*BSD News Article 92726


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From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: HELP!
Date: Wed, 02 Apr 1997 17:38:24 -0800
Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM
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To: mwfurn@hal-pc.org
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mwfurn@hal-pc.org wrote:
> I know I asked alotta ignorant questions and made a moron outta myself
> posting this message but I did it to get some help and again I would
> appreciate any help.  Thanks in advance.

Hmmmmm.  It's quite easy to extrapolate from your first set of questions
the fact that there are actually *many* questions underlying this first
set, and to truly arrive at the real answer we must first ask the real
question, that probably being best summed up as: "How do I work this
crazy thing??"

Unfortunately, that's a much broader question and we'd all wear our
fingers off in explaining even a quarter of it here (plus we'd annoy
everyone else in the group who didn't really want a complete UNIX
tutorial so much as a specific question answered).  You need a book, or
better yet, several books!  Understanding why, for example, floppies
need to be mounted is a good subject for looking up in a UNIX book.  So
is the care and feeding of network connections, how to use FTP, so on
and so forth.  There are many good ones listed in the FreeBSD Handbook,
online at http://www.freebsd.org or on your system at
file:/usr/share/doc/handbook if you loaded the "doc" distribution.  If
you did and you have a CD distribution of FreeBSD, you should be able to
run /stand/sysinstall and go to the Documentation menu in order to read
the Handbook and FAQ documents (it will load a text browser for you if
you don't have it and then point itself at the local files).

Unlike Windows, UNIX is still not for the faint of heart, however.  It
may be better in this regard someday, and many of us are still working
on it, but if you're still at the "where do I put the phone number?"
stage in configuring PPP/SLIP equipment, you might actually be better
served by one of the commercial alternatives (I pains me to say it, but
it's true).
-- 
- Jordan Hubbard
  FreeBSD core team / Walnut Creek CDROM.