Updated FreeBSD for Linux users article

Manolis Kiagias sonicy at otenet.gr
Thu Mar 6 22:31:12 UTC 2008


John Ferrell wrote:
> I have been working on an article entitled "FreeBSD Quickstart for Linux Users", a technical overview of FreeBSD for Linux users.  I have had some feedback from this list and from some people on IRC.  I was hoping to solicit some more feedback before I submitted it.  
>
> http://promethium.rhsmith.umd.edu/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/freebsd-for-linux-users/article.html
>
> Thanks in advance,
> John
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>   
This is a nice, well focused writeup :)

Two things you may wish to consider:

- In your description of packages and pkg_add you may add a few lines 
about how you can use PACKAGESITE to retrieve the latest packages from 
the stable distribution. A lot of people are not aware that by default 
pkg_add fetches release packages, they believe they are getting updated 
ones.

- Since you are discussing the init system and mention 
/usr/local/etc/rc.d: A quick explanation about the difference between 
the base system and the ports (possibly with a reference to another 
document or the handbook, so you would not have to expand this a lot). 
Also a mention that /etc/rc.d has the startup scripts for services in 
the base distribution and /usr/local/etc/rc.d for scripts in 
user-installed programs. Finding out what to write in /etc/rc.conf to 
enable a service confuses most beginners, a mention of the general rule 
<service>_enable="YES" or the  <scriptname> rcvar to find out the entry 
would be nice IMHO.

A quick correction, in the same section, the example about apache22 is 
wrong, it should read:

# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/apache22 start

and

# /etc/local/etc/rc.d/apache22 forcestart


Manolis





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