Installong screenshots

[Malcolm Fitzgerald]

On 26/03/2006, at 2:16 AM, Michael M. wrote:

> But I speak as an not-disinterested bystander.  I'm expecting delivery
> of a new machine next week, and I want to try my hand at installing
> FreeBSD.  (I have tried once before, but failed due to disk geometry
> errors I couldn't figure out how to solve.)  So I've been reading
> through some of the documentation on-and-off, and lurking here, just to
> get prepared -- and, um, psyched.  :-)


I had a similar problem. I solved it by going to the HDD manufacturer's 
web site, searching for the model number and using the information 
found in the tech sheets. The data was very different to that being 
guessed by the partition tool. Have had no problems since.

You may have more experience than me. I'd previously only installed 
systems that set up the window manager for me. What I discovered was 
that FreeBSD installation is very simple. However, getting a window 
manager set up and configuring the box to do what I wanted (printers, 
networks, USB thumb drives, extra CD drive, apache, PHP, mySQL) is 
confusing and laborious.

It's a catch22 situation. If you know that you need to configure 
HOSTS/CUPS/X/etc then you probably know where to find them. And in my 
case, once it's set up I don't want to remember how to do it. I was 
looking for a how-to guide that would walk me through the process of 
setting up a machine that would be used as a desktop box. I want to use 
it for web site building, so I want to set up apache, mysql and php. 
The documentation is directed at users with some background with 
computers. I wanted documentation that presumed that I'd been raised by 
wolves: I'm not stupid, its just that I have no background knowledge.

Any pointers to BSD documentation written for people raised by wolves 
would be appreciated.

malcolm