Newbie Needing Help

[Alejandro Imass]

On Sun, May 8, 2011 at 8:17 PM, John or Judy Hixson
<johnorjudy at earthlink.net> wrote:
> At the risk of being told to get out of here and never come back (until you know enough to not need to come back), I need help on some very elementary stuff. I haven't found anywhere else to ask these questions and am therefore taking my chances.
>


Hey John welcome to FreeBSD. Good honest questions are almost always
answered. If you try to be a smart ass your newbiness will shine right
through and people will avoid you. But making simple honest questions
like you've done will get you help here for sure.

FreeBSD is much like any Unix so may I suggest you first read on some
generic Unix, and mostly anything in that respect will apply to
FreeBSD, Linux and any and all Unixes, mostly anyway.

The first need to change is your Windoze vocabulary, so the "command
line" is called a "shell". Next you will need to eventually master a
text editor. The are literally hundreds of text-editor in the Unix
world but there are two predominant editor cultures: the vi guys and
the Emacs people.

<culutural note>
In Unix, freeBSD and the Linux world there seem to be these
tribal/religious wars about things: vi vs. emacs, gnome vs. kde, MySQL
v.s PostgreSQL, anything vs. sendmail, top posting vs. bottom posting,
etc. etc. etc. In almost everything you will find zealots in the *NIX
world.
</cultural note>

I am an Emacs fan myself, but you will need to learn vi regardless of
the editor you later decide to use. This is because vi is installed as
part of the base system in almost all *nix flavors. You will probably
even need vi to configure your base system in order to install
anything else, so do yourself a favor and get a vi tutorial. The same
goes with pagers: "less" is is better than "more" (pun intended) but
more will probably be part of any Unix system whereas less will
probably need to installed unless you are in the Linux world where
less is actually more, or is it less ? ;-)

Anyway, get yourself a tutorial and soft introduction on Unix in
general, and on vi so you can move around. I think that Chapter 3 of
the FBSD Handbook does a great job:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/basics.html

Good luck,

--
Alejandro Imass