Installing FreeBSD ver. 8.2

[Da Rock]

On 12/31/11 14:45, leeoliveshackelford at surewest.net wrote:
> Good evening, dear FreeBSD enthusiast.  I am a newcomer, and have installed FreeBSD 8.2 on a Hewlett-Packard xw4400.  After many hours of frustration, I am tearing my hair out.  I want my system to include an M-Audio Delta 1010LT sound card, MIDI over USB driver, X-windows, and Gnome.  The instructions in the handbook and on-disk man do not seem to apply to this version of FreeBSD, or at least I do not seem to know how to apply them.  I type "find sound," or "find pcm," or find snd_envy24," or "find x11," or "find gnome," and receive either a blank response, or response of "file does not exist" to all of these queries.  All of these items were supposedly installed at the time of system configuration, but as to where, I cannot seem to determine.  The gnome installation took twice as long as installation of everything else.  Where did sysinstall install it?  How do I get it to start?  The response to "startx" is "file does not exit."  I realize that I may be missing something o
>   b!
> vious.  Any guidance is appreciated.  -- Lee
Lee, your provided info so far is great. But what happened when you 
first installed the system? Step by step through the install process.

1. Disk in, boot up.
2. Wait for beastie menu or hit enter to run.
3. Keyboard selected.
4. Standard install started.
5. Drive formatted.
6. Base packages selected - which ones?
7. Users, Root, mouse and time setup.
8. Network services (NFS client or server, gateway, etc).
9. Package install- any packages selected? (Is this where you installed 
gnome and X)
10. Anything else configured?
11. Reboot. What showed up on the reboot? Run dmesg and post the output.

Also, which part of the handbook are you reading? The teletyped lines 
are commands to be run, and I'm not sure where your commands are coming 
from.

Find is a directory tree parser, and can be used to find things. So you 
run "find / -name foo" to find "foo" in the filesystem. "find /" will 
list the whole filesystem. What attempting I believe would be "whereis", 
as in "whereis sound". Run "man find" or "man whereis" to discover more, 
or google those commands if you have trouble reading that on the console.

Running startx won't get you far if you're looking for a Desktop 
Environment like Gnome, so lets hold on that. But lets see if you can 
get the sound first- login as root or "su -" at the prompt (password 
will be root's password) and try "kldload snd_driver" and "cat 
/dev/sndstat" and post the output. That will load sound and try to find 
the right driver for you as a kernel module. Note that and run "ee 
/boot/loader.conf" and add the driver there (as in snd_hda or 
snd_envy24) directly followed by _load=YES: eg, snd_hda_load=YES. Hit 
the escape key to save and exit. The driver will load every time you 
boot now.

More next episode. Good luck :)