Well, the time has come. Just as StrongBad must wish goodbye to his faithful companion Compy386, ushering in the new era for the Lappy486, I too must bid farewell to my FreeBSD machine.
We've had some good times, and it was definitely an interesting first experience for UNix. I'm not really sure how I let Myron talk me into using FreeBSD as the first UNix to try. In all fairness, FreeBSD runs very efficiently, and with little footprint in memory. I think. I really couldn't tell you for sure, because it's so damn un-user-friendly. It's an OS designed for people that want efficiency, and don't mind putting in ten hours to get their mouse wheel working properly. Me? I want my mouse wheel to work as though by MAGIC. I don't find it fun to spend hours trying to figure out how to make these things work.
In Myron's defense, I probably learned a lot more about the inner workings (or maybe nothing at all) of a UNix system than I would have normally - if I was running Mandrake or RedHat, I would probably have spent a lot less time mucking around with my XWindows setup, or in rc.d. Consequently, Fedora Core 3 will be the new replacement for FreeBSD once all of the dust settles.
I've chosen Fedora Core 3 because I was using it at my previous job, working for a professor at UVic, and I found the install easy, and the package support pretty decent. I didn't have to hack any make files or anything to get things to install properly, though I'm not making the assumption that that won't be required now and then. I'll miss the awesome ports system that FreeBSD has available - you can basically tell FreeBSD to download and install a given program, along with all of its required dependancies. Of course, I won't miss the problems that I ran into with the ports system - namely that sometimes I would get bizarre cross dependancy issues and have to do some major bushwhacking to sort out what was going wrong. Fedora is pretty user-friendly, and seems very polished. That probably doesn't appeal to some of the gurus out there, but I like it, and I like feeling like I'm dealing with a cohesive operating system, rather than a kludge of components that just happened to wind up in an operating system.
So that means there'll be a week or possibly more of down time. Given the frequency of my updates lately, I'm sure this will be near unbearable for everyone, but I don't care about anyone but myself, so you'll just have to cope. I recommend buying me gifts as a way to vent your frustration.
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