Hey bart, thanks for re-inspiring me. Yes, seriously. At the beginning of this week I was talking to Udontknow (on IRC) and he told me a bit about NetBSD and OpenBSD; how "strong" they are, with more "seriousness" on the developing (compared to Linux), etc, etc. He even went as far as showing me some lines of a firewall script, which really made my mouth fall open. Yep, those firewall lines looked simplier than the ones we have in Linux (iptables).
Well, after all that chat I was thinking "what the hell? I have a damn powerful computer, why not testing that crap, just to see what happens?" So, there I was, on Tuesday, downloading NetBSD and OpenBSD CD images for a later try. Later that same day I fired up VirtualBox on my Bluewhite64 and tried installing NetBSD first. Well, I was not that happy or lucky. I got lots of errors when I reach the decompressing part of the installation. Since it was quite late, I decided to try it on the other day. I was not very lucky (nor happy) on Wednesday. I even got as far as really installing the OS. It was running, but something seemed a bit awkward. Plus, when I tried to download some other piece of software, I was disconnected from the server, EVERYTIME, after downloading about... 200KB. DAMN!
Try this, try that... and I decided to try google. There, on the first link I got my answer. Visiting this site, the fourth post, I found the solution. Beautiful! So now I reinstalled NetBSD on that VM, downloaded some more software without a single problem... and I have even installed OpenBSD too.
Why did I say bart re-inspired me? Because when I decided to install Net and OpenBSD I felt, again, the same feeling I got when I first installed Linux on my PC, back in 1997. The feeling of adventure, of the unknown territory! OK, it won't be THAT unknown, since now I have some strong grasp of the *nix way of doing things. Plus, now I won't need to reboot my computer to access another OS (which is working right and dandy), to access the internet and look for clues. Now I will have two (or more) OS running at the same time. I hope this time the learning will be faster. And it does need to be, because now I don't have that much spare time as when I was single and didn't have to work *LOL*
So, bart, I got the feeling of adventure and even thought about posting something. Then I saw that post on your blog... and decided "yes, I do need to post something!".
And I so agree with you, we need to get our skills "un-rusted". I go a bit further. We need our skills challenged! I DO understand you when you say your job is a bit boring. Things are quite the same here. Lots of "using windows" and really, really little challenge.
So, let the challenge begin!
Oh, in regards of your last comment here on my site... well, too bad I was in kind of a rush and I didn't bookmarked that forum where I got the "golden tip" about the drivers I had to download to make that friend's computer to work nicely with Windows XP. But if you decided going for XP instead of "suffering" with Vista, let me know and we might refind it ;) Yes, Vista runs with 1GB of RAM but... as you said, it's quite slow. IF you don't need Windows that much, it might not be a big issue for you. But since my friend ONLY uses windows.... *LOL*
1 comment:
Heheheh, I feel great suddenly :)
Yes, if we stop, we soon start getting bored with work, and in the tech area, being bored will made you mad about the work.
Having fun in work is not always possible, so, yes, we need to find a small time to break from the regular stuff and start again the fun: learning new and amazed stuff.
Glad you tryied VirtualBox, I do use VMWare on the work a lot, and it does play really well to test such things as diffetrent operating systems without havint to mess your machinery ;)
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