Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1998 11:01:29 -0700 From: Ludwig Pummer <ludwigp@bigfoot.com> To: "freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG" <freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: What tipped the balance Message-ID: <199807271817.LAA05229@hub.freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <35BC3FF3.E1EFA4BC@mcmail.com> References: <Pine.BSF.3.91.980726211200.25942A-100000@dsinw.com>
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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
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