Learning FreeBSD

Question

What is the average time that it would take a complete novice, whose background is mostly Windows XP, to go through the FreeBSD handbook and get sufficient mastery to setup a server from the ground up?

Answer 1

It would depend on how much knowledge you have of unix, and from the sounds of things, you probably do not have a whole lot.

Assuming you have little knowledge of unix at all, I would say that it will probably take a few days to get a grasp of what is going on, and possibly a week to have something working.

The FreeBSD handbook is pretty detailed though, and does provide you with a good grounding of everything you need to do to get things to work.

I know that this sounds like an awful lot of time, but in my experience, they really are quite different OS paradigms.

Answer 2

Depends on your reading speed :-) Depends on your needs (I mean: what kind of server). Once upon a time I did this - installing a FreeBSD on x86- (although I had some Linux knowledge already at that time), and it took me 3 hours, mainly that much time, because I was working on another machine in parallel.

Answer 3

It's impossible to say. Not only is it highly dependent upon what sort of person you are, but it also depends on what exactly you are doing and how you define "sufficient mastery". Being able to get Apache operational is a simple matter of following step-by-step tutorials, you could do that in a matter of hours. Being able to run a multi-user server competently takes a hell of a lot longer, and the handbook isn't nearly enough.

Answer 4

Depends on your background: Did you ever use power shell or other command line "applications" (like batches ;-). For me one of the greatest challenges to switch from a completely GUI'd operating system to an operating system that works best with a shell (something a little bit like the DOS prompt). But the moment you get the hang of it you'll be fine again.

Answer 5

Another aspect is the availability of a second computer beside the one you are setting up. If you can do web searches for additional information while in the midst of doing an install, it can save a lot of time.

As for the original topic, I've used Linux and Unix extensively, but have yet to get FreeBSD working after several tries over many years. I'd always get frustrated before I could get it fully installed and configured for a nice graphical desktop. (So personality obviously matters.) But it has been about two years since I've tried, and it may be simple now...

Please do not consider this a flame against FreeBSD... just a true story that for some reason I couldn't seem to make it work. If it were not a good OS, I wouldn't have attempted so many times.

Answer 6

You could start with PC BSD (an easy to use distro) to get a feeling of BSD and then move to more advanced stuff like setting up servers.

As others have noted, configuring a service to do a couple of things isn't very hard, you just have to follow some steps (which any monkey could do), but if you want more, you'll need extra time. A competent sysadmin does not know only the how, but also the why. Grandma can click all day in Windows and even if Windows Server has a GUI for server administration, it doesn't mean she can configure IIS or the DHCP service. By the way, it would be a good thing if you could learn an (Unix) editor, preferably vi, since it's the standard on BSDs; emacs, joe, pico are nice too, but they aren't so popular.

As for the time, it took about two days for me to configure a server. But I had previous Linux experience and the server didn't do anything fancy.

Answer 7

Thanks everyone. To be hopefully more concise, my objective is to acquire UNIX skills to enable me administer production servers in a hybrid environment comprising about 10 servers running Windows 2003,FEDORA and UNIX? I am totally a GUI person making my first forays into the command line/powershell world.

Answer 8

Look if you've never touched a Unix platform, you should learn a lot of things, basically a different philosophy. The FreeBSD Handbook and the community is simply wonderful, but a reference book like the FBSD handbook contains a lot of information that you must develop yourself.

Also, the BSD platform is not easiest of the Unix family to begin from zero.

Good sources to learn:

• Absolute BSD book.
• The Complete BSD book (this is for Release 5, it's good for learning also).
• Man pages. The BSDs man pages are a LOT better than the Linux ones.
• FreeBSD Handbook.
• FreeBSD forums: forums.freebsd.org and daemonforums.
• Any Unix/Linux resource you can get your hands on. Many things are compatible (or near-compatible). e.g, if your friend tells you "I've found an old SGI IRIX / HPUX or (insert unix here) manual that I will throw in the thrashcan" stop it and see what you can learn from it.

Keep in mind that you've a long road ahead. But you'll enjoy it.

Answer 9

If you're coming from a primarily Windows background, I think FreeBSD would be a great way to dive into UNIX, but you may also want to check out Ubuntu Linux-- specifically, Ubuntu Server.

Got a spare Pentium 4-based system laying around at home? Burn yourself a CD and go to it.

As a fan of FreeBSD myself, I have to second the recommendation for the "Absolute FreeBSD" book above-- another book worth a look is "Building a Server with FreeBSD 7."

My original rationale for choosing FreeBSD was getting better control over what gets installed-- I was really tired of installing RedHat and/or SuSE and having a few gigabytes of stuff I wasn't going to use installed as part of the base install that wasn't easily removed after the fact. I've grown rather enamored with the BSD way of doing things, but it isn't necessarily for everyone.

Something to consider-- if you have the hardware, run VMWare or VirtualBox, and set up a few virtual machines to get used to various distributions before making the commitment to install a particular one on bare hardware.