Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2002 06:24:50 -0800 From: David Herman <ob1@yifan.net> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: I bought your system and am not so happy! Message-ID: <20020305022609.8E7EA37B400@hub.freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <NJEILFFGFACAOBDNPELNKEFFCAAA.kmccorm1@stevens-tech.edu> References: <NJEILFFGFACAOBDNPELNKEFFCAAA.kmccorm1@stevens-tech.edu>
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I bought your system and I am pretty happy. I'll start w/ my question first then talk about my transition / install experience (experience is probably a m$ trademark by now) Having succesfully installed 4.4 from the powerpack I'm curious whether I should just get ahold of 4.5 and re-install before I get to far. I am really fond of kde2 and seem to remember reading that this is not in the 4.5 dist. is this true or am I just misinformed? -----------------My Install------------------------------------- Some background, I have used an Amiga since 1992. I like mice, (I'm a hunt and peck typist). When my wife got fed up w/ her mac and made me buy a m$ pc I purchased mandrake 7.0 even before we got he m$ box home. I now boot m$, SuSE linux, BeOS, qnx rtp, and amithalon on this box. This weekend I added freeBSD4.4 (powerpak edition) to that list. I probably installed it 6 or 7 times (me not so smart). Read furthur. Had I been clueless I am sure that I would have taken the package back to the store, The online info and the book definitely give anyone with an interest in freeBSD enough info to decide for themselves whether or not they should go through with an installation. I was tempted to return it as the disk/partition/slice terminology seemed crazy to me, and I had no desire to break what I had working, but finally I took the plunge. There was nothing that I ever read that said, "Just go do it, This will replace windows and the mac. Nothing will go wrong and you won't need to learn anything." Now the good news. I finally did get freeBSD running. I believe all of my problems came down to a combination of 2 things, 1) xfree86 still has a way to go as far as being easy to set up. I kept thinking this was the source of my failures. 2) There was nothing to warn me that choosing high security (rather than moderate) in sysinstall would keep the xserver from being able to start. THIS WAS A BUGGER. I was pulling my hair out, I would set up xf86, things would seem to work, I'd go through the rest of the installation, then after a reboot - xserver cannot start (a message KDE...). I checked Greg's excellent book, the web, read xfree and bsd newbie pages, found nothing. Finally after my 6th or 7th install it occured to me to try some of the online documentation, low and behold there was the info I needed. Sure I could have read all of the online docs before installing but I would have expected such an important and basic piece of info to be right there in the installation help file or in the general Installation documents. Anyway all is well, I look forward to a more "Desktop" related distribution but by the time it arrives I hope I won't need it. dh To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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