FreeBSD Cert

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Wed, 27 May 2020 15:36:40 +0000, Brandon helsley wrote:
>I don't know anything about computers but got freebsd as a project to
>learn as much as possible. If I were to get involved does "teaching
>the ropes" at all possibly include learning other things like
>networking and possibly and hopefully learning how to port software?

Consider to toy with something related to the domains of your interest.
You might use a desktop environment that provides a GUI to set up a
connection with the Internet. You could replace the GUI by writing your
own shell script. This might not make much sense when using DHCP, so
you might need to find something else.

Shell scripts for the default login shell are a good starting point. If
a script works with this shell, you might want to make it portable to
run on different shells.

When I started with computers I owned a C64 a MIDI interface and a
synthesizer. Somebody has written a short Assembler program to
receive the synthesizer's sound bank, to save it on a floppy disk and
to load and transmit a sound bank. One of the first things I did, was
disassembling the program and commenting the assembler commands by using
good documentations [1]. Then I expanded the Assembler code to keep two
sound banks in RAM and to share sounds between the two sound banks, to
get a new sound bank. I also added a feature to rename the sounds.
That's not much, but I learned a lot about binary numbers, hex numbers,
MIDI software standards, MIDI hardware, computer hardware, interrupts,
how to design a program and fortunately programming on the lowest
level that time even without a macro assembler.

[1] Probably the only important documentation regarding Assembler was
"Commodore 64 & 128 Maschinensprache für Einsteiger" Data Becker