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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.cs.su.oz.au!metro!metro!munnari.OZ.AU!spool.mu.edu!uwm.edu!newsfeeds.sol.net!europa.clark.net!feed1.news.erols.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news1.best.com!nntp2.ba.best.com!not-for-mail From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: FreeBSD mini-FAQ Date: Fri, 06 Jun 1997 17:24:17 -0700 Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM Lines: 203 Message-ID: <3398AA31.6201DD56@FreeBSD.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: time.cdrom.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01 (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2-STABLE i386) Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:42549 --------------------------------------------- General FreeBSD Information - Periodic Posting Last Updated: June 6th, 1997 --------------------------------------------- This mini-FAQ attempts to point out various important FreeBSD facts that many newcomers to USENET may be unaware of. It is posted once a month, or whenever I feel like it. Questions sort-of-answered in this guide: o Where can I find more general information on FreeBSD? o Is USENET the best place to get my questions answered? o Where do I get information about important FreeBSD events? o What are the FreeBSD mailing lists? o Any good books on FreeBSD? o Where do I get FreeBSD? o Is FreeBSD a good Internet server solution? o Any examples of FreeBSD being an Internet server? o Which is "better", FreeBSD or Linux or NetBSD or NT or ...? o Is FreeBSD really free? How and why do you guys do this? -- Q. Where can I find more general information on FreeBSD? A. Always good resources are the Handbook (http://www.freebsd.org/handbook) and FAQ (http://www.freebsd.org/FAQ) documents. Want to know how to dual-boot your FreeBSD system? How to use the NT boot manager? How to build a new kernel? All of these points and many more are covered in the Handbook and the FAQ, so please give them a read before asking questions that may already be answered there. -- Q. Is USENET the best place to get my questions answered? If not, where do I get help? A. USENET is actually a bad place to ask for help, generally speaking, though some of FreeBSD's volunteers do go far out of their way in trying to answer at least some of the questions posted here. Most of FreeBSD's support folks do not, however, even read USENET due to an extreme lack of time and the fact that the signal-to-noise ratio of USENET is generally terrible, so the very best way of getting help is to send email to freebsd-questions@freebsd.org. Please do NOT send questions directly to project members (like me!) since, in so doing, you only deny all of the other approximately 700 mailing list subscribers the chance to answer your question and can only delay your getting an answer. Also, most of us in the project already receive well over 500 messages a day and we're likely to simply delete your question if we don't have time to answer (which is a lot of the time). -- Q. Where do I get information about important FreeBSD events, like upcoming release dates and such? A. Please subscribe to freebsd-announce@freebsd.org by sending mail to majordomo@freebsd.org. This is a very low-traffic mailing list and should be subscribed to by anyone interested in keeping up to date on what FreeBSD is up to. -- Q. Are there other FreeBSD related mailing lists like this? A. Yes. Please visit: http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/eresources:mail.html It covers the full range of available mailing lists and, more importantly, the appropriate subject material for each. READ THIS! People don't appreciate off-topic postings in the wrong mailing lists, and reading the mailing list charters will acquaint you with the do's and don'ts of each list. Since most lists have thousands of members, and nobody likes embarrassing him or herself in front of thousands of people, it's really a good idea to make sure you're using the right mailing list for the right purpose. -- Q. Are there any good books on FreeBSD? A. Walnut Creek CDROM (http://www.cdrom.com) sells "The Complete FreeBSD", basically an installation guide and set of manual pages which comes with two CDs inside. If you've never installed FreeBSD before, this isn't a bad reference. In Japan, you have almost an embarrassment of riches with at least 3 books on FreeBSD that I know of. There are also books on FreeBSD in Chinese, published in Taiwan. Please see the Handbook section on books for more information (this is a rapidly changing target and I won't even try to keep the mini-faq up to date in this regard since the Handbook does it already). -- Q. Where do I get FreeBSD? Can I get it on CD, floppies, DAT, punched cards or paper tape? A. There are two popular ways of getting FreeBSD: Over the net and on CD, the details for both of which are covered at http://www.freebsd.org/where.html As for floppies, DAT, punched cards or paper tape, we've never found anyone masochistic enough to try and sell FreeBSD distributions on these media so you're probably out of luck (and please don't ask us to send you 80 floppies in the mail - we'll only laugh at you). Q. Isn't it cruel to laugh at the disadvantaged? Not everyone has an Internet connection or can afford a CD, you know! You sound like an elitist boob, to me. A. Life can be cruel that way, yes. Better get used to it. -- Q. Is FreeBSD a good Internet server solution? What makes it so great? A. FreeBSD is an excellent Internet server solution, heck, TCP/IP itself first came to UNIX through BSD and, to many researchers, BSD remains the definitive reference platform for it. So if networking's what you want, you've come to the right place with FreeBSD. See http://www.freebsd.org/welcome.html for a better synopsis of all this. -- Q. Talk is cheap - do you have any actual examples of people doing Internet services with FreeBSD? A. You bet. Visit ftp://ftp.cdrom.com if you'd like to see the busiest general FTP server on the Internet running FreeBSD. Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com) are also serious FreeBSD users, along with many others. Visit http://www.freebsd.org/gallery.html for more information on some of the people using FreeBSD commercially. -- Q. Which is "better", FreeBSD or Linux or NetBSD or NT or ...? A. Ahhh, we love it when this question comes up - in fact, some of us may someday join monasteries just so that we can spend as much of our time as possible in quiet contemplation of this important question. As a question, it is surely ranked above all others for its sheer brilliance, relevance to everyday life and, indeed, its expression of the sheer totality of universe as we know it. Q. That's very nice, but aren't you avoiding the question? A. Yes. Q. Why? It's a simple question and a lot of people would like to know! A. I know that, grasshopper, but it's one of those questions without a real answer, like the sound of one hand clapping or the essence of "Mu." In the ongoing Maelstrom of development surrounding all of the operating systems in question, their relative merits are constantly changing things and very subjective besides - any given feature of OS X may be totally irrelevant to one user but of critical importance to another, and different trade-offs are made by each OS in pursuit of the goals that its users feel to be important. Q. So you're not going to answer the question? A. No. Only YOU can answer the question, given your specific needs and likes/dislikes. I like FreeBSD and feel it to be superior or I'd be running something else myself. Your own mileage may, as they say, vary. And with the exception of all but NT, the OSes in question are FREE so you can evaluate each before making a decision. What more could you ask? More to the point, expecting to be spoon-fed your answers in life is both unrealistic and stunts your growth besides, so put the time and energy into installing all the ones you're interested in and then choose for yourself. The respective developers of each free OS have given you their stuff for free, and at considerable personal effort, so the very least you can do is be willing to exert a little effort yourself in evaluating what they're providing you. Q. Gee, thanks for the lecture. A. You're entirely welcome. -- Q. Is FreeBSD really free? How and why do you guys do this?? A. Yes, it's really free. We do it by donating all of our time and otherwise abandoning any pretenses of having actual lives. As to why we do it, well, that's harder to define but it's probably reasonable to say that most of us do it because we love UNIX, Berkeley UNIX in particular, and we feel it's worth our time and effort to keep it alive. Most of us do not want to be writing applications in Visual Basic to feed ourselves come the new millennium, and this is one good way of forestalling that terrible fate.