use end delimiters for its code blocks; the
standard in question doesn't apply, so no standard is being broken.
So, this long story boils down to the following question:
What is that best way to use the handbook and related documentation
(like man-pages)?
I am willing to do some reading, but get distracted by irrelevant or
sometimes too low-level stuff. I want to avoid programing as much as
possible until I actually have a work-station I am comfortable playing
around with. Thinking about it in the week before posting this, I think
that part of my problem is I want to use the documentation to do the
"right thing" rather than experiment. Once I move the family's files
onto the server, it becomes essential. I won't be able to have it out
of commission for weeks at a time. I hope with the server properly set
up, win98 may even be usable again: just do a clean install every
morning! I even downloaded the Windows 7 RC so that I can be informed
when I say it sucks.
I'm really not sure how to answer this question, I'm afraid. I don't
think it's a stupid question, and I think I can understand what you mean
about your problems with getting use out of the documentation, but I
haven't had the same problems so I don't know of any quick fixes to offer
in how to get around these problems. For instance, when I installed CUPS
on a couple of computers here for the first time since I started
installing FreeBSD them, it all seemed very straightforward and I didn't
see anything that could even through hyperbole be described as involving
writing my own printer driver. I basically just set up configuration for
CUPS, and it worked -- much more easily than it ever did with Debian (my
OS of choice before I migrated stuff to FreeBSD).
Then again, I go out of my way to make sure I use network-attached
PostScript laser printers, and they tend to be very well supported by
CUPS on BSD Unix and other Unix-like OSes.
In case you're not aware of it, there's one command you should definitely
use to help when you want to look up something in a manpage and don't
know what manpage to use:
apropos
. . . or, equivalently:
man -k
If the manpage you're reading doesn't have exactly what you're looking
for, don't forget to check the SEE ALSO, and maybe the FILES, section(s).
Don't forget that `man man` will tell you stuff like how to access a
manpage in a particular section of the Unix Manual:
man n foo
. . . where "n" is the section number and "foo" is the manpage in that
section you want to read.
PS: I find it a little annoying that FreeBSD releases faster than I can
configure my computer! ;)
So do I, frankly -- because the faster they release, the faster they get
dropped from support, basically, and I still haven't gotten the knack of
figuring out which releases are going to be the extended support releases
when it comes time to pick a minor version number to install on a new
system.
--
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
Quoth Georg Hackl: "American beer is the first successful attempt at
diluting water."
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