Quick update: the learning is going on really good. MINIX turned out to be a piece of crap, even as a learning tool. FreeBSD is much more solid. Unix System Administration Handbook turned out a better book than I expected it to be. Less about administration and more about fundamentals. The Unix Time-sharing System has been a godsend. An Introduction to the UNIX Shell was very helpful too. These 3 have my topmost recommendations to anyone starting with *nix.
I’m currently running FreeBSD 8.0 under Windows 7′s Virtual PC (the one that comes with XP Mode). The biggest pain was getting DHCP to work. The trick was to force full-duplex on the virtual Ethernet adapter and set DHCP client to run synchronously at the boot time. Here’s how my /etc/rc.conf looks now:
font8x8="cp437-8x8" font8x14="cp437-8x14" font8x16="cp437-8x16" allscreens_flags="MODE_32" synchronous_dhclient="YES" ifconfig_de0="DHCP media 100baseTX mediaopt full-duplex"
The top 4 lines configure support for 30-vertical-lines screen, as opposed to default 25-lines one.
The bottom 2 lines configure DHCP.
Another pain was adding second virtual harddrive and mounting it as /home — I finally did it using the “dedicated” method from FreeBSD Handbook.
Finally, in order to get VM to feel more responsive I had to add following setting to my /boot/loader.conf:
kern.hz=50
This is pretty much it, everything else was by-default. This was tons of fun!
