nickednamed said:
I'll be honest with you UNIXgod, that is all a bit over my head right now. But it is an interesting read and hopefully I'll learn something from it.
As I'm running FreeBSD as a desktop [at the moment, at least] I would be more interested in things such as boot time, and ease of configuration, plus idiot-proof design
It's good to know about Dan Bernstein:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein
Many people used qmail years ago:
http://www.lifewithqmail.org/lwq.html
Including google, hotmail and yahoo. Many use postfix (including the FreeBSD site your on now). Both sendmail and bind are the defaults for the OS but considered "long in the tooth" security wise.
Many of the so called "pragmatic" users just pipe into gmails API. which is always an option if you get sick of the configuration of setting up email services as the stack is very large.
nickednamed said:
I'm not sure, but that won't stop me looking [being an idiot and all]!
Actually my main reason for looking at things like these, and using FreeBSD in general, is to learn something. I may try this out in a VM and see how it goes.
Your not an idiot. We all start somewhere. There are many xenophobic and biased users online which get off on trolling what they don't know and worse attacking the new users. This isn't good for anyone.
Many, if not all, *BSD community participants are extremely altruistic in nature. If we've been there we want to share our experiences. Though many will give you specific areas to look into (i.e. man pages and handbook entries) vs just dumping code recipes. Look at the posts and quality of information passed from both wblock and SirDice. These members help users from their free time because they enjoy teaching and helping new users get up to speed with the OS, as well as to point out to old users like myself the simplicity of the OS which I sometimes forget. They are the gold standard we should all live up to in a community. wblock has some of the best off site info I've seen in years:
http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/
My best advice I can give you as you start to work through each piece of tech in the OS and once you get something to work and understand the "hows" and "whys" is to AUTOMATE EVERYTHING as well as understand the concept of BUILD IN ONE STEP.
To do this you will need to learn a bit about shell scripting. Some people enjoy reading Raymond's stuff when they are just starting:
http://www.catb.org/esr/
I like what Paul Graham has to say as well:
http://paulgraham.com/articles.html
Here is a classic from "Hackers and Painters":
http://paulgraham.com/avg.html
Stallman on LISP:
https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html
Of course reading pretty much anything by Brian Kernighan. In fact if you want to know shell his UNIX Programming Environment books is awesome. There are free documents on FreeBSD's site on learning
ed() which as it may seem odd will help you get a grasp of
vi() and provides a good foundation for regular expressions.
Good luck and happy hacking ~