Various FreeBSD Q.

M

micha8l

Hello :)

I haven't installed FreeBSD yet as it's totally new to me; I've got a few questions that I'm wondering if someone could kindly answer.

1. I'm coming from a Windows operating system, what should I expect from FreeBSD?

2. I'm in web development. Will I be able to use some of my favourite programs, Gimp ect, or is compatibility generally an issue in FreeBSD?

3. I've no experience with CLIs, well a little udeer Windows for killing processes and stuff, but nothing advanced. Will FreeBSD be very difficult for me to get to grips with, or does FreeBSD "hold your hand" through learning its features?

4. Can anyone recommend a good book for a beginner?

Kind Regards
Mike
 
1. CLI is totally different and much better with FreeBSD. If you install X and a window manager fancier than twm, you should have no difficulty adapting.
2. Ports, it's (almost) all in ports.
3. Difficult? Maybe at first.
4. The Handbook.
 
wblock said:
1. CLI is totally different and much better with FreeBSD. If you install X and a window manager fancier than twm, you should have no difficulty adapting.
2. Ports, it's (almost) all in ports.
3. Difficult? Maybe at first.
4. The Handbook.
Click to expand...

Thank you, I've just been reading about the port system and the base system, very intresting.

Sorry for the beginner questions I'm sure you get them all the time.

Kind Regards
 
micha8l said:
Will FreeBSD be very difficult for me to get to grips with, or does FreeBSD "hold your hand" through learning its features?
Click to expand...
It certainly won't hold your hand. As a matter of fact most *nix systems are quite unforgiving. If you type rm -rf * it will delete all your files, no questions, no "are you sure?". They will be gone.

That said, getting down to the lower levels of computing does mean you will learn a lot. About networking, services, protocols. Knowledge that will help you immensely.
 
Well, I'd used DOS in a past life, so things like:
http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/unixhelp/DOStoUNIX.html
&
http://bhami.com/rosetta.html
were helpful for me, but the [post=94704]above linked[/post] handbook is one of the best resources available. And your man(1) pages.

More basic links: http://www.wilsonmar.com/1opsys.htm
http://sunsite.utk.edu/UNIX-help/commands.html
http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/DOS-Win-to-Linux-HOWTO.html

Most of the simple Linux commands also apply to FreeBSD (ls(1), mv(1), ln(1), &cet, &cet), though the Linux kids have this rather ugly habit of using shells/bash for everything, so be aware that even short script examples may require editing or using a non-base shell.

Real administrative tasks tend to be quite different. Adding users (easy: adduser(8), powerful: pw(8)), installing webservers and databases (or most any 3rd-party application: pkg_add(1) xor ports(7)), configuring startup (rc.conf(5), rc(8)) are all pretty much nothing like Windows & only vaguely akin to Linux. Be careful out there.
 
@SirDice that does sound very exciting to me and partly one the reasons I do wish to use FreeBSD is to learn more.

@vermaden thank you that article did answer many questions.

Would it be right to assume that in the short-term I'm going to have some trouble, but in the long term FreeBSD can be simpler than windows in regards to updating, driver support etc?
 
micha8l said:
Would it be right to assume that in the short-term I'm going to have some trouble, but in the long term FreeBSD can be simpler than windows in regards to updating, driver support etc?
Click to expand...

No, you can't assume that. You can only assume that it will be different, however different means just different not bad.
 
Well thanks for all the replys - I can see you're a very nice community here and I'll try not to ask too many newbie questions from now, I'll stick to the manuals for a while :)

Kind Regards
 
Be prepared to make mistakes. Learn from them and just start over.

You will be reinstalling your system several times before you come to grips with it ;)
 
micha8l said:
@vermaden thank you that article did answer many questions.

Would it be right to assume that in the short-term I'm going to have some trouble, but in the long term FreeBSD can be simpler than windows in regards to updating, driver support etc?
Click to expand...

In short words, yes.

You will have to learn a lot of new things, an other philosophy of how FreeBSD system is designed and how it works, it takes time, at the begin it may be hard, especially for someone who comes from Windows background, but look at this this way, You do not have any bad habits and linuxism taken from Linux systems, You have a clean start, and that is very positive and encouraging at the same time.

Good luck with your step learning curve.
 
I can assure you that learning FreeBSD is not going to be very easy. I was using ubuntu before I was using FreeBSD and I was reasonably comfortable with CLI also.
The difference would be how much the OS exposes itself to you. When it comes to windows it gives you a neat GUI which is very suitable for a set of people (esp. beginners). Linux distros like ubuntu also tend to expose itself less to the user; even though you can tweak it to a great extent it is still beginner friendly. On the other hand you would find FreeBSD as a do it yourself kind of system where you get the opportunity to learn and understand your system as a whole; of course there is a steep learning curve associated with it; not to say, after you start understanding the system you will love your machine. If you want a beginner distro for freebsd :)P) then go grab PC-BSD.

As for books I would suggest "Absolute Freebsd" to start with and "The FreeBSD Handbook" for understanding; you also might find it very informative to hang around in this forum checking out the discussions.

I also recommend against directly installing FreeBSD in your development machine (hoping that you can get started with FBSD quickly). First install it in a VM and try customizing it a little bit. When you feel comfortable install it in your main machine.
 
micha8l said:
2. I'm in web development. Will I be able to use some of my favourite programs, Gimp ect, or is compatibility generally an issue in FreeBSD?
Click to expand...

FreeBSD cannot run Windows software natively. However, certain software is made to support multiple platforms -- for instance, GIMP does run on FreeBSD, so you will be able to use that without any problems.

OTOH, I think you'll very quickly run into a program that you're familiar with from Windows that won't run on FreeBSD. Usually you'll be able to find a program doing the same or similar job that works on FreeBSD. Sometimes you'll find this new program better, other times you'll find it worse than its Windows counterpart. If you tell us what kind of software you need, we can tell you what's available there for you.

In my opinion, command-line utilities are generally more powerful on FreeBSD, while GUI-based applications tend to work better in the Windows world.

That said, you can use FreeBSD as a GUI-based desktop just fine -- I've been running FBSD on my desktop happily for about two years now. You're simply entering a different world with different advantages and disadvantages.
 
I'm sure I initially dual-booted (win98, freebsd v5) ... of course I had backups (win98 shareware
bootit dual-boot manager which can also do
backups to image files).
 
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