               For People New to Both FreeBSD and UNIX(R)

  Annelise Anderson

   <andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu>

   $FreeBSD:
   release/8.4.0/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/new-users/article.xml 39632
   2012-10-01 11:56:00Z gabor $

   August 15, 1997

   FreeBSD is a registered trademark of the FreeBSD Foundation.

   IBM, AIX, EtherJet, Netfinity, OS/2, PowerPC, PS/2, S/390, and
   ThinkPad are trademarks of International Business Machines
   Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.

   Microsoft, IntelliMouse, MS-DOS, Outlook, Windows, Windows Media
   and Windows NT are either registered trademarks or trademarks of
   Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

   Netscape and the Netscape Navigator are registered trademarks of
   Netscape Communications Corporation in the U.S. and other
   countries.

   Motif, OSF/1, and UNIX are registered trademarks and IT DialTone
   and The Open Group are trademarks of The Open Group in the United
   States and other countries.

   Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to
   distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those
   designations appear in this document, and the FreeBSD Project was
   aware of the trademark claim, the designations have been followed
   by the "(TM)" or the "(R)" symbol.

   Congratulations on installing FreeBSD! This introduction is for
   people new to both FreeBSD and UNIX(R)-so it starts with basics.
   It assumes you are using version 2.0.5 or later of FreeBSD as
   distributed by FreeBSD.org, your system (for now) has a single
   user (you)-and you are probably pretty good with DOS/Windows(R) or
   OS/2(R).

     --------------------------------------------------------------

1 Logging in and Getting Out

   Log in (when you see login:) as a user you created during
   installation or as root. (Your FreeBSD installation will already
   have an account for root; who can go anywhere and do anything,
   including deleting essential files, so be careful!) The symbols %
   and # in the following stand for the prompt (yours may be
   different), with % indicating an ordinary user and # indicating
   root.

   To log out (and get a new login: prompt) type

 # exit

   as often as necessary. Yes, press enter after commands, and
   remember that UNIX is case-sensitive-exit, not EXIT.

   To shut down the machine type

 # /sbin/shutdown -h now

   Or to reboot type

 # /sbin/shutdown -r now

   or

 # /sbin/reboot

   You can also reboot with Ctrl-Alt-Delete. Give it a little time to
   do its work. This is equivalent to /sbin/reboot in recent releases
   of FreeBSD and is much, much better than hitting the reset button.
   You do not want to have to reinstall this thing, do you?

     --------------------------------------------------------------

2 Adding A User with Root Privileges

   If you did not create any users when you installed the system and
   are thus logged in as root, you should probably create a user now
   with

 # adduser

   The first time you use adduser, it might ask for some defaults to
   save. You might want to make the default shell csh(1) instead of
   sh(1), if it suggests sh as the default. Otherwise just press
   enter to accept each default. These defaults are saved in
   /etc/adduser.conf, an editable file.

   Suppose you create a user jack with full name Jack Benimble. Give
   jack a password if security (even kids around who might pound on
   the keyboard) is an issue. When it asks you if you want to invite
   jack into other groups, type wheel

 Login group is ``jack''. Invite jack into other groups: wheel

   This will make it possible to log in as jack and use the su(1)
   command to become root. Then you will not get scolded any more for
   logging in as root.

   You can quit adduser any time by typing Ctrl-C, and at the end you
   will have a chance to approve your new user or simply type n for
   no. You might want to create a second new user so that when you
   edit jack's login files, you will have a hot spare in case
   something goes wrong.

   Once you have done this, use exit to get back to a login prompt
   and log in as jack. In general, it is a good idea to do as much
   work as possible as an ordinary user who does not have the
   power-and risk-of root.

   If you already created a user and you want the user to be able to
   su to root, you can log in as root and edit the file /etc/group,
   adding jack to the first line (the group wheel). But first you
   need to practice vi(1), the text editor-or use the simpler text
   editor, ee(1), installed on recent versions of FreeBSD.

   To delete a user, use the rmuser command.

     --------------------------------------------------------------

3 Looking Around

   Logged in as an ordinary user, look around and try out some
   commands that will access the sources of help and information
   within FreeBSD.

   Here are some commands and what they do:

   id

           Tells you who you are!

   pwd

           Shows you where you are-the current working directory.

   ls

           Lists the files in the current directory.

   ls -F

           Lists the files in the current directory with a * after
           executables, a / after directories, and an @ after
           symbolic links.

   ls -l

           Lists the files in long format-size, date, permissions.

   ls -a

           Lists hidden "dot" files with the others. If you are root,
           the "dot" files show up without the -a switch.

   cd

           Changes directories. cd .. backs up one level; note the
           space after cd. cd /usr/local goes there. cd ~ goes to the
           home directory of the person logged in-e.g.,
           /usr/home/jack. Try cd /cdrom, and then ls, to find out if
           your CDROM is mounted and working.

   view filename

           Lets you look at a file (named filename) without changing
           it. Try view /etc/fstab. Type :q to quit.

   cat filename

           Displays filename on screen. If it is too long and you can
           see only the end of it, press ScrollLock and use the
           up-arrow to move backward; you can use ScrollLock with
           manual pages too. Press ScrollLock again to quit
           scrolling. You might want to try cat on some of the dot
           files in your home directory-cat .cshrc, cat .login, cat
           .profile.

   You will notice aliases in .cshrc for some of the ls commands
   (they are very convenient). You can create other aliases by
   editing .cshrc. You can make these aliases available to all users
   on the system by putting them in the system-wide csh configuration
   file, /etc/csh.cshrc.

     --------------------------------------------------------------

4 Getting Help and Information

   Here are some useful sources of help. Text stands for something of
   your choice that you type in-usually a command or filename.

   apropos text

           Everything containing string text in the whatis database.

   man text

           The manual page for text. The major source of
           documentation for UNIX systems. man ls will tell you all
           the ways to use the ls command. Press Enter to move
           through text, Ctrl-B to go back a page, Ctrl-F to go
           forward, q or Ctrl-C to quit.

   which text

           Tells you where in the user's path the command text is
           found.

   locate text

           All the paths where the string text is found.

   whatis text

           Tells you what the command text does and its manual page.
           Typing whatis * will tell you about all the binaries in
           the current directory.

   whereis text

           Finds the file text, giving its full path.

   You might want to try using whatis on some common useful commands
   like cat, more, grep, mv, find, tar, chmod, chown, date, and
   script. more lets you read a page at a time as it does in DOS,
   e.g., ls -l | more or more filename. The * works as a
   wildcard-e.g., ls w* will show you files beginning with w.

   Are some of these not working very well? Both locate(1) and
   whatis(1) depend on a database that is rebuilt weekly. If your
   machine is not going to be left on over the weekend (and running
   FreeBSD), you might want to run the commands for daily, weekly,
   and monthly maintenance now and then. Run them as root and, for
   now, give each one time to finish before you start the next one.

 # periodic daily
 output omitted
 # periodic weekly
 output omitted
 # periodic monthly
 output omitted

   If you get tired of waiting, press Alt-F2 to get another virtual
   console, and log in again. After all, it is a multi-user,
   multi-tasking system. Nevertheless these commands will probably
   flash messages on your screen while they are running; you can type
   clear at the prompt to clear the screen. Once they have run, you
   might want to look at /var/mail/root and /var/log/messages.

   Running such commands is part of system administration-and as a
   single user of a UNIX system, you are your own system
   administrator. Virtually everything you need to be root to do is
   system administration. Such responsibilities are not covered very
   well even in those big fat books on UNIX, which seem to devote a
   lot of space to pulling down menus in windows managers. You might
   want to get one of the two leading books on systems
   administration, either Evi Nemeth et.al.'s UNIX System
   Administration Handbook (Prentice-Hall, 1995, ISBN
   0-13-15051-7)-the second edition with the red cover; or AEleen
   Frisch's Essential System Administration (O'Reilly & Associates,
   2002, ISBN 0-596-00343-9). I used Nemeth.

     --------------------------------------------------------------

5 Editing Text

   To configure your system, you need to edit text files. Most of
   them will be in the /etc directory; and you will need to su to
   root to be able to change them. You can use the easy ee, but in
   the long run the text editor vi is worth learning. There is an
   excellent tutorial on vi in /usr/src/contrib/nvi/docs/tutorial, if
   you have the system sources installed.

   Before you edit a file, you should probably back it up. Suppose
   you want to edit /etc/rc.conf. You could just use cd /etc to get
   to the /etc directory and do:

 # cp rc.conf rc.conf.orig

   This would copy rc.conf to rc.conf.orig, and you could later copy
   rc.conf.orig to rc.conf to recover the original. But even better
   would be moving (renaming) and then copying back:

 # mv rc.conf rc.conf.orig
 # cp rc.conf.orig rc.conf

   because the mv command preserves the original date and owner of
   the file. You can now edit rc.conf. If you want the original back,
   you would then mv rc.conf rc.conf.myedit (assuming you want to
   preserve your edited version) and then

 # mv rc.conf.orig rc.conf

   to put things back the way they were.

   To edit a file, type

 # vi filename

   Move through the text with the arrow keys. Esc (the escape key)
   puts vi in command mode. Here are some commands:

   x

           delete letter the cursor is on

   dd

           delete the entire line (even if it wraps on the screen)

   i

           insert text at the cursor

   a

           insert text after the cursor

   Once you type i or a, you can enter text. Esc puts you back in
   command mode where you can type

   :w

           to write your changes to disk and continue editing

   :wq

           to write and quit

   :q!

           to quit without saving changes

   /text

           to move the cursor to text; /Enter (the enter key) to find
           the next instance of text.

   G

           to go to the end of the file

   nG

           to go to line n in the file, where n is a number

   Ctrl-L

           to redraw the screen

   Ctrl-b and Ctrl-f

           go back and forward a screen, as they do with more and
           view.

   Practice with vi in your home directory by creating a new file
   with vi filename and adding and deleting text, saving the file,
   and calling it up again. vi delivers some surprises because it is
   really quite complex, and sometimes you will inadvertently issue a
   command that will do something you do not expect. (Some people
   actually like vi-it is more powerful than DOS EDIT-find out about
   the :r command.) Use Esc one or more times to be sure you are in
   command mode and proceed from there when it gives you trouble,
   save often with :w, and use :q! to get out and start over (from
   your last :w) when you need to.

   Now you can cd to /etc, su to root, use vi to edit the file
   /etc/group, and add a user to wheel so the user has root
   privileges. Just add a comma and the user's login name to the end
   of the first line in the file, press Esc, and use :wq to write the
   file to disk and quit. Instantly effective. (You did not put a
   space after the comma, did you?)

     --------------------------------------------------------------

6 Printing Files from DOS

   At this point you probably do not have the printer working, so
   here is a way to create a file from a manual page, move it to a
   floppy, and then print it from DOS. Suppose you want to read
   carefully about changing permissions on files (pretty important).
   You can use man chmod to read about it. The command

 % man chmod | col -b > chmod.txt

   will remove formatting codes and send the manual page to the
   chmod.txt file instead of showing it on your screen. Now put a
   dos-formatted diskette in your floppy drive a, su to root, and
   type

 # /sbin/mount -t msdosfs /dev/fd0 /mnt

   to mount the floppy drive on /mnt.

   Now (you no longer need to be root, and you can type exit to get
   back to being user jack) you can go to the directory where you
   created chmod.txt and copy the file to the floppy with:

 % cp chmod.txt /mnt

   and use ls /mnt to get a directory listing of /mnt, which should
   show the file chmod.txt.

   You might especially want to make a file from /sbin/dmesg by
   typing

 % /sbin/dmesg > dmesg.txt

   and copying dmesg.txt to the floppy. /sbin/dmesg is the boot log
   record, and it is useful to understand it because it shows what
   FreeBSD found when it booted up. If you ask questions on the
   FreeBSD general questions mailing list or on a USENET group-like
   "FreeBSD is not finding my tape drive, what do I do?"-people will
   want to know what dmesg has to say.

   You can now unmount the floppy drive (as root) to get the disk out
   with

 # /sbin/umount /mnt

   and reboot to go to DOS. Copy these files to a DOS directory, call
   them up with DOS EDIT, Windows Notepad or Wordpad, or a word
   processor, make a minor change so the file has to be saved, and
   print as you normally would from DOS or Windows. Hope it works!
   Manual pages come out best if printed with the DOS print command.
   (Copying files from FreeBSD to a mounted DOS partition is in some
   cases still a little risky.)

   Getting the printer printing from FreeBSD involves creating an
   appropriate entry in /etc/printcap and creating a matching spool
   directory in /var/spool/output. If your printer is on lpt0 (what
   DOS calls LPT1), you may only need to go to /var/spool/output and
   (as root) create the directory lpd by typing: mkdir lpd, if it
   does not already exist. Then the printer should respond if it is
   turned on when the system is booted, and lp or lpr should send a
   file to the printer. Whether or not the file actually prints
   depends on configuring it, which is covered in the FreeBSD
   handbook.

     --------------------------------------------------------------

7 Other Useful Commands

   df

           shows file space and mounted systems.

   ps aux

           shows processes running. ps ax is a narrower form.

   rm filename

           remove filename.

   rm -R dir

           removes a directory dir and all subdirectories-careful!

   ls -R

           lists files in the current directory and all
           subdirectories; I used a variant, ls -AFR > where.txt, to
           get a list of all the files in / and (separately) /usr
           before I found better ways to find files.

   passwd

           to change user's password (or root's password)

   man hier

           manual page on the UNIX filesystem

   Use find to locate filename in /usr or any of its subdirectories
   with

 % find /usr -name "filename"

   You can use * as a wildcard in "filename" (which should be in
   quotes). If you tell find to search in / instead of /usr it will
   look for the file(s) on all mounted filesystems, including the
   CDROM and the DOS partition.

   An excellent book that explains UNIX commands and utilities is
   Abrahams & Larson, Unix for the Impatient (2nd ed.,
   Addison-Wesley, 1996). There is also a lot of UNIX information on
   the Internet.

     --------------------------------------------------------------

8 Next Steps

   You should now have the tools you need to get around and edit
   files, so you can get everything up and running. There is a great
   deal of information in the FreeBSD handbook (which is probably on
   your hard drive) and FreeBSD's web site. A wide variety of
   packages and ports are on the CDROM as well as the web site. The
   handbook tells you more about how to use them (get the package if
   it exists, with pkg_add /cdrom/packages/All/packagename, where
   packagename is the filename of the package). The CDROM has lists
   of the packages and ports with brief descriptions in
   cdrom/packages/index, cdrom/packages/index.txt, and
   cdrom/ports/index, with fuller descriptions in
   /cdrom/ports/*/*/pkg/DESCR, where the *s represent subdirectories
   of kinds of programs and program names respectively.

   If you find the handbook too sophisticated (what with lndir and
   all) on installing ports from the CDROM, here is what usually
   works:

   Find the port you want, say kermit. There will be a directory for
   it on the CDROM. Copy the subdirectory to /usr/local (a good place
   for software you add that should be available to all users) with:

 # cp -R /cdrom/ports/comm/kermit /usr/local

   This should result in a /usr/local/kermit subdirectory that has
   all the files that the kermit subdirectory on the CDROM has.

   Next, create the directory /usr/ports/distfiles if it does not
   already exist using mkdir. Now check /cdrom/ports/distfiles for a
   file with a name that indicates it is the port you want. Copy that
   file to /usr/ports/distfiles; in recent versions you can skip this
   step, as FreeBSD will do it for you. In the case of kermit, there
   is no distfile.

   Then cd to the subdirectory of /usr/local/kermit that has the file
   Makefile. Type

 # make all install

   During this process the port will FTP to get any compressed files
   it needs that it did not find on the CDROM or in
   /usr/ports/distfiles. If you do not have your network running yet
   and there was no file for the port in /cdrom/ports/distfiles, you
   will have to get the distfile using another machine and copy it to
   /usr/ports/distfiles from a floppy or your DOS partition. Read
   Makefile (with cat or more or view) to find out where to go (the
   master distribution site) to get the file and what its name is.
   Its name will be truncated when downloaded to DOS, and after you
   get it into /usr/ports/distfiles you will have to rename it (with
   the mv command) to its original name so it can be found. (Use
   binary file transfers!) Then go back to /usr/local/kermit, find
   the directory with Makefile, and type make all install.

   The other thing that happens when installing ports or packages is
   that some other program is needed. If the installation stops with
   a message "can't find unzip" or whatever, you might need to
   install the package or port for unzip before you continue.

   Once it is installed type rehash to make FreeBSD reread the files
   in the path so it knows what is there. (If you get a lot of "path
   not found" messages when you use whereis or which, you might want
   to make additions to the list of directories in the path statement
   in .cshrc in your home directory. The path statement in UNIX does
   the same kind of work it does in DOS, except the current directory
   is not (by default) in the path for security reasons; if the
   command you want is in the directory you are in, you need to type
   ./ before the command to make it work; no space after the slash.)

   You might want to get the most recent version of Netscape(R) from
   their FTP site. (Netscape requires the X Window System.) There is
   now a FreeBSD version, so look around carefully. Just use gunzip
   filename and tar xvf filename on it, move the binary to
   /usr/local/bin or some other place binaries are kept, rehash, and
   then put the following lines in .cshrc in each user's home
   directory or (easier) in /etc/csh.cshrc, the system-wide csh
   start-up file:

 setenv XKEYSYMDB /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/XKeysymDB
 setenv XNLSPATH /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/nls

   This assumes that the file XKeysymDB and the directory nls are in
   /usr/X11R6/lib/X11; if they are not, find them and put them there.

   If you originally got Netscape as a port using the CDROM (or FTP),
   do not replace /usr/local/bin/netscape with the new netscape
   binary; this is just a shell script that sets up the environment
   variables for you. Instead rename the new binary to netscape.bin
   and replace the old binary, which is /usr/local/netscape/netscape.

     --------------------------------------------------------------

9 Your Working Environment

   Your shell is the most important part of your working environment.
   In DOS, the usual shell is command.com. The shell is what
   interprets the commands you type on the command line, and thus
   communicates with the rest of the operating system. You can also
   write shell scripts, which are like DOS batch files: a series of
   commands to be run without your intervention.

   Two shells come installed with FreeBSD: csh and sh. csh is good
   for command-line work, but scripts should be written with sh (or
   bash). You can find out what shell you have by typing echo $SHELL.

   The csh shell is okay, but tcsh does everything csh does and more.
   It allows you to recall commands with the arrow keys and edit
   them. It has tab-key completion of filenames (csh uses the Esc
   key), and it lets you switch to the directory you were last in
   with cd -. It is also much easier to alter your prompt with tcsh.
   It makes life a lot easier.

   Here are the three steps for installing a new shell:

    1. Install the shell as a port or a package, just as you would
       any other port or package. Use rehash and which tcsh (assuming
       you are installing tcsh) to make sure it got installed.

    2. As root, edit /etc/shells, adding a line in the file for the
       new shell, in this case /usr/local/bin/tcsh, and save the
       file. (Some ports may do this for you.)

    3. Use the chsh command to change your shell to tcsh permanently,
       or type tcsh at the prompt to change your shell without
       logging in again.

     Note: It can be dangerous to change root's shell to something
     other than sh or csh on early versions of FreeBSD and many other
     versions of UNIX; you may not have a working shell when the
     system puts you into single user mode. The solution is to use su
     -m to become root, which will give you the tcsh as root, because
     the shell is part of the environment. You can make this
     permanent by adding it to your .tcshrc file as an alias with:

 alias su su -m

   When tcsh starts up, it will read the /etc/csh.cshrc and
   /etc/csh.login files, as does csh. It will also read the .login
   file in your home directory and the .cshrc file as well, unless
   you provide a .tcshrc file. This you can do by simply copying
   .cshrc to .tcshrc.

   Now that you have installed tcsh, you can adjust your prompt. You
   can find the details in the manual page for tcsh, but here is a
   line to put in your .tcshrc that will tell you how many commands
   you have typed, what time it is, and what directory you are in. It
   also produces a > if you are an ordinary user and a # if you are
   root, but tsch will do that in any case:

   set prompt = "%h %t %~ %# "

   This should go in the same place as the existing set prompt line
   if there is one, or under "if($?prompt) then" if not. Comment out
   the old line; you can always switch back to it if you prefer it.
   Do not forget the spaces and quotes. You can get the .tcshrc
   reread by typing source .tcshrc.

   You can get a listing of other environmental variables that have
   been set by typing env at the prompt. The result will show you
   your default editor, pager, and terminal type, among possibly many
   others. A useful command if you log in from a remote location and
   can not run a program because the terminal is not capable is
   setenv TERM vt100.

     --------------------------------------------------------------

10 Other

   As root, you can unmount the CDROM with /sbin/umount /cdrom, take
   it out of the drive, insert another one, and mount it with
   /sbin/mount_cd9660 /dev/cd0a /cdrom assuming cd0a is the device
   name for your CDROM drive. The most recent versions of FreeBSD let
   you mount the CDROM with just /sbin/mount /cdrom.

   Using the live filesystem-the second of FreeBSD's CDROM disks-is
   useful if you have got limited space. What is on the live
   filesystem varies from release to release. You might try playing
   games from the CDROM. This involves using lndir, which gets
   installed with the X Window System, to tell the program(s) where
   to find the necessary files, because they are in the /cdrom file
   system instead of in /usr and its subdirectories, which is where
   they are expected to be. Read man lndir.

     --------------------------------------------------------------

11 Comments Welcome

   If you use this guide I would be interested in knowing where it
   was unclear and what was left out that you think should be
   included, and if it was helpful. My thanks to Eugene W. Stark,
   professor of computer science at SUNY-Stony Brook, and John Fieber
   for helpful comments.

   Annelise Anderson, <andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu>

     --------------------------------------------------------------
