Is there a particular order in which things should be done?

[crzdgns1 at starpower.net]

Hello,

I am a beginning FreeBSD/UNIX user and have recently installed 
FreeBSD-5.3-RELEASE, Xorg, and KDE on a Pentium II Celeron 330 
MHz custom made PC.  Everything seems to be working ok for now, 
but I feel completely overwhelmed because there is a tremendous 
amount of info to learn.  Yesterday, when I logged out of KDE and 
back into command mode, I noticed a line in the output produced 
during KDE bootup (is that the right lingo?) that my machine thinks it 
is badly misconfigured.  The exact message was "could not find local 
host, your system is badly misconfigured".  Here are my questions for 
this forum.  I preface my questions by saying that what I did was boot 
from floppies and install via FTP.  All at once, I installed FreeBSD 
with Xorg and all of its fonts, Perl, Postfix, and every file in the KDE 
directory, and something else that I've already forgotten.  Since I am 
a beginner, I expect I will go through the installation procedure a few 
more times, but maybe I can be more efficient about it in the future.  
So here is my question, in the future, what recommendations would 
the community make about correct order of operations for installation 
and configuration, and for confirmation that the install and 
configuration are "correct"?

Thanks,

Mark