FreeBSD at Home: A Newbie Perspective

Copyright © 1999 Bart Trzynadlowski

I fondly remember my first computer: an old IBM 286 clone running DOS. Back then it was great. As a youngster all I did was play my favorite game "Beast" where the objective was to defeat the letter H's chasing you by smashing them between blocks. Not long after this my dad brought home a screaming 386 with a 5.25" AND a 3.5" floppy drive and a whopping 120 megs of disk space. This monster was equipped with a more than generous 4 megs of RAM. I cut my teeth on this system. I learned to program in BASIC.

Soon I moved into the world of more modern computers: my Pentium 166MHz system. I engaged in more BASIC, some C/C++, and 80X86 assembly language. Pretty soon I was familiar with all the perils and downs of Windows 95. The "blue screen" was an all too familiar sight. After a few years of sacrificing stability and power for compatibility I realized it was time to move on from the MS empire. In 1998 I heard about some great new OS: Linux. This Linux offered most of the advantages of UNIX -- something I had never actually tried -- and then some. So what I did was I headed over to CheapBytes and got myself RedHat 5.1.

I loaded up RedHat and was pretty disenchanted. Before I actually rushed to get Linux I was recommended FreeBSD instead. But I dismissed that after some "heavy" consideration. My main concern was compatibility with my sound card. The Linux installation was nice and intuitive but it wasn't working. For some reason it wasn't creating the /, /usr, and swap slices on my disk. Eventually after much sweat and blood was shed it booted and I was happy. But not for long. Linux simply "did not work." The installation had screwed up royally. Most of the programs complained about missing configuration files and some programs such as the RedHat Control Panel just didn't respond. Nothing happened when I clicked that button... over and over and over.

After some stabs at trying to configure it I gave up and deleted it. However all those great stories about UNIX being a "programmer's dream" tempted me again. This time I remembered the FreeBSD suggestion and got myself release 3.1 at CheapBytes.

Installation was a bit less friendly than Linux, but it wasn't that bad at all. However FreeBSD could not pick up my second hard drive because it was the secondary slave -- and there was no master on the secondary channel. But once this issue was resolved (a simple jumper tweak) I was able to set up the disk space for FreeBSD. But I ran into another hurdle: the boot manager. It would not install. It kept prompting wether or not I wanted to install it several times until the installer wouldn't continue. So I skipped the boot manager and went on. Within an hour I had FreeBSD booting from my mfsroot floppy.

FreeBSD seemed better than Linux from the start. The best way to put it is that "it works." I had no ports installed (although I did have Netscape and just a few other essentials) and there wasn't much to do. The first thing I did was set up my PPP connection. Although it was a bit of a rough ride at first I was able to get things going manually in no time thanks to the generous support from the freebsd-questions mailing list (freebsd-questions@freebsd.org).

Then I went about installing things from the ports collection. I must say that I have never experienced anything as well designed as the ports system. For NASM all I had to do was:

Brzuszek#cd /usr/ports/devel/nasm
Brzuszek#make install

and I was in business! Within minutes FreeBSD had pulled NASM off an FTP site and installed it without a hitch.

I began to experiment with FreeBSD. It was very different than Linux but what I liked best was that it was truly a fun experience toying around with various concepts and learning along the way. I resorted to the freebsd-questions list a lot but the advice helped and with each problem solved I learned a bit more about UNIX and FreeBSD. The shell-based interface clicked with me -- I had always been a great fan of command line systems, under Windows I spend most of my time in the DOS prompt.

FreeBSD is great, there has been nothing to make me even CONSIDER uninstalling it.

Right now I am still a confirmed newbie. I am still tinkering with shells, user management, ftpd, PPP, and that behemoth archive of configuration files: /etc. I have a long way to go before I migrate from Windows fully but each day I inch closer. I only rely on Windows for a few things: WordPerfect 8 (you can bet I'll get this running under X soon), NASM (still doing assembly), and occasional browsing, although the latter is attainable under FreeBSD because X11 with twm works.

I won't buy the Linux hype from now on. Sure, give Linux a try but also give FreeBSD a try. I'm sure FreeBSD will be your choice. Everyone says that for newbies Linux is the best but I have to disagree! If you must choose between the two give FreeBSD a go. Besides, the Linux emulation mode is great. All you do is type 'linux' and you can run X86 Linux binaries (assuming FreeBSD is on your X86 machine.) Anyhow, to wrap things up, I'm all for FreeBSD now. It's great! Try it and you probably won't regret it. Congratulations to The FreeBSD Project and everyone who's contributed to it!

Bart Trzynadlowski, trzy@powernet.net