Getting over the FreeBSD Learning Curve

[Dave Vollenweider]

On Fri, 08 Oct 2004 21:51:15 -0400
braidsenfro at netscape.net (Akbar) wrote:

> It occured to me that you get better with FreeBSD one desired feature at a time. I wanted to input Japanese text, I had to look around, read, and ask.  It broke when i installed chinput, then i reinstalled it and got a better understanding of enabling japanese input in X. Before that i had to understand something about installing software. I wanted to burn a CD, and ended up making my first Makefile, so now i know how to read them better in the ports.

I've been using FreeBSD for about six months now, and I can say that it is all about learning how to do things on your own.  That's true of most if not all Unix-like OSs, Apple's Mac OS X notwithstanding.

> I'm a newbie of better than a year now.  Still excited about FreeBSD, but admittedly, it seems like FreeBSD is not for people who want everything now.  That's what Apples are for. For example, i ran an OpenGL screen saver under KDE and it was horribly slow. I also have a SB Audigy Gamer card that i don't hear anything out of at the moment, but I will, eventually.

Again, that's the learning curve coming in, and it's true of most Unix-like OSs.  I've used Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and a tiny bit of Solaris.  All require the user to search around and find how they can do what they want to do.  For most people it doesn't seem worth it, and that's one of the reasons why MS Windows is so popular.  But, these people don't want to learn, either.  FreeBSD and the other Unix-like OSs are perfect for those of us who want to learn how these systems work.  Other OSs try to hide the inner workings as much as possible.  That's the difference.  But, that difference means that the FreeBSD user, with sufficient knowledge and experience, can gain total control over his or her own system, something that users of OSs that try to hide the inner workings will never achieve.

As for your screensaver, the first mistake was running KDE; that's the slowest desktop environment you can use, and it sucks a lot of RAM, which most likely slowed down your screensaver.  On the sound card, it's possible that someone will make a driver for it, or you can even do it yourself if you're up to it.  That's the beauty of freely-available open source software: anyone can contribute to it.  Some parts are more glamourous than others, of course, but that doesn't mean they're less necessary.  In fact, the less glamourous parts are ususally the most necessary.

> I'm sure almost all newbies want to be gurus. Here's my postulation on how. Think of something you want to do on your FreeBSD station, then concentrate on doing it. Once that's done, go to the next thing. In other words, don't look at FreeBSD as a whole.  Chances are, you don't care about everything that it is made of, or can do. But over time you'll have a degree of fluency in FreeBSD.

I agree with this advice.  I'll pass along some more that I've been given: learn what's behind the programs you use, which includes the programming languages, if you really want to know the system.  This also gives you the power to make big changes as you see fit, changes which you may even want to submit for inclusion into FreeBSD itself.  I know this is advanced, but this is one of the reasons why I've begun learning Perl.  Other languages include C (the big one for Unix), C++, Ruby (which portupgrade uses), Python, LISP...the list goes on and on.  In using FreeBSD we are using something where we have the ability to look at how it works.  I say let's take advantage of it.