Tips for Linux users
This article was written by Liz, who seems to have made the transition
from Linux to FreeBSD with a minimum of strife. It was probably harder for her to
write this article than it was for her to install FreeBSD the first time. She
*hates* writing documentation.
Liz writes
For those moving to BSD from Linux its not as hard, I would say, as going
to BSD from Windows. FreeBSD is somewhat of a cross between Debian (the ports system
is compared to apt-get) and Slackware (which is based on BSD anyway). The key things
to remember are probably networking. i.e. most people want or need it in someway be
it ppp or eth. This is a brief sumory of the comparisons.
ifconfig
ifconfig in Linux brings up the config of the interfaces eth0, lo, and ppp0 in a nice
setup. When used in FreeBSD the same results are obtained from "ifconfig
-a" (only maybe a little more confusing looking and less tidy but it is the same
thing).
In FreeBSD, interfaces are named according to chipset, not interface type.
That means that the equivalent to Linux’s eth0 could be xl0 or ed0, depending on
what type of ethernet card we are dealing with.
route
"route -n" in linux shows you the gateway and general routing. BSD
route is completly different and it is good to read the man page! To get a look at
the routing however use "netstat -nr"
ppp
ppp is like minicom only different. You can decide to go interactive and get it
to do things as you tell it or you can set up a script and it does it automaticaly in the
background. I’ll do a write up on ppp as well as soon as i can ;]
/dev/
/dev/ is a whole new ball game with BSD. But the basics are there if you know
Linux. Instead of being /dev/hda1 its /dev/ad0s1, the ad0 being the fixed drive and
s1 being slice one or partition 1. BSD also uses abcd etc that are partitioned
within a partition due to the different BSD partitioning. What looks like one BSD
partition from Linux has smaller partitions from within.
floppy
/dev/fd0 is floppy
Liz writes
Do remember this is only what I have found on my own there may actually be a better
way (probably is actually). That is all i can think of at the moment.
Feel free to email
comments/abuse to wishes@chiqs.on.unixathome.org.
Liz