Oohhhhh goody :D

Okay after over a month of futzing around, I finally got my baby toes into the FreeBSD pond and to tell ya the truth : it's great! I am really getting into the groove of it.

Years ago (God that makes me feel kinda old now :P ) I used to dabble a bit with a CLI but I really had no idea what I was doing and no real, easy way to get to the Internet (the neighborhood library was crap and I was poor). So I just tapped at the keyboard and messed up; I gave it up as too hard and put it off. Fast forward a few years, I got snagged into playing around with graphical Linux when I saw all the cool new developments, especially Ubuntu. And I was getting a bit tired of looking at Windows and Mac so I figured I'd look at that. I ordered Ubuntu and it sat for over a year as I had no machine I could safely put it on. :D So a few months ago, I came across a "sidewalk sale" and took a tower :D I would have gone back for the other tower but the effort from lugging the first one half a mile home was a bit much. So voila , I installed Ubuntu and had many trials.

So I was talking to some friends online and was quite quickly talked into looking at a BSD distro. And after looking around for a bit I settled on FreeBSD. Heaven!! :D Installed another hard drive and bam! on we go :P after many trials, screaming and hair pulling (getting it on the right drives, being too lazy to physically switch the hard drives around, having to switch the drives anyway, reinstalling and updating a billion times, etc).

I got irssi to work a bit more quickly than I had anticipated, which is terrific. I still haven't quite mastered the ins and outs, but it's working for the most part. Getting games setup was a lot trickier than I thought and that's another thing to work on, but having rediscovered make install makes that go a lot faster. Setting up the monitor resolution, which I'm working on now, is way tricky but I'm pretty sure I can work with it. I am making some inroads with Xorg. I decided to make a few study lessons that I'd work out over a couple of days to do myself instead of going "easy" and asking people because my intent is to really mess it up myself and learn from that rather than really getting any outside help. I'm the "throw to the sharks" type personality. :D

I am really proud of myself and motivated cause this coming up February is a FreeBSD conference and I really wanna be able to attend. I dunno If I'll be able to afford it though :( But the bright side is that I learn a new set of skills that are pretty valuable. :)

Anyways, off to study.....