A newbie here - not to tech, but to FBSD. AIX support was my job back in the day, and I just decided, out of the blue, to see what Unix has evolved into over the years. My daily driver has been Debian, with a Mac for routine Interneting.
So, my first task was to RTFM. I downloaded the very comprehensive handbook and almost sent it to the printer then realized that it was almost a thousand pages! My test machine is an old Mac Pro Trashcan, and was selected just because it was empty and sitting on the shelf. Normally, trying to load a foreign OS onto any Mac hardware is not recommended as a newbie learning process, as they will almost always present some oddball hardware that is not supported or documented. In fact, when the cast-off system arrived a couple of years ago, I fought with AMD drivers for a pair of days when I tried to install Debian. It finally worked, but was definitely not plug and play.
To my surprise, even with my knowing nothing about the intricacies of FBSD, by following the handbook carefully, I installed the OS from a memstick, then video drivers, then EMACS just as a test of loading a program, then Xorg. And it worked.
Well, sort of. When it booted into the GUI I was presented with the ugliest and least usable desktop that I have ever seen. Then I realized that I was looking at raw Xorg - a utility that is autoinstalled with Linux when a desktop is loaded. Installing XFCE4 and goodies, got it up to a nice looking GUI console. Not much on the system yet, but it definitely works - a real surprise on this oddball Mac.
So to my question. The manual has a few errors. Actually, I think they are not actually errors, but probably situations where the OS has been upgraded and the changes have not flowed down to the book. So far they are not stumbling blocks, just needing some advice from Chatgpt or a google search. So, is there a place on the website for these little glitches to be reported for future inclusion?
Thanks all.
So, my first task was to RTFM. I downloaded the very comprehensive handbook and almost sent it to the printer then realized that it was almost a thousand pages! My test machine is an old Mac Pro Trashcan, and was selected just because it was empty and sitting on the shelf. Normally, trying to load a foreign OS onto any Mac hardware is not recommended as a newbie learning process, as they will almost always present some oddball hardware that is not supported or documented. In fact, when the cast-off system arrived a couple of years ago, I fought with AMD drivers for a pair of days when I tried to install Debian. It finally worked, but was definitely not plug and play.
To my surprise, even with my knowing nothing about the intricacies of FBSD, by following the handbook carefully, I installed the OS from a memstick, then video drivers, then EMACS just as a test of loading a program, then Xorg. And it worked.
Well, sort of. When it booted into the GUI I was presented with the ugliest and least usable desktop that I have ever seen. Then I realized that I was looking at raw Xorg - a utility that is autoinstalled with Linux when a desktop is loaded. Installing XFCE4 and goodies, got it up to a nice looking GUI console. Not much on the system yet, but it definitely works - a real surprise on this oddball Mac.
So to my question. The manual has a few errors. Actually, I think they are not actually errors, but probably situations where the OS has been upgraded and the changes have not flowed down to the book. So far they are not stumbling blocks, just needing some advice from Chatgpt or a google search. So, is there a place on the website for these little glitches to be reported for future inclusion?
Thanks all.
