[CS-FSLUG] BSD for linux users

[Brian Derr]

On Wed, Jul 07, 2004 at 04:13:28PM +0300, Jukka Y wrote:
> Now that I am back at home, I started again my adventures in BSD-land. I 
> prepared a installation media (cdrom) for FreeBSD, tried it once, but after 
> realizing the process has differences compared to linux, I decided to learn 
> more before actually diving into it (I try to preserve my win98/linux 
> installation, backups etc. which are alredy in a same machine).

I too, have stepped into BSD-land.  Over a year ago I installed FreeBSD
on my dilapidated 486 Compaq laptop with fairly good success.  The
install wasn't really all that complicated (as I remember anyway.)
However, with the crash of my hard drive yet again I decided I needed to
get a dedicated server back up and running in my home.  I had forgotten
that I had an old Compaq Prosignia 500 sitting around.  I has a Pentium
150 with 128MB RAM and about 12GB worth of RAID-0 (that's mirroring
right?) SCSI disks.

I had recently read a little article on OpenBSD and thought I would give
that a try.  So, I downloaded the floppy image for version 3.5 and
popped it into the floppy drive.  (I had previously tried installing Red
Hat 8.0 and Slackware 7.1 on this machine with not much luck because it
required both SCSI and RAID drivers and on all the boot options they
weren't in the kernel image!)  OpenBSD, however, supported it all right
off the bat!

I must say, the installer is insanely convoluted, even for an
experienced linux user.  I was scratching my head with the fdisk
followed by disklabel setup, quite a strange thought coming from linux.
But I figured, what the heck, I have no data on the drives I want to
save so if I screw up the partitioning I can just try it again with no
worries of data loss.  So I did my best and got it all setup for an FTP
install.  Got the onboard 10Mbit NIC setup and downloaded the required
packages for a base install.

It has been purring nicely for the past 8 or 9 days now with no hiccups.
I have got to say, I really enjoy the differences between OpenBSD and
Slackware.  It has been quite fun learning a new set of rules and new
software.  Plus, OpenBSD is just plain secure!  I had to do very little
"out of the box" to get it tightened down.  Now, granted, I could do
much more such as encrypt the swap and other file systems, but I'm still
quite a newbie to the BSD world.

Anyway, just thought I'd give you an update on my open source
adventures.  :-)  (By the way, I went with my beer variety naming
convention for my network: lager (OpenBSD), hefeweizen (Slackware, my
desktop), pilsner (CRUX, laptop) and stout (Win2k/Debian, my wife's
computer.)

Brian

-- 
The just man walketh in his integrity:
his children are blessed after him.  -- Proverbs 20:7
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