Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2001 20:47:25 +0300 From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> To: "Joel M. Fulton" <jfulton@e3tech.net> Cc: freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Would like comments and opinions regarding desktop OS switch Message-ID: <20010828204725.B11715@hades.hell.gr> In-Reply-To: <03d201c12fcc$ce04a7d0$0801a8c0@corp.trigeo.com>; from jfulton@e3tech.net on Tue, Aug 28, 2001 at 07:22:01AM -0700 References: <03d201c12fcc$ce04a7d0$0801a8c0@corp.trigeo.com>
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# This is a rather long posting, so if you hate ramblings that are # kind of longish, be warned .. this is one of them :-) From: Joel M. Fulton <jfulton@e3tech.net> Subject: Would like comments and opinions regarding desktop OS switch Date: Tue, Aug 28, 2001 at 07:22:01AM -0700 > Greetings- > > I am looking to switch (personal) desktops from Win2K/NT/9x to > either FreeBSD or the Debian distribution of Linux. I've spent a > lot of time researching distributions, usability, hardware > compatibility, etc. and have a component system spec'd with hardware > appropriate for either. I have also lurked on this (and other) > FreeBSD lists and Debian lists - trying to get sense of the > environment from its people, so to speak, before making my decision. Hello Joel, What you describe as having done so far, is very thoughtful and nice of you. Especially the lurking part, and the effort to find out more about the `people' who use an open source OS. You'll see why I deem this so important, when I describe the reasons why I use one OS, and tend to prefer it instead of the other. > I am asking for and would like comments about the reason you made > your decision to use FreeBSD. I have been using computers since 1993, when I started studying computer engineering. The first computers I ever used were Sun servers that I could connect to through a terminal server we had in the computing facilities of our campus. I grew accustomed to working on Unix, and then when I bought my first PC later that year, using DOS 3.x on it was a pain, compared to the elegance of Sun-OS 4.3 that I had been using until then. After a year or so, I installed Slackware Linux on my 486 DX/33 with 8 MB of RAM, and started playing with it. Using various distributions of Linux until 1999 was what made me more and more comfortable with the way a Unix system is supposed to work. Then, I wanted to try something else. I had heard of the BSD's and I wanted to try and see one of them (or even all of them), just being curious in what the differences were with Linux that I had been using until then. A friend of mine had installed OpenBSD on his home PC, and had been working with it for quite some time. I phoned him and asked if I could visit and try OpenBSD at his home workstation, or if he could create an account for me and let me fool around trying to get the hang of how things worked on OpenBSD. Instead of that, he gave me a copy of his OpenBSD 2.6 CD-ROM and insisted on me installing it on my own. "That way you'll know how the thing is installed, and how you can set up an OpenBSD system from scratch." So, that's what I did. I grabbed the OpenBSD CD-ROM, created a couple of boot floppies, and booted them. During the installation, I managed to completely wipe out my partition table, and there I was with a computer that would not even boot! (Backups of my data that I had kept on CD-ROM, before attempting to install the new OS, proved to be most valuable when I later had my computer running again.) A bit frustrated at the ease with which I had destroyed my partition table with the OpenBSD partition editor, I kept the OpenBSD around, and installed a copy of Slackware again, to get something running so that I would be able to access the web. I looked at other BSD's web pages, and in the next half an hour I had downloaded the boot floppies of FreeBSD and booted into them. I started the installation of FreeBSD just to get the feel of it, and see how things were done in this OS. In the next two hours, I had installed a copy of FreeBSD on my second partition with FTP-install, without messing with Slackware. The first thought was "Hey, this is so easy!" So, there I was, instead of an OpenBSD user, a FreeBSD user - and the choice was made simply because installation was easier on the FreeBSD part of the world. > How has your experience been so far? At first I knew nothing about the system. Not even how to get the thing up and connected through my dial-up provider. Then I discovered things bit by bit. The man-pages. The documentation in /usr/share/doc. The FAQ. The Handbook. The general feel of the OS, showed that people had done excellent work, and the overall impression of a "professional" style was apparent right from the start. Now, after slightly more than 2 years of using exclusively FreeBSD as my desktop OS at home, and as a server at work, when a Unix server was called for, all I can say is that every day I like FreeBSD a little more :) There are problems at times, especially when someone from Windows sends me some file that I need a Microsoft product to read it. But, by now, most of the people I work with have learned to value the portability of ASCII or HTML for data they send to me :) > Now that you're a FreeBSD user, would you have rather chosen another OS? For my own personal use, no. I can understand that there are reasons why one might not be in the position to use BSD, in certain cases. For instance, if one finds a company with a setup that includes a dozen or so of Linux servers, it's not a wise idea to try switching them all to BSD. At least not before he knows exactly what each and every one of them is supposed to do. I'm using BSD as the word in this answer, and not FreeBSD, because I've also played with NetBSD and OpenBSD since I first installed FreeBSD, but I still prefer FreeBSD in the way some parts of the system work. I also like the huge ports collection a lot. And there are a couple of other reasons too. > Did you begin using FreeBSD for politico-ethica-socio-spiritual > reasons if not, why did you begin using FreeBSD? I began using open source systems, for various reasons. There were the economical ones (back at 1994, I could not spend the amount of money it would take to have a Sun server/workstation at home, but I could afford buying the occasional Infomagic cdrom-set). Then, there are the ethical ones. I hate software piracy. If I kept using Windows on my home machines, most of the stuff that I could easily find here in Greece, would be copies of programs, that I would pay little for, but still be a pirate. That, I loathed. Social reasons also are included in the lot. While I was using Sun-OS at the University, the help I received from newsgroups of other Unix users was tremendous. Very precise, and to the point. Also, that help usually came without the extra `benefit' of an attitude - which was more typical of the DOS using world. So, I liked the `community' part of Unix a lot, too. Then, when I had used Linux for so long, I began using FreeBSD because I was curious to see how it worked. In time, I discovered that the same reasons that had made me use Linux in the first place, also applied to FreeBSD - only a little modified. FreeBSD is also free. It's actually more free than Linux. The BSD license is there to make sure this is true. Ethical reasons that make use open source, also apply to FreeBSD. And then, there is the community. After having asked a few things in the Linux camp, and received prompt answers, I discovered that the comparison between the way Linux people helped newbies, and the way FreeBSD people do, is certainly in favor of FreeBSD. That `attitude' reason that had driven me away from DOS in the old days, was now pulling me away from Linux and into the FreeBSD lot. It's also much easier to get support for FreeBSD using the more centralized way it works. Mailing lists for support are hosted at freebsd.org and all you have to do is post to questions@freebsd.org. If you ask in a polite manner, and have done your homework, more often than not the same people who develop the code will answer back! Now, that was amazing for someone who came from the Linux camp, with the millions of packages, the dozens of distributions, and the hundreds of different mailing lists / newsgroups / and what not. > What three things do you wish you would've known before adopting > FreeBSD? 1) That www.freebsd.org and the documentation present there are an invaluable resource. 2) That it's not that hard to install and learn to use. This kept me for quite some time from 'testing' on of the BSD's at home. 3) That it's so easy to keep up to date. If I knew that, I'd have switched much sooner. > It is my intent to run both before deciding which to keep. My > functionality requirements to make this a successful shift: > stability, Yes, this is what FreeBSD is famous about. Being -STABLE as a rock :-) > ease of updates (both to os and to ports/packages), The way FreeBSD can be updated is described in the Handbook. I find the idea of a `base system' with known parts that are always there, and are updated with CVSup as a single entity, very useful. It is one of the reasons why I stick with FreeBSD now. Having to update a few dozen packages, and all their dependencies in Linux tends to be a nightmare when you want to compile everything yourself. With FreeBSD, it's all a matter of a few commands: # cd /usr/src # make buildworld # make buildkernel KERNCONF=MYCONFIG # make installkernel KERNCONF=MYCONFIG # reboot [ into single user-mode ] # mergemaster I haven't found yet a Linux distribution (or a commercial Unix, for that matter) that can beat this! > some specific applications > (palm sync, There's a whole ports/ category for palm. I'm not sure if you'll find something that you like in there, since I do not own a Palm to have tested them, but they're there... and if you find that you want to change something, they're open-source too :-) > cdrw/cd-ripping (for backup purposes only), For CD-recording, I use mkisofs from the ports and burncd from the base system. I know very little of audio-cd ripping, but I have used dd(1) to copy images of what cdrom's I wanted to keep on local storage for copying later with burncd. > samba/smb connectivity) There are a few options here, too :-) I used to work with sharity-light, but now there's even a net/smbfs in the ports. After you install FreeBSD, any such questions tend to be answered very fast from more knowledgeable people that are lurking freebsd-questions. > Thank you, in advance, for any comments. Just to reiterate, I'm not > looking for reasons to jump off the Microsoft ship ... > What I am asking for reasons *to* move to FreeBSD and perhaps a > contrast between it and the Debian distribution. I haven't mentioned Debian so far. I do not know much about recent Debian distributions, since I'm only using FreeBSD for a couple of years now. I vaguely recall 'dselect' and horror creeps up my spine, when I compare it to the ports. I've heard of apt-get but never used it. I'm afraid, I cannot comment on Debian. -giorgos To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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