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By then I had moved on to FreeBSD, I think starting at 3.?. The main reason for that move was internet access. FreeBSD CD set came with additional CDs of thei

by jmclnx 2y ago

By then I had moved on to FreeBSD, I think starting at 3.?. The main reason for that move was internet access. FreeBSD CD set came with additional CDs of their ports collection. No more downloading via my flaky and very slow phone connection (via kermit). I went back to Linux around 4.8 because FreeBSD started having issues with my hardware. By then I had "real" internet thanks to the company I worked for. I remember seeing items about this, but the BSD people tended not to care about these things. But a nice look back

arp242 2y ago
> FreeBSD CD set came with additional CDs of their ports collection. No more downloading via my flaky and very slow phone connection (via kermit). You just had to endlessly swap between the different CDs because the dependency resolution wasn't very smart about that. Fun stuff :-)
linguae 2y ago
This is actually how I was introduced to FreeBSD as well. I was a high school student in 2004 who had a hand-me-down PC that one of my high school teachers gave me. It had a 475MHz AMD K6-2 processor, 64MB RAM, and a 8GB hard drive that was running Windows 98. I learned about Linux in the spring of 2004, and I had Zipslack, which was a version of Slackware Linux that ran on top of DOS. I wanted to try Gentoo, but I had dial-up at home. At least Zipslack was small enough to make the download via dial-up bearable. During the summer of 2004 I took an introductory computer science course at Sacramento City College. The professor was a big fan of FreeBSD. He convinced me to try it instead of Gentoo, and he gave me some CDs that he burned containing FreeBSD and plenty of FOSS software. I ended up installing FreeBSD on my PC, and I fell in love with it. It was my daily-driver OS until the summer of 2006, when I was able to use some of my internship earnings to purchase a MacBook, my first brand-new computer and my first modern Mac. I still use FreeBSD whenever I need a Unix and when I don’t need to use Linux-specific software.

by jmclnx 2y ago

arp242 2y ago

> FreeBSD CD set came with additional CDs of their ports collection. No more downloading via my flaky and very slow phone connection (via kermit). You just had to endlessly swap between the different CDs because the dependency resolution wasn't very smart about that. Fun stuff :-)

linguae 2y ago

This is actually how I was introduced to FreeBSD as well. I was a high school student in 2004 who had a hand-me-down PC that one of my high school teachers gave me. It had a 475MHz AMD K6-2 processor, 64MB RAM, and a 8GB hard drive that was running Windows 98. I learned about Linux in the spring of 2004, and I had Zipslack, which was a version of Slackware Linux that ran on top of DOS. I wanted to try Gentoo, but I had dial-up at home. At least Zipslack was small enough to make the download via dial-up bearable. During the summer of 2004 I took an introductory computer science course at Sacramento City College. The professor was a big fan of FreeBSD. He convinced me to try it instead of Gentoo, and he gave me some CDs that he burned containing FreeBSD and plenty of FOSS software. I ended up installing FreeBSD on my PC, and I fell in love with it. It was my daily-driver OS until the summer of 2006, when I was able to use some of my internship earnings to purchase a MacBook, my first brand-new computer and my first modern Mac. I still use FreeBSD whenever I need a Unix and when I don’t need to use Linux-specific software.