Installing problems. No Desktop.

[Hendrik Hasenbein]

Lloyd Hayes wrote:
> 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.

The commands are very similar at the command line, but you invoke a 
directory listing with 'ls' instead of 'dir'. Copy and move just lost 
their vocals ('cp', 'mv').

> 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.

Your situation is more like being stuck in MSDOS 6.0 before starting 
Windows 3.1(1). You have to start up the X-Windows system.

'XFree86 -configure' generates you a template config for your system.
After you have moved your config to /etc/X11 you should be able to fire 
up kde by entering 'kdm'.

If all is successful you can enter the command in /etc/ttys for 
automatic startup. There is a template line for xdm.

> 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".

It is possible to restrict even root for security reasons.

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

Hendrik