From owner-freebsd-chat Thu Mar 16 19:16:49 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from bachue.usc.unal.edu.co (bachue.usc.unal.edu.co [168.176.3.20]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AF58F37BB62 for ; Thu, 16 Mar 2000 19:16:41 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from giffunip@asme.org) Received: from asme.org ([168.176.3.60]) by bachue.usc.unal.edu.co (Netscape Messaging Server 3.6) with ESMTP id AAA5925; Thu, 16 Mar 2000 22:16:21 -0500 Message-ID: <38D17D02.5486A25C@asme.org> Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2000 19:32:02 -0500 From: "Pedro F. Giffuni" Organization: Universidad Nacional de Colombia X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en]C-CCK-MCD {Sony} (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en,pdf MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Cc: James Howard Subject: Re: Wow, it has been a while References: <200003162031.PAA24296@rac1.wam.umd.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org 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. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message