Installing problems. No Desktop.

[Lloyd Hayes]

I installed FreeBSD on an older Gateway laptop. 128 MB/ 233 MHz/ 800x600 
screen/ 6 GB Hard driver with 4 GB on the hard drive set aside for 
FreeBSD. Windows 98 SE is installed in the other 2 GB. FreeBSD appears 
to be installed correctly, but I cannot  get the KDE desktop to come up. 
In fact, all I can get is the command line. I can pull up the 
installation files. But that is pretty much it. I am very familiar with 
DOS commands, but UNIX commands appears to be nothing like them, and I 
don't know any UNIX commands. It seems that I can not pull up even the 
directory. I have managed to get my mail saying that I have incomplete 
modifications from trying to change things. I get to a point where I 
can't even figure our how to close the program, so I hit the power power 
which closes things down.

But this is frustrating, and makes a good case for why people are 
staying with Windows. In going from the old C-64/C-128 to Apple, to IBM, 
to a CP/M operating system, the system commands reminded very much the 
same. Even in going from the old GEOS (On both the C-64/C-128 or the PC) 
to them MAC, to Windows, things stayed very close to the same between 
them. Here everything is completely different. It's like going from 
English to being told to fill out a form in Chinese without ever having 
seen or heard the language.

I've installed the FreeBSD software 4 times coming to the same end. How 
do I get from this Chinese line item stuff to an environment that I can 
deal with? KDE seems to be installed, but is not coming up by default, 
nor by any other way or reason.

I've tried several things, but I tried something to manually bring up 
KDE the other day by switching to it's directory. Whatever I was doing 
was something out of the FreeBSD Handbook. I was logged in as 'root'. I 
got errors saying that I did not have permission. This puzzled me. I 
didn't think this was supposed to happen while logged in as "root".

I have version 5.2.1 which I had downloaded a couple of weeks ago.

-- 

Lloyd Hayes

Email: wyoming_antelope at yahoo.com
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