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BSD and Me
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Bishamon-tenno's Open Source Page ----- Greetings and Welcome ----- |
| BSD and Me |
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I first got involved in
open source
back in 1996.
A co-worker mentioned that he was
running a version of unix on his desktop computer.
Now THAT got me curious. Years before, I had had an internet account with CRL. It wasn't what people nowadays think of as the internet. You connected to a computer and stared smack-dab at something that looked like DOS, but was far more powerful. It was a shell account on a unix machine. Not only did it let me broswe the card catalogue of a library in New Zealand, use electronic mail, and browse a growing mass of interconnected electronic texts called the World Wide Web, but this 'unix shell' was one powerful mama-jama, blowing the snot out of any scripting abilities DOS had. Getting help from my co-worker was like pulling hen's teeth, but eventually I scraped together a system. It was a Cyrix 486 80MHz computer with 16 megs of RAM. Not horrible for back then. I also dug up an old Hercules monitor and card for it. Black screen. Green letters. Enough electro-magnetic radiation to sterilize a male elephant. Frankly, building a FreeBSD box taught me more about computers, networking, operating systems, and programming than I had ever learned from a Microsoft product. FreeBSD is not made with 'cloak and dagger' tactics. No effort is made to hide the nuts and bolts from the user in an effort to creae a revenue stream out of support. To use FreeBSD, you have to KNOW it. True, that does raise the bar. I don't know how many late nights I spent coaxing that first box, trying to get the exact sequence of keystrokes needed to produce the correct result. But the knowledge gained was deeper, and it's protable knowledge. I can use what I learn in any operating system, from MacOS X to Windows 2000. I've used FreeBSD in commercial environments, and for my own personal use at home, and it's never failed me. As I saw Linux gain popularity, I was skeptical. It seemed just a pretender. But it comes from a very similar design philosophy, and after getting over it's slightly different configuration, I see that they share the same . . . for the lack of a better pun . . . the same genetic 'code.' They are siblings from Papa and Mama UNIX, growing up and making their parents proud. I am resoundingly happy with my desicion to break from the norm and experiment with these operating systems. I think I'll always feel more comfortable with FReeBSD. The operating system just feels more like home. Perhaps if I started with Linux, I'd feel differently. At this point, though, I don't see any overwhelming difference in the two that can't grow closer in the next few years. Right now, FreeBSD is a stronger server, while Linux is a but more user friendly as a workstation. All things change, but I can't see anyone going wrong with either. - Bish |
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© 1999 Bishamon-tenno. All rights reserved. |
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