[olug] loss of FreeBSD virginity

[puzzled]

        My first time with FreeBSD was not so good - I did an FTP install
over the net and got a really messed up setup which I tinkered with for a
few days.


       I did manage to get cflowd from caida.org working on the first
install and I was hooked ... I've spent hours and hours wrestling with that
package, trying to get it running on linux, and it just installed and
worked on BSD. cflowd is useful if you have to tune BGP on Cisco routers
which is something I get to do at my new job.


      I went to Walnut Creek and got the FBSD 4.0 distribution on CD for
about $40. It took maybe 45 minutes to install and its not any more
difficult than a redhat text install. Instead of having a single binary
based installation method like many *nix distros BSD uses binary packages
managed with pkg* tools and it has this thing called 'ports'.

     ports is pretty cool - its a directory structure with hundreds of
programs represented ... instead of full source you get a makefile and
FreeBSD specific patches. You do a make ; make install in the directory of
the package you want and the code is pulled from the internet, adjusted to
run on your system, and installed. make deinstall removes things and you
can do a make search key=<text> if you want to find something in the ports
but aren't sure of its name.


    I also bought Greg Lehey's FreeBSD reference book - its a must have if
you're going to work on any of the BSD derivatives.


   There are four BSD derivatives, btw - BSDI is a commercial effort,
FreeBSD is the largest 'free' offering, and NetBSD and OpenBSD are smaller,
more security focused releases. Apprently ports is the same for each
platform and the difference is the kernel and enhancements.


  I think we might have a BSD binutils maintainer lurking on this mailing
list ... perhaps he'll speak up :-)



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