Resources for Newbies

The FreeBSD Handbook and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) are the main documents for FreeBSD. Essential reading, they contain a lot of material for newbies as well as advanced users. For users interested in installing a GUI, see the X Windows chapter.

Manual pages are good for reference but not always the best introduction for a novice. They generally provide information on a specific command, driver or service.

Join the FreeBSD-Questions mailing list to see the questions you were too afraid to ask, and their answers. Subscribe by filling out the following form: https://lists.FreeBSD.org/subscription/freebsd-questions. You can look up old questions and answers via the search page.

The FreeBSD Forums offer another support channel. Many users have written various tutorials and lots of new users receive help there.

You can search the Handbook and FAQ, the whole web site, or the FreeBSD mailing list archives.

The Support page contains a wealth of information about FreeBSD, including mailing lists, user groups, web sites, release information, and links to some sources of UNIX® information.

TrueNAS is a Network Attached Storage (NAS) software that shares and protects data from modern-day threats like ransomware and malware. TrueNAS makes it easy for users and client devices to access shared data through virtually any sharing protocol.

GhostBSD is derived from FreeBSD, GhostBSD uses the GTK environment to provide a beautiful looks and comfortable experience on the modern BSD platform offering a natural and native UNIX® work environment.

NomadBSD is a persistent live system for USB flash drives, based on FreeBSD. Together with automatic hardware detection and setup, it is configured to be used as a desktop system that works out of the box, but can also be used for data recovery, for educational purposes, or to test FreeBSD’s hardware compatibility.

MidnightBSD is a BSD-derived operating system developed with desktop users in mind. It includes all the software you’d expect for your daily tasks: mail, web browsing, word processing, gaming, and much more.

pfSense is a FreeBSD based network security solution. pfSense software, with the help of the package system, is able to provide the same functionality or more of common commercial firewalls, without any of the artificial limitations. It has successfully replaced every big name commercial firewall you can imagine in numerous installations around the world.