From owner-freebsd-newbies Mon Jul 27 11:17:40 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id LAA05250 for freebsd-newbies-outgoing; Mon, 27 Jul 1998 11:17:40 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from inet.chipweb.ml.org (qmailr@c1003518-a.plstn1.sfba.home.com [24.1.82.47]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id LAA05229 for ; Mon, 27 Jul 1998 11:17:24 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from ludwigp@bigfoot.com) Message-Id: <199807271817.LAA05229@hub.freebsd.org> Received: (qmail 1413 invoked from network); 27 Jul 1998 18:16:19 -0000 Received: from speedy.chipweb.ml.org (172.16.1.1) by inet.chipweb.ml.org with SMTP; 27 Jul 1998 18:16:19 -0000 X-Sender: ludwigp2@mail-r X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.0.1 Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1998 11:01:29 -0700 To: "freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG" From: Ludwig Pummer Subject: Re: What tipped the balance In-Reply-To: <35BC3FF3.E1EFA4BC@mcmail.com> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org At 09:53 AM 7/27/98 +0100, Rick Twyman wrote: Christmas of 1996, I went to the Christmas Party hosted by my ISP (it was a small, 10-line, $10/month for a TIA PPP account ISP, www.sns.com). Until then, the only experience I had was using my shell account, and I didn't even know about man pages then. So I asked the ISP's Unix guru, Bob Palawoda (now at www.fiver.net), what he thought about a guy like me loading Linux (the only free unix I had heard about until then). He suggested FreeBSD, for the reasons that you could someday contribute your own code improvement. I knew that would be a long way off (right now, my C experience is limited to simple "read a comma delimited database and write a price list with it" CGI scripts), but I became interested and visited www.freebsd.org. I also visited a Linux web site or two, but they didn't have the extensive Handbook or FAQ. I still had a 14.4k modem back then, and didn't have a free partition, so I spent my time reading the Handbook and the FAQ and all the instructions I could get to with my web browser. So I finally repartitioned my hard drive and installed FreeBSD from a DOS partition. I had downloaded bin and a few other things. FreeBSD booted, but I didn't know what to do. So I hit the reset switch to go back to Window$. Read up a bit. Booted back into FreeBSD. The startup fsck did its thing. I discovered I hadn't installed the manpages. Booted into Window$, fdisked my FreeBSD partition away, download the manpages, and reinstalled. Since then, I've loaded FreeBSD onto three other computers of my own (all of my computers have a FreeBSD partition on them). One's my cable modem gateway and server for everything. One's my DNS and kerberos server. One's my laptop, which I use to write CGIs with XEmacs. My desktop system was without FreeBSD for a while, but then I got kind of frustrated with how slow XEmacs, Netscape 4, and fvwm95 were going on the laptop (P-133, 24MB, FreeBSD 2.2.6), so I reloaded FreeBSD onto my desktop, with kde (finally!). And that's my story... I still feel like a newbie sometimes (when installing something totally unfamiliar, like when I installed kerberos), but that's what documentations, irc, or freebsd-questions (and MLs) are for! --Ludwig Pummer ludwigp@bigfoot.com ludwigp@chipweb.ml.org ICQ UIN: 692441 http://chipweb.home.ml.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message