need more info

[Kevin Kinsey]

Roland Smith wrote:

>On Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 12:56:37PM -0400, Nathansm at aol.com wrote:
>
>  
>
>>What exactly is FreeBSD? 
>>    
>>
>
>See the freeBSD homepage: http://www.freebsd.org/
>
>  
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>>Can it be used by the computer beginner or do you  
>>need to be a very knowledgable computer user?
>>    
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>
>Some knowledge definitely comes in handy. For an absolute beginner it
>can be quite a learning curve. Reed the FreeBSD Handbook, especially the
>section about installation:
>
>http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install.html
>
>  
>

I would add that if you are able to climb the learning curve, you
will probably find it a rewarding experience.

FreeBSD is highly customizable and easily breakable if you
don't do things right.  OTOH, if you follow the (well-written!)
instructions, you end up with a highly reliable and usable
system for most general purposes.  If you need a computer
for a specific purpose, you should do a lot, I repeat, a lot
of research before deciding to use FreeBSD for your
purpose.

I'll clue you in: gaming machine?  not likely, especially for
a beginner and some games.  Web/Mail/File/DHCP/FTP/NAT/Firewall
server? Nothing better for the price, for the most part, religious
beliefs excepted, of course.  (Do you know what 'Linux' is?  FreeBSD
is _not_ Linux, although there are many similarities....)

>>Is it compatible with my computer?  It is a compaq presario 5000
>>series with an AMD Duron 750MHz processor.
>>    
>>
>
>Probably yes. The processor should not be a problem, but other devices
>like network- or graphics chip tend to vary in brand name computers, so
>it's impossible to tell.
>
>Roland
>  
>

He's right, but he forgot to add "without your telling us
about all your hardware". 

If you read the website carefully, at some point you'll probably find
the page(s) that talk about hardware compatability.

Also, the most important URI for a FreeBSD user would be:

http://www.freebsd.org/handbook

(He did mention this, more or less).

Although the community is fairly friendly, we're a little
picky about who those friends are; and if you don't RTFM (Google
for it ;-) no one is going to shed too many tears with you when
things take a turn for the worse.  The good news is that there
is usually a light at the end of the tunnel, and with FreeBSD
it is not an oncoming Train (read "hefty license fee", "virus",
"blue screen of death", "need to reformat and reinstall the system".

If you want to try FreeBSD, be prepared to read the instruction pages. 
By the dozens....

Respectfully,

Kevin Kinsey

P.S.  I would mention that in our office we have a
Presario 5150 running at 300 Mhz, with stock hardware
and no issues except we occasionally have a system "lock up"
which is not common in FreeBSD; we suspect a failing HDD
controller, but it could be an issue with XFree/Xorg and we
have yet to spend enough time on it to discover the real cause.
(The system is used by a part time employee as a workstation
and is not "mission critical", per se.  The hardware is a little
old, at least in our case.