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

[aht0]

Would you mind explaining a bit the chaotic and ossified part?

ossified - bad choice of a word. I had to look up the exact meaning in English because I at first did not understand what's wrong. It has somewhat different meaning in my own.

I meant it as "irrevocably locked in a certain mentality" - in Linux's case, "change for the sake of it, for whatever cost". Combine it with a NIH syndrome and "we are going to reinvent that wheel for the n'th time." (I could read ten+ years old FreeBSD HOWTO and be reasonably sure that whatever I am doing, I am going to get it working. Because changes have been small and incremental. Read 5 years old Ubuntu HOWTO and you'll be stuck in minutes)

Chaotic - It's said that Linux evolves, BSD is engineered. Evolution as a process is inherently chaotic. Fittest will win. So, both, good and bad ideas shall be casted into code and tried out on Linux. Where the viability of each shall be tested on Linux users.. How long would you like to be a lab rat?

 

[Deleted member 30996]

That's their paradigm:

paradigm

noun

2. an example serving as a model; pattern.
3.
1. a framework containing the basic assumptions, ways of thinking, and methodology that are commonly accepted by members of a scientific community.
2. such a cognitive framework shared by members of any discipline or group:

 

[hrsetrdr]

I'm just a hobbyist, been mostly using Debian since 2004, and "flirting" periodically with FreeBSD. I'm putting FreeBSD and OpenBSD on more of my machines, perhaps my Dell Inspiron I5 7567, if support for all components is available.

 

[devilock76]

I started on Sun in the mid 90's and by the late 90's was running debian.

About 10 years ago I started using Freebsd for some servers. After a few years those servers were bouncing back and forth between centos or debian depending on various reasons.

I recently came back to the BSD world, first running OpenBSD and now also running FreeBSD. I run both, I love the simple straight forward no nonsense nature of OpenBSD. I use Freebsd in places were I need more virtualization options as well as ZFS. Right now they are both doing desktop duties but looking to get more of my personal servers using them.

My primary work world is that of a developer, with a lot of work being in python, and also a lot of usage of docker. However on the side I am also a musician, used to be professional, now, just a hobbiest really. After years of dealing with Jack + Alsa, I have a special fondness for sndio which is what brought me into OpenBSD at first.

In the end there are just several things about what linux has become that leans me more towards the BSD world. I still appreciate what Linux has done for me in the past and will continue to use it heavily at work and personally. But the BSD's are feeling a bit more sane to me these days, especially considering I started in the Sun world.

Ken

 

[ShelLuser]

I'm not new but heck.. I feel like venting a little so I might as well

I've been a Unix fan for more than 20 years now (learned about Sun Solaris around 1995, got hold of RedHat Linux around 1998 which I merely used to keep my Unix expertise fresh at first). Basically I've been a fan of Sun Solaris for most of my time, I really enjoyed that OS as well as the company behind it (Sun Microsystems). Heck, I still have a few Sun boxes at home today (stored of course), some very ancient but they all still work (my Sparcstation 5 even has a massive 22" CRT screen, very fun to move around ).

Alas.. At first I started using Linux to keep my Unix knowledge fresh (I was a die-hard OS/2 user at the time), but when IBM more or less ditched OS/2 and things became quite outdated I eventually moved to a Linux (KDE) desktop which worked just fine. This was around 2003 - 2005 I think, RedHat powered at first but eventually I moved to Debian, and later messed around with Ubuntu.

Anyway, my fascination for Solaris & Sun never faded and I tried numerous of times to get my hands on Solaris/x86 but it wasn't exactly cheap. But around 7 things became affordable so from there on my servers ran on Solaris. Which was an awesome experience, especially if you keep remote X usage in mind. I would often log onto my local X environment on TTY7 (from mind) and then set up a remote logon on TTY8 which allowed me to directly connect to dtlogin and CDE (Common Desktop Environment). Of course I also had options to simply log onto the server using SSH (within Konsole) and then fire up X programs on the command line which would then manifest themselves on my local screen.

I actually somewhat pre-ordered Solaris 10/x86 and that environment was directly responsible for my eventual switch to FreeBSD, around 2012 I think. The problem was that after Oracle had taken over Sun you could immediately notice their corporate greed. I used to have 2 running licenses for Solaris; one for the x86 environment (main server) and one for a sparc which I used on an old Blade server (which was my main router / print server).

So when Oracle took over I saw my support costs go up from approx. E 300,- / year to E 900+ / year while your support options actually got chopped. For example: a license also gave access to SunSolve which was basically Sun's online database for everything they manufactured. For a Sun fan like myself this was really good stuff. And also one of the first things Oracle whacked.

Things went so bad that I quickly decided that I had to ditch Solaris. Not so much because I disliked the OS, but because I never got a good feeling about Oracle at all. That became quite obvious when I tried to get rid of my Oracle account around 2012, that wasn't easy!

Now my only problem was finding a suitable replacement. I was very customed to using ZFS, Zones (virtual machines on Solaris, comparable to Jails) and Solaris as a whole of course. And to be honest I wasn't really looking forward to moving back to Linux; it didn't support ZFS nor zones nor anything I was used to, but also because I started to dislike the environment as well.

That's when I gave FreeBSD a try and it was pretty much love on first sight (keep in mind: working with Unix environments has always been a thin line between work and hobby for me). Everything felt natural and familiar, and although I had to adjust to some changes (/usr/local vs. /opt for example) other things immediately felt normal. Obviously it was a big help that FreeBSD still used the Solaris packaging tools back then (version 9), and that I could continue using Solaris' ipfilter firewall.

So yeah.. for me FreeBSD was basically some kind of "Solaris 2.0 experience". Of course it's not really Solaris, but through all those years that I've been using it it never disappointed. FreeBSD has always given me that very same professional feel that Solaris did which gained me a lot of satisfaction of working with the OS.

For me the 'why' part basically boils down to:

• ZFS; once you become familiar with ZFS and all the crazy things you can do with it then it's very hard to move back to a more traditional setup.
  • Keep in mind though that although I favor ZFS I also still very much enjoy UFS environments as well. My (ancient) Toshiba laptop runs FreeBSD with UFS for example.
• Full control over my server; I always seriously disliked seeing wireless utilities getting pulled in on Linux merely because some required packages depended on them. Why on earth do I need wireless junk on my wired server? It's not a big issue, but the idea of redundancy always bothered me.. Well.. with FreeBSD I'm in control. And best of all: it's hardly that much more effort.
• Awesome documentation; One of the reasons I adored Solaris were its excellent manualpages. Unlike on Linux where manualpages were often an afterthought. Well.. FreeBSD provides more of the same. There's a good reason why I always pull in https://svn.freebsd.org/doc/head into /usr/doc together with textproc/docproj.
  • It's still on my todo to learn more about the XML layout of the documentation so that I can more actively participate in helping to keep things up to date. Problem is also time restraints.
• OS doesn't change on a whim; When pkgng was announced I was somewhat skeptical at first. Also because I actually enjoyed the previous tools. But looking back I still admire the whole transition and I think it's brilliant to move from pkg_add to pkg add.

And well.. I also think it's fun but that's obviously a very personal point

(edits): tty8 vs tt8, 150 vs. 300 for support costs.

 

[Vull]

Hi, I'm James and I've been working in the data processing/IT business off and on since 1981. My first PC experience was on a Tandy's Radio Shack TRS-80 model III which IIRC my dad purchased in 1980. It had no disk drives, but could (slowly) read and write Microsoft BASIC programs on a cassette tape recorder. I taught it to play 5 card draw poker because it had a character set that included symbols for spades, hearts, clubs, and diamonds. I figured that if I could teach it play poker I could teach it do any rote memory task I could do.

In the early '80s I installed computers, mostly TRS-80 model IIs, in accounting offices and radio stations to be used for scheduling radio advertisements, word processing, and a lot of Visicalc usage. The oldest computer systems I've ever encountered or used are probably the IBM 5100 and 5110, which I found in an accounting office. In 1984 I went back to college at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale where I completed a bachelor's degree in computer science in 1986. My first taste of Unix was at SIU where they had obtained a single PDP-11 minicomputer just so they could have a Unix machine, but there was only one, so all I got to do on it was basically to log in and then immediately log out, and let the next student have a turn at it. In 1987 I got a job working for a software VAR using Nixdorf and Point 4 minicomputers to run inventory control and other accounting systems written in Business Basic. Minicomputers of those types were well on their way out by then, so by the early '90s we started using Xenix, DEC, IBM/AIX, and eventually SCO Openserver, all of which were unix flavors with their associated licensing costs, which were easily high enough to keep me from getting a Unix machine of my own. Thus when FreeBSD and GNU/Linux hit the scene in the late 90's I was naturally more than just a little bit intrigued.

Still in the late '90s, I found the combo book and CD set from Walnut Creek CDROM books called The Complete FreeBSD by Greg Lehey at a Staples office supply store, and installed my first FreeBSD system on an old 286 machine I had lying around. I was immediately hooked. I also found a CD set for Red Hat Linux and somehow- I can't really remember how-- I also obtained and tried Slackware on the same hardware. Introduced all of this to my employer, but they chose to go with Red Hat instead of FreeBSD, which I thought was a mistake at the time, and it was, but I won't go into all of that here. During that time I also found time to open and run a comic book store from 1989 to 1998, but 'nuff said about that, and I won't go further into that either. In 2001 my wife died and in 2003 I jumped ship and went to work for Radiac in their internal IBM shop where they wrote all their own software. They worked with System 370 and knew nothing about AIX. I was not a good fit for them and I didn't last long at that, so I soon went back to my previous employer. By 2009 my kids were grown and I moved to Colorado Springs for about 2 years, burning many of my bridges behind me, but was probably too old to make such a move permanent, and so I soon found my way back to Southern Illinois, which is where my roots are, and where I remain.

Sort of burned out on the software business about 12 years ago, but in 2009 I got a Macbook computer which has FreeBSD in it's kernel, and just for my own amusement built a web-based business system executive suite using Apache and PHP, with the option to use either MySQL or PostgreSQL for the databases. It no longer supports MySQL since they got bought out by Oracle, and because it was always much slower than PostgreSQL anyway. I use PhpPgAdmin for the basic DB maintenance stuff although I use my own software for DB design, access, and administration. All of this was originally designed using the OS X Macbook with its FreeBSD kernel. I had to compile all the 3rd party software such as Apache and PHP because as you probably know the Macbook wasn't really designed for that type of thing. Never paid for any macOS X upgrades either, so I eventually ported the software to more business-like platforms such as FreeBSD and Debian, and also deployed it on Ubuntu and Linux Mint, just to see if it would work there, although I don't really recommend those two for such purposes, as they seem more focused on competing with Windows and Apple in the mass market, and offering the latest in multimedia software.

I prefer FreeBSD because it definitely seems to be better organized, more stable, focused, Unix-like, and business-like, and also because seems to offer somewhat better performance for the sort of server systems I like to write. I like FreeBSD because it adheres more closely to basic Unix system design principles and philosophies, such as writing components that fit well together, and to write a thing once, and write it well, and keep improving on it, rather than to keep on continually starting over from scratch.

Thanks for putting up with me y'all, and for sharing your thoughts and experiences; this is a great forum.

 

[dsyvanen]

Who's new to FreeBSD? Did you migrate from another OS and what was your reason?

Greetings! I started using Non-windoze OS back in '95 with Red Hat, then to Debian, then back to Fedora for UEFI boot, then to
FreeBSD when Fedora won't wakeup after a night of Transmission torrenting. I need someone to help after I 'pkg install xorg' and
a 'Xorg -configure' and 'startx' gives me a 'EE no screen found.' Any clues?

 

[Vull]

Greetings! I started using Non-windoze OS back in '95 with Red Hat, then to Debian, then back to Fedora for UEFI boot, then to
FreeBSD when Fedora won't wakeup after a night of Transmission torrenting. I need someone to help after I 'pkg install xorg' and
a 'Xorg -configure' and 'startx' gives me a 'EE no screen found.' Any clues?

f your GPU is not supported by FreeBSD, you can fallback on VESA (if your computer uses a BIOS) or SCFB (if your computer uses UEFI). For the latter case, you can find instructions to setup SCFB in a dedicated article.

You should check out this page, and if you can't find a solution there, you should probably start a separate thread for a follow up on these kinds of questions there. Thanks and welcome to the forum.

 

[kpedersen]

Hi, I'm James...

Nice, that was a cool story, thanks for sharing. The idea of queuing up for the Unix system was quite amusing and actually agrees with the experiences I have heard from others .

Your web-based business system executive suite using Apache and PHP sounds interesting. Any screenshots? Whilst I hate the idea of being tied to the web for this kinda stuff, it still really interests me to see the technology in use!

One thing that might interest you is that whilst Mac OS X does have a "BSD subsystem" based on FreeBSD, its kernel is actually a micro-kernel called XNU, not actually BSD derived (Though did have UNIX certification in the past). It is almost like how Interix provides Microsoft Windows with a UNIX subsystem, the kernel itself remains Microsoft's NT.
For all intents and purposes, Mac OS X is very similar to FreeBSD from a cli point of view. Which is also why a lot of FreeBSD developers and fans run Mac OS X when they need their laptop hardware to work.

 

[Deleted member 30996]

So please be a bit more verbose because we do not share the same background.

That's an understatement. So many people have such impressive backgrounds in computers, ralphbsz drank beer with Linus, blackhaz is setting up boxen from the Amazon to the Arctic, Unix Admins, etc.

My background is nothing like it. My favorite job was a Union Laborer in an Iron Foundry where they poured 2300 degree F molten iron into sand castings, scooping sand or swinging a sledge hammer all night long. Plenty of hard work but very little stress involved and no shortage of women who wanted to be with me.

I don't even know anyone who runs Linux much less BSD or understands what I'm talking half the time. Forget talking computers if it's not Windows. They want to know if you can play Hearts on it. My website has some wallpapers they like but what the heck is that wall of text tutorial? You should have ads and get those clicks. They have no understanding or interest in bots, that's just plain weird to some, and more interested in Facebook. When I try to explain the kind of computer I run I ask if they've seen the movie Wargames or The Matrix and tell them it's like that.

I'm just a guy you probably wouldn't expect it from with a modest Thinkpad farm and not one person I know could run them, care or have the capacity to learn to if I gave them one. I never considered myself a hobbyist or this a hobby. I wanted a desktop OS that wasn't Windows or Linux, taught myself to use it and eventually worked my way here, a middling mortal among titans of technology.

 

[Vull]

...
Your web-based business system executive suite using Apache and PHP sounds interesting. Any screenshots? Whilst I hate the idea of being tied to the web for this kinda stuff, it still really interests me to see the technology in use!

One thing that might interest you is that whilst Mac OS X does have a "BSD subsystem" based on FreeBSD, its kernel is actually a micro-kernel called XNU, not actually BSD derived (Though did have UNIX certification in the past).
...

Thanks. My time's a bit limited today but I'll try to get some screenshots together in the next few days and post them in the screenshot thread. I used to use ImageShack for hosting images, but that was several years ago, and I'll probably need to find a new way of doing that now.

I only vaguely understand the bits about FreeBSD's involvement in the macOS system, although I've watched a few youtube video/lecture type things on the subject. My understanding of kernel workings is pretty limited, and even more obsolete than the macOS X 10.5.8 version which I still have running on my Macbook. I bought the thing on sale in 2009, and within a few weeks they were already pitching for a $50 upgrade to Snow Leopard. I've never upgraded it although I still like it. For sure I'd have never bought it if it hadn't been for FreeBSD's involvement, and because it allowed me to do server software development on a single portable machine that functions as both client and server. It's still capable of hosting the latest version of my PHP & Apache exec, but I mainly just use it for watching videos sometimes, and for when my other computers are busy.

...
My favorite job was a Union Laborer in an Iron Foundry where they poured 2300 degree F molten iron into sand castings, scooping sand or swinging a sledge hammer all night long. Plenty of hard work but very little stress involved and no shortage of women who wanted to be with me.
...

One of my favorite jobs before getting into computers was a Teamster union job as a delivery driver for a lumber yard. I'd probably still be doing it, but they ruined it for me when they tried to make me the yard boss. I'm presently working in a grocery store after working as a medcar driver for about 6 years. The grocery job is more physical, keeps my heart rate up, and might be the only thing keeping this old man meat I'm wearing from shutting down, after 5 plus years of decomposing while sitting on a car seat all day long.

...a middling mortal among titans of technology.

Likewise (-:

 

[devilock76]

That's an understatement. So many people have such impressive backgrounds in computers, ralphbsz drank beer with Linus, blackhaz is setting up boxen from the Amazon to the Arctic, Unix Admins, etc.

My background is nothing like it. My favorite job was a Union Laborer in an Iron Foundry where they poured 2300 degree F molten iron into sand castings, scooping sand or swinging a sledge hammer all night long. Plenty of hard work but very little stress involved and no shortage of women who wanted to be with me.

I don't even know anyone who runs Linux much less BSD or understands what I'm talking half the time. Forget talking computers if it's not Windows. They want to know if you can play Hearts on it. My website has some wallpapers they like but what the heck is that wall of text tutorial? You should have ads and get those clicks. They have no understanding or interest in bots, that's just plain weird to some, and more interested in Facebook. When I try to explain the kind of computer I run I ask if they've seen the movie Wargames or The Matrix and tell them it's like that.

I'm just a guy you probably wouldn't expect it from with a modest Thinkpad farm and not one person I know could run them, care or have the capacity to learn to if I gave them one. I never considered myself a hobbyist or this a hobby. I wanted a desktop OS that wasn't Windows or Linux, taught myself to use it and eventually worked my way here, a middling mortal among titans of technology.

Reading this I want to caveat my story with a side note, although I am in IT the main reason I started using linux and bsd in my personal life was because of music software. Back in 1999 I bought a new computer, windows 98 and a new 8 channel audio interface for it from event electronics. Was heavily invested in logic audio which was still a windows program and used this in my home studio. Roll ahead a few years and no more driver updates for that card but more importantly Logic moved to Mac only. I got pissed. I said I will never again be out of control with what happens on my computer that I spend all this money on. I found a book I ordered online about linux and music. I read it cover to cover and started to learn the linux desktop. My interest in open source software did not start from a grey beard unix admin or hard core programmer perspective, but simply I wanted control of how to process audio on my computer and never let some far away corporate decision affect my investment again.

Ken

 

[justinnoor]

Th

Did you migrate from another OS and what was your reason?

Yes (new). I’m a junior sysadmin who migrated from Linux for several reasons. The ones that stick out are: support for clang and zfs, functionality, stability, and maturity. Linux is the Wild West.

 

[Rastko]

Maybe this answers the poll more than what it is specifically asking.

There are only 3 specific reasons FreeBSD is **not** the _only_ operating system on my laptop:

1) feel obliged to keep up with .NET framework and Visual Studio as a prospective junior developer
(the least of my concerns, though)
2) Professional music production with emphasis on MIDI (ergo, support BitWig)
3) Microsoft Flight Simulator (that's a tough one to escape)

I also had nervous break downs with dual booting, and come to find it more and more off-putting.

 

[Hakaba]

Hi,

In short : FreeBSD on my personal server for jails and easy and strong update.
Maybe soon on my main computer (a laptop)
________________________________

Here is my story. (/!\ long speech ...)
I discover computer in France with Thomson and after that a little Mac SE in my friend (our parents are neighbor).

After that I bought some Mac (classic system) and have a nightmare with Mac OS 7.5+ (buggy system).
My principal interest was creating content (we create a journal for the middle scool and I wrote some novel).

But my study oriented me to computer science, so I use Linux (Yellow Dog, because it was a PowerPC distro and I run it on my iBook G3...)
After that, I rediscover Mac OS with the version X. And I try a lot of things as I compile GIMP (I'm maybe the first to do it) in Mac OS X, just to be sure that I can do it.

I my jobs I always work on linux server and Windows computer (some clients accept that I work on my own machine).

But for my personal website, I decide to use BSD as Mac OS X use a lot of BSD component.
I try OpenBSD and FreeBSD.
My choice for FreeBSD is clearly drived by jails.

Finally, my old Macbook pro has to be replaced. But my interest for Apple is gone*. So since few year, I only use software that run on OS X and Linux.
So I bought last month a MSI laptop. Unfortunately, I can't reboot it with FreeBSD, GhostBSD, TrueOS nor Trident Project. So I install Ubuntu.
My hope : I maybe will find why FreeBSD doesn't work and how to pass the blocking point.
I have two dream for FreeBSD :
- When we boot a computer on FreeBSD installer, we have an option to have the list of the detected / supported hardware.
- A repository with typical jails configuration to create a jail for a service. As an exemple, gitlab is maybe in PHP or Python or... But a file in a public repo describe how to make a corresponding jails. (So : basic config / list of pkg / ...)
And a tool in FreeBSD can read it to make a working jail (or more than one like Docker Compose).
This tool can be smart to ask to reuse installed jail for subservice (as MySQL) or create new one.
The goal : If you have a home server you can have a personal mailer, a personal assistant like Mycraft and so on even if you are not an expert.


* I can explain it if you are interested (If not, don't read )
- Hardware is closed again.I bought a Macbook Pro with standard output (USB/ DVI / SD card reader / Ethernet...) and extensions (I added to it SSD, RAM). Today, this kind of computer doesn't exist in the Apple catalog
- All update in Mac OS X since 2015 is about private cloud (iCloud), sync with iDevice or closed software to replace opensource (OpenGL is not replaced with Vulkan, but with internal private and closed API - Metal - as an exemple)
- Where is Darwin OS project ? I found all component, but where is the full distro ?
- The cost of things... I bought my laptop 2500€ in 2013, I have to change it to a 3700€ laptop that doesn't correspond to my needs.

 

[danniella]

Wanted an OS that could run on outdated hardware. So far i am not disappointed! In here looking for tips and tricks on how to improve and learn!

 

[ralphbsz]

Depends on what you want to improve on and learn. Want to learn programming skills? Find a problem that needs solving. For example, if you live in the US: doing book-keeping of your medical billing paperwork. That could involve scanning old medical bills, running them through OCR (installing an OCR program), decoding the resulting PDF files to get the text out, scrape the important information, put it in a database, write some utilities to manage the data, and a web server for online access to it.

Or get some electronically controllable light switches, and turn your christmas lights on and off at the right time. Obviously not just by installing an app on your cellphone, but from the FreeBSD machine, through an API. Bonus points for cron jobs that automate it, and web pages that show the status of the lights, allow controlling and overrides, and keep track of total electricity and $$$ usage of the christmas lights.

 

[c47]

Hi, I'm Rebeka and I'm new to this forum.

Somewhen in 2013 I became interested in GNU/Linux. I dropped my MS Win. installation and started with archlinux. For my first installation of the archlinux base system I needed 4 hours or so, but my first try was successful. I learned quite a lot, but as I learned more I stumbled upon all those systemd debates - also found out, that it wasn't a good idea to ask in the archlinux forum about pros and cons of systemd and sysVinit, so I decided to use Slackware. I learned new things with it and took my first look at FreeBSD... also OpenBSD, played with them from time to time, but didn't really used none of them for longer.
I started doing sysadministration things in a LUG with a debian server.
Then I started using Gentoo linux on my desktop at home. I liked it very much and after a while I set up another webserver with Gentoo. For a long time I just used it for static content, but then I decided to run 2 webapps of decentralized social networks on it. I rented another VPS and installed FreeBSD and moved the static content there. That was FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE.
Why FreeBSD now?
Well, my main reasons were FreeBSD jails and OpenZFS. Yes, there is also zfsonlinux, but I have watched a talk about (Open)ZFS and the guy who gave the talk said that FreeBSD's implementation of OpenZFS is the best he knows. That time I became more interested in running FreeBSD on a server, try out how it feels and this is how I started using FreeBSD more constantly. Of course I'm also very happy about FreeBSD's ports and build system.
When I set up that FreeBSD server I first used UFS as file system, because I didn't know yet ZFS in practice. On a local machine I tried FreeBSD's guided installation on ZFS, but I must say I wasn't satisfied with the default file systems, so I just moved the content to another place on the disk, destroyed those file systems, created folders and moved the data back to it's place... and then I found that absolutely great tutorial by ShelLuser how to install FreeBSD without installer on ZFS. Thank you very much! Immediately I did some backups on my VPS and reinstalled FreeBSD on that machine, but now on ZFS.
Yesterday then I did the system upgrade from 11.2 to 12.0 - absolutely smooth, no problem occured.
Now I just began setting up a little backup server.. also with FreeBSD... but it is an intel atom machine and I had to use MBR instead of GPT.
Because I wasn't fully sure how to do that partitioning stuff manually, I used the installer and chose MBR and ZFS and ran exactly into the problem, what -Snake- had with the bootpool besides zroot, but the solution is also in a forum somewhere on this server - the described workaround works pretty well.
Thanks again
I have an old netbook also running with FreeBSD - so far I'm really happy with - it's great, I like it and I'm very excited what the future will bring then.

 

[ralphbsz]

Welcome.

... but it is an intel atom machine and I had to use MBR instead of GPT.

Must be an old BIOS. My home server is an Intel Atom, it is not very young (I think I bought it in early 2012), and it uses GPT no problem. If MBR bugs you, try pushing on the BIOS front, perhaps a firmware update is available?

 

[c47]

Welcome.

Must be an old BIOS. My home server is an Intel Atom, it is not very young (I think I bought it in early 2012), and it uses GPT no problem. If MBR bugs you, try pushing on the BIOS front, perhaps a firmware update is available?

Thanks

I don't know how old it is . It was a present... well, the people who used it before didn't need it anymore, but it still worked. Now that you mention it... my netbook's FreeBSD installation was also done with GPT...

 

[ronaldlees]

My background is nothing like it. My favorite job was a Union Laborer in an Iron Foundry where they poured 2300 degree F molten iron into sand castings, scooping sand or swinging a sledge hammer all night long. Plenty of hard work but very little stress involved and no shortage of women who wanted to be with me.

Ahh! The smell! There's no other place on earth where it exists. I always thought it was probably what hell smelled like - but kinda liked it. Was your foundry electric? Mine was, and I'll always remember the movie-like countdown before each batch, with the power company on the line, listening to us as we counted down to zero. They needed to know the exact moment we were going to hit them.

 

[Deleted member 30996]

Yours sounds more like a steel mill.

 

[ronaldlees]

Yours sounds more like a steel mill.

Well, I worked in both an iron foundry and a steel mill. You're correct tho - only the mill was electric. The electric furnace was very hard on a person's ears. As soon as the zero tick was hit, indoor lightening from 14 inch diameter, twenty foot long electrodes shook both the building and the ears with their thunder.

I worked both places on computer contracts - so my ears recovered.

 

[Deleted member 30996]

So you were trying to trick me once again. Shame on you, ronaldlees,

Give it up.

 

[ronaldlees]

So you were trying to trick me once again. Shame on you, ronaldlees,

Give it up.

? ? The problem is the apparent confusion of foundry versus steel mill? I actually know the difference - even though it's not my vocation specifically. My contract with them was for about two weeks, and spent mostly some distance from the furnaces, behind the large triple insulated glass shields of the control center. I probably worked in a hundred different factories in this fashion, and other businesses as well. When was the other time I "tricked" you? Perhaps a "contractor" doesn't work LOL? I am probably one of very few people who've worked for (inside of) Ford, GM, AMC, and Chrysler. Anyway, this is kinda OT.