# Newbie - Best way to know more about freebsd



## trybeingarun (Dec 27, 2009)

Hi guys,
What would be the best way to know more about freebsd for a newbie? I have "the Handbook" and "Absolute freebsd" with me. Also to force myself into learning freebsd I have removed Ubuntu from my PC and freebsd is the only OS with me now. And so far I am totally happy about that because I learned more in the past few weeks than I had earlier while using Ubuntu.

My requirement is not very specific; am just using freebsd for my desktop. Any suggestions...?

P.S. - Plz don recommend reading all contents of /usr/src/sys


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## graudeejs (Dec 27, 2009)

nah, just read all content in /usr/src.

Just joking....

you started very good. 
try, break, fix. That's all you need to do to learn


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## Beastie (Dec 27, 2009)

Exactly. Discover, be curious about everything related, practice, and learn from your mistakes and the mistakes of others. That's the best school.

In addition to the 2 documents you already have, don't hesitate to (ab)use man(1) pages. They're very well written and very informative. Always check them when in doubt.


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## DutchDaemon (Dec 27, 2009)

Bzzt. Wrong forum!

Posting in Howtos & FAQs


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## Alt (Dec 27, 2009)

Install some software, then break it =)


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## FBSDin20Steps (Dec 28, 2009)

> P.S. - Plz don recommend reading all contents of /usr/src/sys



But I do recommend reading all contents of */etc*. :e


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## wonslung (Dec 28, 2009)

trybeingarun said:
			
		

> Hi guys,
> 
> My requirement is not very specific; am just using freebsd for my desktop. Any suggestions...?
> 
> P.S. - Plz don recommend reading all contents of /usr/src/sys




The best thing you can do is learn about jails.

In FreeBSD jails are your friend.  They allow you to do so much and it's a very unique feature of the os.

Just a few things you can do with jails:

Virtual FreeBSD installs (each jail has it's own ip or ip's and is separate from the other jails)

Build software for testing
Try different configs
Run multiple versions of software on the same machine

But the best thing about jails is they allow you to create a small virtual enviorment to "break" things

With a few minor exceptions, almost everything you can do in freebsd can be done in a jail, so you can create different configs inside of a jail without fear of screwing up too badly.  No more having to do a complete fresh install when something doesn't go as planned.

You can just create a new jail, and start over.

Also, jails are nice because you can build build ports for other systems inside of a jail without fear of screwing up your system....for instance, I have a quadcore intel core2quad 9550 with 8gb ram which isn't very loaded, but i have other machines which are much slower and much more loaded.

When i need to install ports for those machine, most of the time i just build them in a jail on my fast machine, then do something like this:


```
pkg_info -Ix someprogram
pkg_create -Rb someprogram-x.x.x
```

it's very cool.


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## FBSDin20Steps (Dec 28, 2009)

It's also very cool to have your own tinderbox in a jail


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## wonslung (Dec 28, 2009)

now i think it's my turn to learn something.

What do you mean by tinderbox?
?


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## FBSDin20Steps (Dec 28, 2009)

Here Ya go! http://tinderbox.marcuscom.com/


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