FreeBSD for the common man(or woman) (was: > upgrade 7.2

Polytropon freebsd at edvax.de
Sat Aug 8 17:55:27 UTC 2009


On Sat, 8 Aug 2009 10:46:00 -0600, Chad Perrin <perrin at apotheon.com> wrote:
> Yeah, I hate that stuff.  The GNU project is kind of like the Microsoft
> of the open source community, that way.

Be happy that there at least is an info manual. In many cases, there
is NO local documentation, neither in man or info format. The usual
cases of documentation, often found in different Linusi, but as well
in some "modern software" on FreeBSD, are:
	- bury the documentation in an arbitrary web location
	- use a Wiki for documentation
	- let the users write the documentation
	- don't document anything.

Fortunately, there are even "GUI only" projects that keep up with
the good manpage tradition. Have you ever tried "man opera" or
"man gmencoder"? On the other hand, most KDE stuff doesn't have
a manpage - of course, I can understand it. From their point of
view, the question would be: Who would want to read documentation?
Answer: Nobody. So why spend time to create it?



> Don't mess with the filesystem layout unless you *really* know what
> you're doing!

Again, my advice do read and understand "man hier". There is a
well-intended reason why things are located in certain places.



> The FHS isn't a Unix standard.  It's a Linux distributions standard.

It aims to be.



> 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.

Especially in an environment with "elevated security", there are
resons to separate things filesystem wise. File permissions and
mount options are a topic there, and symlinking across partitions
is a no-go in such settings.



> 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. 

Just have a look at how Solaris, HP-UX or AIX organize things in
terms of directories. You'll be surprised every day where you
can find stange things. :-)



> 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.

Postscript capable network printers have the advanage that they don't
need any support. PS is the default output format for printing, so
there's no need to mess around with filters. Most office class printers
even include a spooling mechanism for the printer jobs, so this
takes away more work from the OS. You simply use the system's lpr
command to shove data into the printer, and it does the rest by itself.



> 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.

It's worth mentioning that there are manpages that don't refer to a
particular binary, file, interface or function, but instead provide
information about maintenance operations and general introduction.
An example is

	% man intro

There are other manpages that give hints for compiling the system,
such as "man build", and others.



-- 
Polytropon
>From Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...


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