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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mira.net.au!news.netspace.net.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.Hawaii.Edu!news.caldera.com!enews.sgi.com!newshub1.home.com!news.home.com!news1.best.com!nntp2.ba.best.com!not-for-mail From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: The FreeBSD mini-faq - a semi-monthly publication Date: Tue, 24 Jun 1997 06:02:00 -0700 Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM Lines: 316 Message-ID: <33AFC548.167EB0E7@FreeBSD.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: time.cdrom.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="------------794BDF32446B9B3D2781E494" X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01 (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2-STABLE i386) Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:43407 This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --------------794BDF32446B9B3D2781E494 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit -- - Jordan Hubbard FreeBSD core team / Walnut Creek CDROM. --------------794BDF32446B9B3D2781E494 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; name="freebsd-minifaq" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline; filename="freebsd-minifaq" --------------------------------------------- General FreeBSD Information - Periodic Posting Last Updated: June 16th, 1997 --------------------------------------------- This mini-FAQ attempts to point out various important FreeBSD facts that many newcomers to USENET may be unaware of. It is posted once a month or whenever I feel like it. Questions sort-of-answered in this guide: o Where can I find more general information on FreeBSD? o Is USENET the best place to get my questions answered? o Where do I get information about important FreeBSD events? o What are the FreeBSD mailing lists? o Any good books on FreeBSD? o Where do I get FreeBSD? o Is FreeBSD a good Internet server solution? o Any examples of FreeBSD being an Internet server? o Which is "better", FreeBSD or Linux or NetBSD or NT or ...? o Is FreeBSD really free? How and why do you guys do this? o Waaah! Something is broken! How do I get it fixed? -- Q. Where can I find more general information on FreeBSD? A. Always good resources are the Handbook (http://www.freebsd.org/handbook) and FAQ (http://www.freebsd.org/FAQ) documents. Want to know how to dual-boot your FreeBSD system? How to use the NT boot manager? How to build a new kernel? All of these points and many more are covered in the Handbook and the FAQ, so please give them a read before asking questions that may already be answered there. -- Q. Is USENET the best place to get my questions answered? If not, where do I get help? A. USENET is actually a bad place to ask for help, generally speaking, though some of FreeBSD's volunteers do go far out of their way in trying to answer at least some of the questions posted here. Most of FreeBSD's support folks do not, however, even read USENET due to an extreme lack of time and the fact that the signal-to-noise ratio of USENET is generally terrible, so the very best way of getting help is to send email to freebsd-questions@freebsd.org. Please do NOT send questions directly to project members (like me!) since, in so doing, you only deny all of the other approximately 700 questions mailing list subscribers the chance to answer your question and can only delay your getting an answer. Also, most of us in the project already receive well over 500 messages a day and we're likely to simply delete your question if we don't have time to answer (which is a lot of the time). -- Q. Where do I get information about important FreeBSD events, like upcoming release dates and such? A. Please subscribe to freebsd-announce@freebsd.org by sending mail to majordomo@freebsd.org. This is a very low-traffic mailing list and should be subscribed to by anyone interested in keeping up to date on what FreeBSD is up to. Q. That's nice, but I'm not much of an email sort of person. Don't you have something more snazzy which I can read over a burrito at lunch? A. Ah, you want the FreeBSD Newsletter then. Subscriptions are free, and you can register for one by filling out the registration form during your initial installation or, if you skipped that step, by visiting http://www.freebsd.org/register.html The newsletter is published by Walnut Creek CDROM and will be sent out about 3-4 times a year, or whenever we have some extra energy. Contents for the newsletter are provided by the FreeBSD user base and contributions are always welcome - just send email to newsletter@FreeBSD.org if you'd like to contact the editor (me!). -- Q. Are there other FreeBSD related mailing lists like this? A. Yes. Please visit: http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/eresources:mail.html It covers the full range of available mailing lists and, more importantly, the appropriate subject material for each. PLEASE READ THIS! People don't generally appreciate off-topic postings in the wrong mailing lists, and reading the mailing list charters will acquaint you with the do's and don'ts of each list. Since most lists have thousands of members, and nobody likes embarrassing him or herself in front of thousands of people, it's really a good idea to make sure you're using the right mailing list for the right purpose before you send stuff to it. -- Q. Are there any good books on FreeBSD? A. Walnut Creek CDROM (http://www.cdrom.com) sells "The Complete FreeBSD", basically an installation guide and set of manual pages which comes with two CDs inside. If you've never installed FreeBSD before, this isn't a bad reference. In Japan, you have almost an embarrassment of riches with at least 3 books on FreeBSD that I know of. There are also books on FreeBSD in Chinese, published in Taiwan. Please see the Handbook section on books for more information (this is a rapidly moving target and I won't even try to keep the mini-faq up to date in this regard since the Handbook does it already). -- Q. Where do I get FreeBSD? Can I get it on CD, floppies, DAT, punched cards or paper tape? A. There are two popular ways of getting FreeBSD: Over the net and on CD, the details for both of which are covered at: http://www.freebsd.org/where.html As for floppies, DAT, punched cards or paper tape, we've never found anyone masochistic enough to try and sell FreeBSD distributions on these media so you're probably out of luck (and please don't ask us to send you 80 floppies in the mail - we'll only laugh at you). Q. Isn't it cruel to laugh at the disadvantaged? Not everyone has an Internet connection or can afford a CD, you know! You sound like an elitist boob, to me. A. Life can be cruel that way, yes. Better get used to it. -- Q. Is FreeBSD a good Internet server solution? What makes it so great? A. FreeBSD is an excellent Internet server solution, heck, TCP/IP itself first came to UNIX through BSD and, to many researchers, BSD remains the definitive reference platform for it. So if networking's what you want, you've come to the right place with FreeBSD. See http://www.freebsd.org/welcome.html for a better synopsis of all this. -- Q. Talk is cheap - do you have any actual examples of people doing Internet services with FreeBSD? A. You bet. Visit ftp://ftp.cdrom.com if you'd like to see the busiest general FTP server on the Internet - it's running FreeBSD. Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com) are also serious FreeBSD users, along with many others. Visit http://www.freebsd.org/gallery.html for more information on some of the people using FreeBSD commercially. -- Q. Which is "better", FreeBSD or Linux or NetBSD or NT or ...? A. Ahhh, we love it when this question comes up. In fact, some of us may someday join monasteries just so that we can spend as much of our time as possible in quiet contemplation of this important question. As a question, it is surely ranked above all others for its sheer brilliance, relevance to everyday life and, indeed, its expression of the sheer totality of universe as we know it. Q. That's very nice, but aren't you avoiding the question? A. Yes. Q. Why? It's a simple question and a lot of people would like to know! A. I know that, grasshopper, but it's one of those questions without a real answer, like the sound of one hand clapping or the essence of "Mu." In the ongoing Maelstrom of development surrounding all of the operating systems in question, their relative merits are constantly changing things and very subjective besides - any given feature of OS X may be totally irrelevant to one user but of critical importance to another, and different trade-offs are made by each OS in pursuit of the goals that its users feel to be important. Q. So you're not going to answer the question? A. No. Only YOU can answer the question, given your specific needs and likes/dislikes. I like FreeBSD and feel it to be superior or I'd be running something else myself. Your own mileage may, as they say, vary. And with the exception of all but NT, the OSes in question are FREE so you can evaluate each before making a decision. What more could you ask? More to the point, expecting to be spoon-fed your answers in life is both unrealistic and stunts your growth besides, so put the time and energy into installing all the ones you're interested in and then choose for yourself. The respective developers of each free OS have given you their stuff for free, and at considerable personal effort, so the very least you can do is be willing to exert a little effort yourself in evaluating what they're providing you. Q. Gee, thanks for the lecture. A. You're entirely welcome. -- Q. Is FreeBSD really free? How and why do you guys do this?? A. Yes, it's really free. We do it by donating all of our time and otherwise abandoning any pretenses of having actual lives. As to why we do it, well, that's harder to define but it's probably reasonable to say that most of us do it because we love UNIX, Berkeley UNIX in particular, and we feel it's worth our time and effort to keep it alive. Most of us do not want to be writing applications in Visual Basic to feed ourselves come the new millennium, and this is one good way of forestalling that terrible fate. -- Q. Waaah! Something is broken! How do I get it fixed?! WAAAAAAHHHH!! A. Well first off, calm down. Nobody can understand a word you're saying while you're blubbering like that! Second, it would help if you could now describe the problem to us, taking special care to note the following facts: o Which version of FreeBSD it is you're talking about. At least half of the bug reports we receive concern problems which have already been fixed. There are still users running FreeBSD 2.0 out there, for example, and that was released in December of '94 (yeesh). We really do need to know what FreeBSD version you're running in any bug report we receive. (``uname -a'' is your friend). o A description of the problem and whether or not it's a new problem or one which has existed since the system's initial installation. If it is a new problem, try and also list any additional events which occurred at around the time that the problem first appeared. A significant percentage of the problem reports we receive are not, in fact, problems with FreeBSD so much as they are acts of misconfiguration by confused system admins and the more we know about what might have led up to the problem's appearance, the better our chances of spotting the real cause. o The steps a support person might take in trying to reproduce the problem, assuming that it's reproducible. o If a fix is known, an attached diff is always much appreciated and, assuming it's not a bogus diff, will greatly accelerate the resolution of your problem report. You should also be very clear on the fact that the people doing the tech support on the other end are doing it for free, and shouting at them or otherwise making strident demands will only result in their rightfully deciding that you're some kind of mad dog which bites those who feed it and they'll stop feeding you. Nobody likes having a problem with their system, and it's obviously a frustrating experience for you if you're unlucky enough to be experiencing a nasty difficulty, but that still doesn't excuse you from being civil and you're expected to remember that regardless of any frustration you may be feeling. Be professional and FreeBSD's tech support will gladly return the favor. All those necessary preliminaries out of the way (bad experience having made us cautious where all of the above is concerned), there are two ways of contacting the tech support folks: 1. Send email to questions@freebsd.org The questions answered here are also archived and searchable from http://www.freebsd.org/search.html - you might do a quick keyword search before asking your question on the off-chance that it's already been answered there (and you'd be surprised). 2. If you have a more formal bug report to file, e.g. you're sure this is some sort of error with FreeBSD and not simply a "how do I ..." sort of situation, then you should use the send-pr command (``man 1 send-pr'') or, if you're more of a fan of HTML-based interfaces, visit: http://www.freebsd.org/send-pr.html This will assign your problem report a unique ID# which will be sent to you by return email. You should reference this PR# in any follow-up correspondence to us, the PR mechanism also ensuring that you are kept informed of the PR's progress up to final resolution. -- --------------794BDF32446B9B3D2781E494--