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Old 24th September 2008
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jggimi jggimi is offline
More noise than signal
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: USA
Posts: 7,977
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php111 -

  1. Patience is required. Knowledge and skill will come to you; but not instantly.
  2. You must be prepared to read, and read quite a bit. All of the BSDs pride themselves on their excellent documentation. You must consume it. Note: man pages are not "How To" documents, nor are they tutorials. The FAQs and Handbooks produced by the BSD projects are your prime tools for learning. Man pages are reference documents, and you will find them extremely helpful for learning how something works ... just not how to apply that thing to a specific situation the first time you come across it.
    Secondarily, and of great help, are books geared for end users of Unix (or Linux), and OS-specific books designed to aid administrators. I will be bold enough to recommend ANY book by Michael W. Lucas, who wrote Absolute BSD and Absolute OpenBSD -- he writes for someone brand new to Unix, or someone with three decades experience with it. Simultaneously. My copy of Absolute OpenBSD is very well thumbed through -- and I reread bits of it often.
  3. You must be prepared to make mistakes. You will make them. We all have, and, we all will again. Forgive yourself, and learn to learn from them.
  4. Some of your mistakes will cause data to be lost. Be prepared for it: Figure out how to take backups; and test that you can restore them in the event of an unbootable mess. See Item #5, below.
  5. Multibooting is easy to set up, but can be confusing. When setting it up, a mistake can make all OSes on the hard drive unbootable. See Item #4, above.
None of the above covers networking, which goes above-and-beyond your choice of OS.

Last edited by jggimi; 25th September 2008 at 03:10 AM. Reason: clarity
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