Newbie Experience (As promised)

[Arindam]

> Dear Very Helpful and Informative FreeBSD List,
>
> I installed FreeBSD on Friday Night and tried very hard to get it all working.  My initial X problem actually fixed itself (you can imagine my surprise), however, even with that, our computer is useless as a desktop (or anything else) without an internet connection.  My hardware is unsupported and despite my best efforts, I decided it would be better to expedite the process and I installed Mepis Linux.
>

Which version of FreeBSD did you install.

> I would hardly describe it the way another newbie did one week ago.  It was a good challenge.  I'll wait until I'm a better administrator and there's more support for hardware I might have.
>
> The only really annoying thing was that I perpetually had trouble mounting my usb flash drive.  I think this was a filesystem problem.
>

What was the problem?

I am a newbie too ... my second week on FreeBSD. I could manage
mounting my 1G Memorex traveldrive without a bother. The usbd daemon
is configured to run on boot. Depending on which USB port I connect it
to, I do something like:

mount -t msdosfs [-o ro] /dev/da0s1 <my_mount_point>

I prefer to use "-o ro" whenever I mount a file system on some
directory and I don't want to take any kind of risks.



> Thanks for any help you've offered,
> Joel
>
> Joel J. Adamson
> Arlington, MA
>
>

Just to share it with you. I had a couple of other fixes to do. I
could not get my AMD PcNet 97c79x ethernet card to work with my
FreeBSD 6.1 installation, although the device could be detected and
configured through sysinstall / ifconfig. My packets just won't get
past the LAN card on to the wire. So I swapped it with another card I
had on a different PC which dual boots to RHEL and Windows. That is a
Realtek card, and it worked fine with FreeBSD.


The other issue I faced was with configuring my old 3-button Logitech
mouse. But even that works now on X - some configuration changes. I
disabled moused by removing moused entries from /etc/rc.conf - I felt
it was making the mouse freeze in the X term.


Get some of the window managers - they help. Afterstep / XFCE / FVWM
are good points to start.

Cheers,
Andy