Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2000 19:32:02 -0500 From: "Pedro F. Giffuni" <giffunip@asme.org> To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Cc: James Howard <howardjp@wam.umd.edu> Subject: Re: Wow, it has been a while Message-ID: <38D17D02.5486A25C@asme.org> References: <200003162031.PAA24296@rac1.wam.umd.edu>
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That brings the old memories...
AFAIK, I installed the first FreeBSD box in Colombia. Linux was barely
known then, but the idea of a system created by a CS student in Finland
was not convincing enough for my first UNIX encounter. I was basicly
learning with Solaris and SCO then, and I found on the net some
information about 386BSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD.
The *BSD history seemed interesting enough to give these a try, and if I
hadn't liked it, the source code would still be an excelent reference. I
was interested in NetBSD but I had a PC, and only FreeBSD had a CD
distribution those days.
I tried the installation floppy of the just-released 2.0.5R and it did
look promising but I didn't consider sensible to attempt installing it
with the limited bandwidth we had. Casually someone from the University
was travelling to the US and asked me where he could find a good Linux
distribution; I gave him the information about WC's Slackware and
mentioned FreeBSD. The guy brought with him a FreeBSD-2.0.5 Release that
I installed while he was playing with his Slackware. Both CD sets got
lost misteriously.
unalbsd.usc.unal.edu.co (as we called that first box) was installed from
the CD distribution mounted over NFS. unalbsd is very dead now, but we
were very impressed when we saw how much faster it was compared to the
SCO system it replaced.
I went into a big deal of trouble building gcc, gopher, ghostscript,
lynx, and XFree86 under SCO; with FreeBSD all of this and much more was
included. I was very much hooked since then to FreeBSD: In home my ATAPI
CD drive wasn't recognized, the graphic card never worked properly and
it took me quite some time to get ppp and netscape running, but it has
always been my favorite OS.
My addiction to the ports tree came shortly after and when I was
contracted by the School library I had three boxes with FreeBSD
installed...
I have made many good friends using FreeBSD, which is something that I
would also add as a positive point: we still don't have too much of the
bigotry common in other groups.
Well that was it, here I am, anxiously waiting or each release every
four months :).
cheers,
Pedro.
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