Installing problems. No Desktop.

I installed FreeBSD on an older Gateway laptop. 128 MB/ 233 MHz/ 800x600
screen/ 6 GB Hard driver with 4 GB on the hard drive set aside for
FreeBSD. Windows 98 SE is installed in the other 2 GB. FreeBSD appears
to be installed correctly, but I cannot get the KDE desktop to come up.
In fact, all I can get is the command line. I can pull up the
installation files. But that is pretty much it. I am very familiar with
DOS commands, but UNIX commands appears to be nothing like them, and I
don't know any UNIX commands. It seems that I can not pull up even the
directory. I have managed to get my mail saying that I have incomplete
modifications from trying to change things. I get to a point where I
can't even figure our how to close the program, so I hit the power power
which closes things down.

But this is frustrating, and makes a good case for why people are
staying with Windows. In going from the old C-64/C-128 to Apple, to IBM,
to a CP/M operating system, the system commands reminded very much the
same. Even in going from the old GEOS (On both the C-64/C-128 or the PC)
to them MAC, to Windows, things stayed very close to the same between
them. Here everything is completely different. It's like going from
English to being told to fill out a form in Chinese without ever having
seen or heard the language.

I've installed the FreeBSD software 4 times coming to the same end. How
do I get from this Chinese line item stuff to an environment that I can
deal with? KDE seems to be installed, but is not coming up by default,
nor by any other way or reason.

I've tried several things, but I tried something to manually bring up
KDE the other day by switching to it's directory. Whatever I was doing
was something out of the FreeBSD Handbook. I was logged in as 'root'. I
got errors saying that I did not have permission. This puzzled me. I
didn't think this was supposed to happen while logged in as "root".

I have version 5.2.1 which I had downloaded a couple of weeks ago.

--

Lloyd Hayes

Email:
URL: http://TalkingStaff.bravehost.com
E-FAX Number: (208) 248-6590
Web Journal: http://lloyd_hayes.bravejournal.com/


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