bsdfsse said the following on 10/3/2004 3:12 AM:
Ironically, I'm switching to FreeBSD because I'm already tired. My bones are aching from years of abuse. I'm tired of..
<MuchSnippage>
Hear Hear!!
..of Linux distributions with fatal flaws. I went on a giant search to pick the perfect Linux distro, and I ended up selecting FreeBSD. Every single distro had some aspect I didn't like.
I started with FreeBSD in the Fall of 2000, when I started at Lumeta. I loved it so much that when I built my personal server, I used it (and Wing's now running on 4.10-STABLE, and when 5.3 is out of BETA I'll most likely upgrade it...). I had played with RedHat (3 or 4.. I still have the CDs somewhere!), I had used Unix System V (on a Unix PC (AT&T PC 7300) no less!) in the early 90's, but had ended up working with Windows mostly at my jobs, and thus, at home. Every time there was a new version of Windows, there were new idiosyncracies and more bullshit to cram into my head. When I started at Lumeta, I found those old Unix skills creeping back out of my memory--and they STILL WORKED! *gasp* ;)
Things that attracted me to FBSD:
1) The ease of the Ports collection. No messy rpm commands to have to memorize or read man pages on--just cd /usr/ports/tree/package && make install clean -- Wow. How much easier can it get? Oh I know... when you don't want the port anymore? cd /usr/ports/tree/package && make deinstall ;)
2) The support in the community--I've never lacked at being able to find help. Granted, this is more Unix-oriented than FBSD-oriented.. But I have to admit that the mailing lists have been a *HUGE* help when I've needed it.
3) Finding that O'Reilly hosted articles about *BSD (Like Dru Lavigne's many articles discussing the ports tree and other nifty things in FreeBSD, and how to maintain & keep them in tip-top shape)!
4) Finding that I could actually *run* more than, say, 2 or 3 services on a particular server! (The first FBSD server I helped configure at Lumeta served as our: general development, Samba-shared, user home, network print server, DNS, DHCP, Apache, RT, email server--I was amazed you could run all that on one box without it crashing daily, like Windows would at the time!)
5) The ease with which I was able to take an existing port (misc/instant-workstation) and make a Lumeta package which would run over the course of a weekend, hands-free, and build a developer's workstation to our specs! For free! I didn't need to learn any weird packaging script language (read: InstallShield), nor did I have to worry incessantly about "how many licenses do we have left for ..." like I had to with our Windows boxen.
(There are others, of course, but these are what come to mind immediately...)
..of proprietary formats. All the emails I lost over the years that were in some kind of Outlook format that at the time I was either too lazy or too ignorant, to make a back up of.
Yeah--early on I switched from Outcrack to Eudora, which, though better, still wasn't perfect--but at least it was in a Unix-like format! :)
My point is, the knowledge you gain about UNIX is your's forever. The freedom is forever. The control is forever.
If want to be a sysadmin, you don't have to be master of everything. You just need to be on the path - and you are.
It's not all about what you have memorized. It's knowing where to look for the information. I have *no* qualms telling people in interviews, when they ask me a question I don't know the answer to off the top of my head, that I could easily find that information via man <command> or a Google search. In general, I have found that if the person interviewing you Has Clueage, that's better to them than someone sitting there scratching their head going "Um.. let me think... um... " for a few minutes.
Myself, I am preparing to migrate my home PC from WinXP to FreeBSD 5.x soon. Mostly because I'm sick of the stupid driver conflicts, spontaneous reboots where M$ blames my NVidia drivers, and software that ceases to work because of SP2 (my screensavers, no less. And--do they cease to work gracefully? Noooooo--that'd be too polite--it just locks the PC with a black screen and a mouse pointer which is the only thing that responds to anything, forcing a reboot. Nice eh?). I'm already using Firefox, Thunderbird, and OO.o, so the switch shouldn't be too bad :)
Best, Glenn
--
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." ~Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759
_______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
