A tryst with FreeBSD

Now that I have a lot of freespace on my hard-disk, (since removing windows), I decided to experiment with another OS. I use Solaris+Linux at work, and Linux at home, so the choice gets limited to
1) One of the BSDs (FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD)
2) GNU Hurd
3) Solaris 10
(BeOS & QNX I have already experimented with)

I downloaded HURD quite some time ago, but it could only be compiled from another Hurd natively, and cross-compilation didn't looked easy. In any case, Hurd isn't going to be usable any time soon, so I downloaded the latest stable FreeBSD (5.3).

Linux is no longer good enough. It has lost the exclusivity it had a few years back, so I needed something more uncommon to adorn my desktop. After all, every new kid on the block is running linux today ( or has run it at some point and given up), so you need something more to be accepted like a uber-geek, and thats where FreeBSD fits in very well. At least for the time being :)

Jokes apart, I thought I had get some idea of the BSD kernel, and see if I can port the work I am doing on Solaris to FreeBSD. The two are a lot similar, and as I wait for the Solaris sources to be opened, FreeBSD kernel sources are proving quite helpful. Sun has taken the first step with dtrace (http://opensolaris.org), but my guess is it would still take few more months.

This post, being made from

FreeBSD pluto.solar.com 5.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE #0: Fri Nov 5 04:19:18 UTC 2004 root@harlow.cse.buffalo.edu:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC i386

is a proof that I have got FreeBSD and one of my LAN cards working. (which connects to 24Online cable network) . The other one still needs to be configured.

BTW, Epiphany looks like a browser well done.