Introduce yourself, tell us who you are and why you chose FreeBSD

I am a person who started in this fascinating world of computers on May 3, 2007 at 7:30 pm, when he came to install in my house the desktop PC that I had bought, at that time, with my son and when they finished installing it and the technician left, I ask my son and now what do we do Valentino ???

I remember a splendid Windows XP on the Acer W1916 17-inch monitor.

Valentino with his 7 years, he says to me:
Let me see 'pa and he sat in front of that screen and started to do, what for me, was magic.

After this prologue, I have to say that I got into this world, because of the questions I was asked on a commercial level:
you have mail, what's your mail ??? and so on with those questions, feeling totally out of place and that's what made me start walking this path, which I spent almost seven months every night trying to learn and learn, which was already an obsession.

Eventually, I got rid of Windows XP and installed Mandriva-8.0, where I learned a lot and then continued with Debian, Fedora, until with the help of a Uruguayan user at night I was able to install Slackware-11.1

Then I discovered Arch Linux and there I stayed, along with an Arch fork like Antergos and today I participate daily in the EndeavourOS distro.

Why did I choose FreeBSD ?
Simply because, at least for me, it is the Mecca where you can reach, settle down and learn, although Linux helps a lot, it is not the same at all and it needs hours and hours of reading manuals and touching and breaking and reinstalling when I can't find solutions, until I can fix it, which is very comforting.

Anyway, this is who I am and this is what there is ...
I do what I can, I take it as a hobby and it is embedded in my daily life.

Ahh, now I can send and receive emails ;)


Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
 
Bienvenido, Judd! Este Oriental te manda saludos y desea que la pases bien en este foro.

(Begging the moderators' forbearance of a short greeting in a language other than English. I swear it contains no trolling, systemd-bashin', linux-pinin', or wrong-os-question-askin'.)
 
20-100-2fe said:
Though Linux is not Unix, I've learned a lot with it, and all this learning has greatly helped me getting into BSD.
I'm thankful to Linux for that! ;) :)
Click to expand...

Hello,

My personal story with FreeBSD started actually with Linux. The year was 1995 when I decided to set up a web and internet applications server. In summer 1995 my first version of the server was on Linux. After a week I realised (based on my previous Unix experiences with System V and BSD) that Linux is a complete crap. Reinstalled the machine with FreeBSD (I think it was 2.0 then) and never regretted that move.

Gradually upgraded software and hardware. Today the system is still running as my personal mail server as a Bhyve VM (FreeBSD v12.1). Always install applications from ports, configure and compile my own kernel. On Bhyve I have a very compact kernel configuration with only one virtual network driver. During that journey with FreeBSD I have had nat firewalls, web proxy with Squid and file servers with Samba all on FreeBSD.

I also happen to like FreeBSD on desktop and laptop. Have been running on desktop more than 10 years. I am writing this message on my FreeBSD laptop with ZFS and Mate GUI.

Good Luck!
 
Argentum said:
[...] After a week I realised (based on my previous Unix experiences with System V and BSD) that Linux is a complete crap.
Click to expand...
Haha, in the early/mid 90ies, OS/2 & Linux 0.9-1.x had cost me a keyboard each, that I threw against the wall out of frustration... Luckily, I overcome this kind of behaviour. Nevertheless, I did not know about FreeBSD, so I stayed with Linux until about 2005. My 1st FreeBSD installation was onto a gifted fanless Mac mini, where Linux had issues & the previous owner told me FreeBSD is running suffiently well. At that time, the GUI admin tools of KDE were not disabled, and some were functional despite Linuxisms. My final switch to FreeBSD was after I had data loss on a Linux box for the 3rd time (filesystem crashes & broken libraries after update).
 
I am long time windows user, gamer, and recently got into Freebsd for my eternal search of the cleanest license and I found it is 'BSD'.

An economist by trade, I was forced into learning more about sysadmin task, engineering, coding, DB architecture and DevOps due to the many pitfalls I've faced in my businesses with so-called "quote on quote" experts. I build & mod computers as a hobby, build my first Hackintosh 17 years of age, and first water-cooled 19ish. Own plenty of computers and hardware parts, I have a couple of blade servers setup, around 100tb+ of NAS, I build & refresh servers from off the shelves parts because well Enterprise cost is ridiculous.

Been a business owner from a very early age, I guess you can say I dislike working for anyone but myself. I am a secluded learner and tend to learn things the hard-way meaning by doing them. I tend to limit my learning to the time or needs of the moment so I leave lots of knowledge holes in between :rolleyes: forcing me back into an eternal spiral of never-ending search of knowledge.

I am in Disneyland because FREEBSD documentation and manuals are substantial.
 
After 18 years of Linux 'home power user' use, infuriated with systemd, and bored to tears with the daily torrent of "distro x, based on distro y" releases, with little but icons and wallpaper to differentiate them, I attempted for the second time to get a BSD machine up and running. GhostBSD was a good place to start, except it's very Linux distro-like and I want absolute granular control and simplicity (I was running Artix Linux for a few months - Arch without systemd), but again - too easy to get setup. FreeBSD, with Trihexagonal's 'newbies guide', proved to be just right. I used the memstick image and built everything else from Ports. Portmaster has been something of a revelation, as has 'pkg audit -F' (I ran archaudit on the Artix box after learning of its existence and found multiple vulnerabilities.)
This reminds me of using Slackware, which I loved for its simplicity and ease of setup.
 
I was introduced to FreeBSD back in 1995, when I started Computer Science studies at a university. I enjoyed using that system and learned a lot of basic system administration and software development skills from it. It was definitely a major hobby of mine during this time.

After graduation and entering the workforce, I used Linux professionally, but abandoned computing as a hobby in my spare time. A couple of years ago, I became interested in it again. I installed Linux on a few laptops that I had. One laptop was really old and was having performance issues. I still wanted to get some use out of it, so I created a few virtual machines to test out various operating systems.

Once I got the FreeBSD virtual machine up and running some of those old feelings came back from when I first started using it. I installed FreeBSD on the old laptop and it was usable again for all of my standard applications (browser, office software, etc.). Since then, I use it more as a server for my home network and have learned more and more about its features. I'm looking forward to running it on a more powerful machine and increasing my depth of knowledge.
 
Hi! I've been playing around with Linux for over 7 years. I've installed BSDs a couple of times, but never really did much with it. Recently, I've decided to spend more time trying to learn FreeBSD. I don't plan to abandon Linux, but mainly make FreeBSD a new tool on my open-source tool belt.
 
SKull said:
That is indeed a way to get to some new troubles :p
Click to expand...
Yep. But I managed to make every single piece of hardware I need working and it was quite satisfying. That involved building custom kernel and mixing some code from 13.0-CURRENT into 12.1 (because some things worked in 13.0 but not in 12.1 and I wanted the production version). I was really surprised that, after fixing a few errors, it compiled and worked. That was my first weekend as a FreeBSD user on a real hardware. Learned a lot!
 
I am just a geek that knows way too much about too many things to be an expert about anything. That being said, my first foray into Linux was with Slackware kernel version 0.9x. I then purchased the FreeBSD Handbook which had version 2.x included. From there I subscribed for a while to FreeBSD where they sent the CD's for the latest version as they were re Linux formleased. Got out of it for a while due to family and work but have my laptop running FreeBSD for a while now. I love the fact that I can tweak and break everything imaginable. I think Linux is doing great work but I want much more control over my installation then any distribution is willing to give. Also, the fact that what I learned from FreeBSD 2.x and on, is still relevant today on making changes to the system.

This forum has always been way more enjoyable and informative than any Linux forum that I have been a part of and is a major reason to be a part of FreeBSD.
 
Hi, I'm a software developer from Germany. I'm new to *BSD. I have a long background in Linux, and I always knew FreeBSD exists, but never tried it. Today I ask myself why, cause FreeBSD is great. I started with Ubuntu and ended up with Gentoo. I used it for some years, I liked it, but a few weeks ago I got annoyed by some weird bugs and started to dislike the linux kernel developement culture, so I thought about trying something new, just for fun. I installed FreeBSD on a free hdd which I didn't used for years, and tried it. And it was GREAT. Like a new way better world. I archived my old Gentoo, shifted FreeBSD to my SSD and use it now for weeks as my main system for development. And it's really awesome. Didn't imagine it could be that much better^^
 
Hello, I am an electrical engineer, who actually studied at an IT college. I've been using linux since linux-2.4? I guess. Last months/weeks I got into operating systems history as a free time activity, my interest was of course linux history, which led me to UNIX history, which led me to BSD. I knew about FreeBSD since college, but never actually thought about trying to use it. Now the time has matured.
I want to learn about FreeBSD, so there is no better option than to install it on bare metal and try to use it as my daily driver, it should be doable, because linux is my daily driver and AFAIK software availability is very similar. So far, I like the simplicity, I thought that arch linux is simple, now I see that FreeBSD's simplicity, compactness and ordered-ness (what's the correct word for it?) is on another level and I like it. I also like this OS's heritage and compliance to the UNIX philosophy, which is very apparent (e.g. OSS features and functionality, yea!!!)
 
I'm a mathematician and computer scientist, was mainly doing research for about 10 years, but then I decided to move from academia to the industry 3 years ago. My first experience with Linux dates back to 1998 (Mandrake), later I switched completely to OpenSUSE from Windows XP around 2006. I always wanted a semi-rolling distribution with a stable base and an up to date packages, that is nowhere to be found in the Linux world, where there is no clear distinction between base and packages. That is what brought me to FreeBSD early 2018, and since then it became my operating system of choice for my daily driver laptop (I appreciate many other points apart from the semi-rolling bit of FreeBSD). I also have a kvm OpenSUSE workstation that I use mainly for my daily work and another one running FreeBSD 12.1 with a couple of bhyve VMs. I try to contribute to FreeBSD whenever I can, I sent many patches to improve acpi support for Thinkpads, that were accepted and committed. I actively contribute to the Xfce desktop project since 2010, and I'm still part of the core team. Currently, I work fulltime for SUSE.
 
The last time I really worked and installed FreeBSD was more than 10 years ago. In 2009 I installed FreeBSD 8.0 running as VM on a new Dell server with Citrix XenServer as Virtual Machine Host, (it wasn't called hypervisor yet, I believe), and it's still running in the same VM ever since. It's only used for a postgresql database. After that I moved away from FreeBSD to Debian, because (at that time) you could not install FreeBSD on EC2 servers from Amazon, and I wanted to have the same OS for both my local servers as well those on EC2 and on dedicated servers in datacenters (Hetzner). I always used FreeBSD in the shell, never tried a desktop GUI.

After 10 years, it's time to renew the hardware, we got a new server (AMD Threadripper 3970X) and we are using xcp-ng as Hypervisor with more RAM and fast SSD, so we can install more VM's.

So I'm trying to get FreeBSD running, but after numerous attempts, it all hangs on the same

Code: 
uhid0 on uhub0
uhid0: <QEMU QEMU USB Tablet, class 0/0, rev 2.00/0.00, addr 2> on usbus0

I've tried:
FreeBSD-11.4-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso
FreeBSD-12.0-RELEASE-i386-dvd1.iso (it's i386, I know, it will show the UEFI Interactive Shell v2.2, does not boot at all.)
FreeBSD-12.1-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso
FreeBSD-12.2-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso
FreeBSD-12.2-RELEASE-amd64-disc1.iso
FreeBSD-12.2-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso
FreeBSD-13.0-CURRENT-amd64-20201022-0035a6c7bb7-bootonly.iso

They all hang on the exact same point, any input of the keyboard is ignored, but if I change the .iso of the VM, it will give me
Code: 
g_access(961): provider iso9660/12_2_RELEASE_AMD64CD has error 6 set

After this I tried to install TrueNas:
TrueNAS-12.0-RELEASE.iso

Surprisingly, this worked immediately and I was surprised by the great web-interface. I read about not putting TrueNAS as a VM, but this was for testing purposes to see if I can get any FreeBSD version running on this xcp-ng hypervisor. I could even install some community plugins, and that worked great out-of-the-box.

Now, If I would use TrueNAS just for a NAS in production environment, I would not think about adding any plugins, but why not use a TrueNAS installation for only the plugins? Are there any other solutions that install FreeBSD and have it real easy to install other applications/plugins/whatever-you-want-to-call-them ?

Anybody ideas why the normal FreeBSD are not booting on xcp-ng?
 
Hi all, it's good to see a 2.0 thread. I started using FreeBSD back in 2012, about halfway into high school. Mostly I'd jumped from Linux distro to distro-- my father was a huge fan of Slackware but I grew up on Ubuntu. I stumbled on the BSDs after reading the Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll and looking a bit into its history-- and I found it to be exactly what I was looking for (something challenging for someone learning about computing systems, yet stable enough to hold its own for production systems). Nowadays I pretty much use it as often as I can-- for my main desktop machine (in conjunction with awesome wm) and for almost all of my server infrastructure (huge fan of bhyves and cbsd). I think I really just enjoy how open, yet cohesive FreeBSD seems to be, compared to some of the other projects out there.
 
Hi
Linux user since 1995, migration of my 3 home PCs to Freebsd for 1 year.
without any regrets I haven't touched windows since 1995.
sorry my english is bad
 
Not a new user, but haven't touched FreeBSD for years. Missed it. Missed this forum too. Hope I'll get to run FreeBSD again someday. Now if only I can get FreeBSD and Netflix to work together..
 
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