"Something vaguely memorish"<br><br>I've been getting a feeling from this thread that I got when I logged onto a BBS via telnet about a year ago. Nostalgia. Even toying around with MacPorts on OSX brings me that feeling, and I was never a Unix user, I started out on DOS/Win 3.11.<br>
<br>I can relate to the RPM nighmare, I gave up on Mandrake relatively quick as a noob.<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 11:14 PM, Brian Sobolak <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:brian@planetshwoop.com">brian@planetshwoop.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div class="im"><br>
On Fri, March 27, 2009 1:06 pm, Christopher D. Heer wrote:<br>
<br>
> Having said that, I've got a few older boxes lying around and I'm tempted<br>
> to try BSD and others, but I'm curious as to what it is the proponents of<br>
> BSD, Solaris, etc. really like over Debian-based Linux, or even Linux in<br>
> general.<br>
><br>
> What's the hardware/driver situation like? I'm thinking of things like<br>
> printers, scanners, and even video...is this relatively painless these<br>
> days?<br>
<br>
</div><!-- warning -- something vaguely memoirish follows --><br>
<br>
I first tried FreeBSD in 1997 when I copied 17 floppies from the UIC<br>
computer lab and then subsequently stayed up all night loading them onto<br>
my *blazing* Packard Bell, only to have the thing fail on me at about<br>
5:45am.<br>
<br>
In 1999 I installed various flavors of Linux. I worked at a tiny company<br>
and pirated an old PC to play with. I installed Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse,<br>
BeOS (not linux but fun) etc etc. They were fun to play around with what<br>
came out of the box, but installing software *for me* was a nightmare.<br>
RPMs didn't work too well.<br>
<br>
I switched to FreeBSD and have been running it off and on ever since. The<br>
reason I switched (and stayed) are:<br>
<br>
- _Social Engineering_ As I said at the meeting last night, I like that<br>
I can keep all of the URLs for support and technical materials in my<br>
head and the development process is orderly. (In particular, I liked<br>
<a href="http://freebsd.org/handbook" target="_blank">freebsd.org/handbook</a>, <a href="http://freebsd.org/ports" target="_blank">freebsd.org/ports</a>, and <a href="mailto:questions@freebsd.org">questions@freebsd.org</a>)<br>
<br>
- _GNU_ I was frequently exhausted by some Linux fora that would go at<br>
great lengths to tell me how awesome GNU/Linux was, only to have my<br>
compile fail.<br>
<br>
FreeBSD is fantastic for server needs. I've run mail servers, web<br>
servers, etc. off a DSL connection and appreciated running a real Unix<br>
server.<br>
<br>
It's typically a bit behind Linux on support cutting edge hardware, but<br>
hardware support, especially for an older computer, is good.<br>
<font color="#888888"><br>
brian<br>
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</div></div></blockquote></div><br>