[buug] BSD newbie needs help

[Skip Evans]

Hi Everyone,

I just joined the list and have a few questions about FreeBSD. Let me give a brief intro to give you a better feel for my skill set. I was a developer for 15 years, C, C++, Java, and in that time did probably 50% of my work under HP-UX, Solaris, and a little SCO Unix. I have light sys admin experience, but nothing moderate to heavy. I can get my way around a Unix box, but for those of you who are true sys admins, I will be the first to admitt us developers (even us former ones), can be real bulls in china shops when we try and do admin work. However, I worked in a few small shops where we wore many hats, and then at some big companies and had to fill in at times when staff was short.

That said, I left dev work after 15 years to work at a small non-profit here in Oakland defending the teaching of evolution in public schools. Bringing my background with me, a couple of things I've done is to add an intr(a)net section to our int(e)rnet facility that we use for various sundry activities, and also organize closed list serves for various communities of activists we work with around the country. Our internet and intranet is currently a Windows NT/ASP shop, and I decided with our own in-house server I'd opt for BSD for the next phase of the intranet, and migrating our lists from Yahoo Groups and another Unix server someone else maintains, I'd be able to get more done and better organized.

I've got BSD installed on an old box we had laying around, but will probably need help getting it on the network and getting our second domain name signed up for it. Additionally, I'll need majordomo, Samba, and Apache set up for the initial fire up. 

Are there people on the list available for consulting work? We are a non-profit and don't have a big budget but if we get some good estimates we can pay someone for the work. If our budget is too small, I'd be happy to compensate with some pizza and a few beers if you like at the end of a few hour stint. I'd prefer work on say a Saturday afternoon so that I could look over your shoulder and learn a bit. I'll be maintaining this thing moving forward and I know I have a lot of learning to do.

In the meantime, a couple of quick questions: for dev work I always worked under the CDE environment, but just to see what it was like I loaded Gnome on this box. One feature I really liked under CDE (KDE), were the buttons on the bottom of the tool bar that essentially gave you four screens in one. Is it possible to configure Gnome like that? I thought I had seen workstations accessing Linux boxes at one job that were like this. How customizable is Gnome? Do any of you have preference for one over the other?

Thanks so much! I hope to attend the August 1 meeting.


Skip Evans
Network Project Director
National Center for Science Education
420 40th St, Suite 2
Oakland, CA 94609
510-601-7203
510-601-7204 (fax)
800-290-6006
evans at ncseweb.org
 http://www.ncseweb.org

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