Date: Wed, 01 Nov 2000 09:04:26 +0100 (CET) From: Micke Josefsson <mj@isy.liu.se> To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: About introducing newbies to FreeBSD Message-ID: <XFMail.001101090426.mj@isy.liu.se>
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On freebsd-questions there is now a thread 'Beginners with bsd'. As some of it has a bearing on advocacy and I have recent experience of this perhaps you will be interested. The thread started off with a newcomer asking whether FreeBSD is suitable for a beginner. Specially this particular beginner wondered if tools for typical MS Office chores existed. The answers, this far, has pointed out the clear, thorough documentation of FreeBSD, as a good thing for newbies. Other answers include congratulations for trying it out and lots of encouraging voices. The presence of StarOffice and WordPerfect as alternatives to MS Office has also been mentioned. But some people recommended a Linux dist (notably Storm or SuSe) as the easy way out. And even went as far as saying that FreeBSD is not for the faint of heart. Finally Igor Roboul made this note: "But, generally, if I talk about friends, it is better install something, for which you have "live person near you" :-)" This last sentence had me triggered to write a reply due to my recent experience: <--Slightly trimmed quoted from freebsd-questions --> Exactly my point of view in another thread some time ago. What a newbie needs best is someone to put his/her questions to. If you are into BSD then recommend BSD, if you are into Linux then recommend the same dist as you use yourself. It can be very annoying for a newbie to see how helpless his computer literate friend is with an OS he is not used to. Apart from that I'd recommend FreeBSD before anything else. Recently I had the opportunity to introduce a guest professor to FreeBSD. She had really no computer training from the sysadmins view, but was very keen to learn. So we spent some time partitioning disks, discussing the pros and cons of partition sizes and even opened up an old disk drive for fun. All this she learned a lot from. But when it came to do the actual installation of FreeBSD the barrage of questions was to much for her in the end. I made a trial installation session with her and then she tried at least three times to do it herself, but failed to answer the correct thing on just one or two questions, with a non-working system as a result. A co-worker made her try RedHat 6.2, it installed as a breeze and actually also setup the correct X-server for her. I have pointed out to her that RedHat puts more stuff on the drive than one (I anyway) would want, but at the end of the day, disk space is ubiquitus and cheap. And the pleasure of having got the system up and running gives her better feedback, than the FreeBSD sysinstall does. Personally I really, really like the port/packages device and also, being a minimalist, I like to have a small system first and then extend it with the programs *I* want to be there, not what anyone else think I should be using. But then I have used computers since my Sinclair ZX80. The guest professor had a user's perspective not the root's, and used to MS Windows program. All in all. The problem seems to have been sysinstall here. Or anyway the program to perform the initial installation. Imagine that sysinstall is used for post-install configuration only or installation for the advanced user then another couple of boot-diskettes could be used to a more user friendly installation interface (and better looking, specially after setting my locale:) for newcomers or any 'generic' user. Personally I do not like the idea of a generic user, but some people, specially the ones just trying FreeBSD for the first time or are not that computer savvy might find this handy. We don't want to scare people away from FreeBSD. <-- end of quote Do you have any comments on this? I'd love to hear them. Cheers, /Micke ---------------------------------- Michael Josefsson, MSEE mj@isy.liu.se This message was sent by XFMail running on FreeBSD 3.5-STABLE ---------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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