“Absence makes the heart grown fonder.”

Back with Gentoo now, and ready to “settle down” again and dig in for another round. Renew my vows, if you will :)

Read on for my impressions of FreeBSD and why I am sticking with Gentoo, warts and all.

Fail!

Epic fail. :-D

I tried to install FreeBSD 8-CURRENT yesterday from this month’s snapshot. No good. Actually I did get ZFS up and running painlessly, and WOW… very cool stuff! But I had a heck of a time trying to get anything from the CD onto my computer. Finally I got a base system installed, but attempting to install really basic ports crashed and burned on me.

Jumping In

Oops. So much for being all patient and waiting until summer vacation. I played with the Freesbie LiveCD last night and my computer didn’t blow up. I was only able to get X running with the vesa driver and I didn’t even try to get my wireless card working, but I spent over an hour playing with the system internals and frankly, it wasn’t that scary. Then something happened which made me feel like advancing my schedule for trying out FreeBSD. And it was through no fault of Gentoo’s.

Gentoo Linux on the IBM Thinkpad T43 Type 2686

A HOWTO, or rather HOWIDID get Gentoo Linux running super smooth on an IBM Thinkpad T43 Type 2686.

I Used to Hate Windows

But now I don’t.

Gandhi said, “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.” One of my favorite quotes, and certainly accurate in describing the software world’s actions against OSS (Open Source Software). But how to describe the other way around: OSS users feelings toward proprietary software makers? We need to rearrange that quote a little. “First you fight it, then you ridicule it, then you ignore it, then you win.”

Photo Credits

Gotta give credit where credit is due.

The photo I used for the header image is from flickr, taken at Ise Shrine in Japan by James Disley.

The original photo is here. The photo is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. As per the terms, I hereby release my remix under the same license. Thanks for sharing, James!

-Doug

Statement of Purpose

On this page I’d like to keep track of where I am with open source. I’m planning a trial swith from my longtime bastion of Gentoo GNU/Linux to something new and difficult: FreeBSD. On this page I will post HOWTOs, config files and other bits of information to help not only myself, but hopefully a few others.

In my first post, I’ll lay out some personal reasons for the switch, along with a basic stragety to accomplish it.