Newbie Experience (As promised)

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2006-09-17 12:22, Joel Adamson <trashbird1240 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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.

Well, maybe not completely useless.  You can still grab packages
from the network, using another system, transfer them to the
target installation with a CD-ROM disk or other medium and
install without a network connection.

In general, though, a FreeBSD system without any sort of network
connection is (IMHO) something like a 'crippled' computer.  In
fact, these days, *any* desktop system without some sort of
access to a network is crippled in one or more ways.

> My hardware is unsupported and despite my best efforts, I
> decided it would be better to expedite the process and I
> installed Mepis Linux.

What hardware are you talking about?  Maybe it *is* supported,
but it was not very obvious how to configure or set it all up.

If you still want to give FreeBSD a try, please try to install
it, then run the following commands, saving their output to a
file and find a way to post these files to us (i.e. use a floppy
disk or something else, like a USB stick):

	# dmesg
	# pciconf -lv

> 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.

Mounting filesystems is probably not as intuitive or automatic as
it could have been.  If you give FreeBSD another try, as I said
above, then you can try showing us the output of:

	# usbdevs -v

Run this command when logged in as `root', save its output to a
file and post this file to us as a text attachment.  We'll help
you with the rest of the things needed to discover more about
your USB flash disk and how to mount it.

> Thanks for any help you've offered,
> Joel

You're most welcome.  You know how to find us if you need more
help with FreeBSD either some time soon now, or later :-)

Regards,
Giorgos