Greetings and salutaions..

[Benjamin Walkenhorst]

On Sun, 22 Feb 2004 18:46:17 -0500
"Mr_H" <Mr_H at comcast.net> wrote:

> Howdy everyone,
> 
>     I have finally decided to send a post.  It's been a few months
>     since I have sucessfully installed FreeBSD 4.8 using the boot
>     floppies and the ftp install method.  It took several attempts to
>     do it correctly.  Since that wonderfull day, I have met many great
>     people and, using a unix based IRC client has opened up a world of
>     possibilities.  I too had no experience, except for MS products,

When I first came to Unix-like systems, I found them very difficult to
use, too. But I can be a tough customer. =) And all those wonderful
things I could and can do with it made realize just how much windows
sucks. =)

>     and have had an apparently tough time getting acquainted with the
>     'CLI',  which is why I decided to write. I see several people
>     having the same issue(s) I once had.  All I can say to other
>     newbies is to simply stick with it.  I spent approximately 2

I decided to spend some money and get a good book to introduce me to the
command-line and shell-scripting. 
And it still took me a lot of time. I just learnt what I needed to know
to accomplish a given task, and so I learnt to use the system step by
step. 
I've been using Linux for more than three years now, FreeBSD for about 7
to 8 months, and I still learn a lot of things. 
Someone once said "Unix *is* simple - it just takes a genius to
understand its simplicity". I'd rather say it takes a lot of time to
understand its simplicity (not wanting to call myself a genius *g*).
That goes for the command-line as well - once you got the basic
vocabulary and the 'grammar', it's very simple and comfortable to use. I
prefer the command-line for many tasks, since it's often faster. Or I am
faster via command-line, anyway, since I'm a very good typist. =)

>     horribly frustrating weeks trying to set up a gateway. Without the
>     support of my IRC peers, and some much needed advice, I may have
>     fallen by the way side and resorted back to M$. 

I, too, was frustrated, and more than once. If I had started with
FreeBSD instead of SuSE, I might have given up. But I spent 45 Euro on
SuSE 7.0 back then, which was a lot of money for me at the time. I just
don't wanted that money to be lost. =) Later, it became a question of
honour - I just could not stand the thought of leaving the problem
unsolved. Sometimes I would just let my machine stand around for weeks
or just use windows (which I still keep installed for playing games),
but sooner or later I would look at the problem again, and often to find
the solution quite obvious. =)
Frustration is something you have to learn to deal with if you're using
Unix. But as you gain experience and skills in problem-solving, problems
turn from annoyances to challenges. With each problem you overcome you
know your system a little better, until one day you sit down at a
windows-machine and make stupid mistakes like forgetting to copy marked
text to the clipboard manually or try to roll up windows or use "/" as a
directory delimiter on the command-line. I've had all of these
already... =)



>     I now have a home
>     network, a personal webserver, and a new, clearer understanding of
>     computers in general.  The best part of it all is that it was
>     free!!  (minus the obligatory legwork) My understandings only
>     continue to improve each day.

Eh, well... =) Just as I said. =) I hope you enjoy FreeBSD as much as I
do. After using SuSE for about one year, I tried Debian for some time,
but when I tried to set up my ISDN-card manually, I blew up my system,
so I returned to SuSE (the only time I ever gave up on a problem like
that). Then, in summer 2003 I tried out FreeBSD 5.0.
Since I had gotten used to configure SuSE almost entirely manually, I
liked FreeBSD a lot, since its configuration files are a lot tidier and
... reasonable than SuSE's. 
But some things did not work, my ISDN-card, my TV-card did not work
entirely, I had to load third-party-modules for my soundcard... ;-/ So I
stuck with SuSE.
Then I tried Slackware and loved it immediately, mainly for being quite
BSD-like, so it became my primary system.
In december, I tried out FreeBSD 5.2, and now it is my primary system. I
also use NetBSD on my second machine, which I use as an
internet-gateway, NFS-server and some basic explorations of Unix'
networking-capabilities, since I don't have much experience in that
area.
FreeBSD is a great system indeed, easy to use, easy to configure - once
you know how it works - and all in all a lot of fun. 

If you run into more trouble you'll find the mailing-list to be very
supportive and friendly. For technical questions you should turn to
freebsd-questions.

Kind regards,

Benjamin

-- 
If you want to know what god thinks of money, just look at the people
he gave it to.
                -- Dorothy Parker