Thread: Introduction
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Old 14th October 2013
virtuvoos virtuvoos is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2013
Posts: 28
Default Introduction

Hi all,

I thought it might be polite to introduce myself. So here I go:

I'm not an IT guy by profession. More something like a mix of an enthousiast, a geek and a power user. I like to think I know at least something about everything but not everything about something. A broad knowledge rather than deep knowledge that is.

For well over a decade I've been toying with GNU/Linux. Most of the distributions I worked with are Debian and Debian-based. The past few years though it has been exclusively Debian. I'm also on Windows XP but all blame for that, I shall forward on to my employer.

Apart from being an open source enthousiast, privacy (or shall I say the lack thereof) is something I read and think about. News papers of the past few months have been very interesting and have only strengthened my beliefs and fed my concerns around this matter.

Until 2 weeks ago I was completely *BSD ignorant. I think I never gave it any attention because I thought: BSD is less open/free than GPL, BSD has a smaller user base so probably less software/hardware support. Basically not interesting enough to learn a new OS. I didn't even consider reading about *BSD.

The thing that made me change my mind was a web page which had "highly secure" and "BSD" in the same scentence! Really?? I thought it might be worthwhile to have a closer look after all.

Since the stress at OpenBSD is much on security, I concluded that it would be my best fit of all the BSD flavours. Good stuff!! There was also a very recent book that had fantastic reviews "Absolute OpenBSD 2nd edition". That made me decide to give it a real try. I added an HD to my current Debian box and configured a dual boot and more less patiently waited for the book to arrive in my mail box.

Just as I did with my move from Windows 2000/XP to GNU/Linux more than a decade ago, I'm currently dual booting. And just as I did back then, sometimes I'm gnashing my teeth and pulling my hear out, at least the ones that are left.

The learning curve though, seems to be much less steep. Partially because I'm already familiar with the UNIX way of dealing with things and partially because the book is truly fantastic and it's well written! That makes I'm actually taking the time to read, reread, and practice .

I'm sure I'll have more gnashing of teeth ahead of me but I'm already starting to feel at home with OpenBSD!

Cheers!
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