jmoiron.net

My god has arrived in the shape of a demon. That's right, far beyond just being trendy (or, more to the point, more obscure and considerably more oldschool), I've come to like; no, adore BSD. And its not really BSD in general, I suppose, but FreeBSD.. and there's one simple reason why.

The Ports System. After finally actually using the ports system tonight, I've come to the realization that it is the best thing that has ever happened to me since Slackware. And in fact, its better.

Using the ports system, a hefty 30 megs + of directories and makefiles, you can at will download from the Internet and install source. The source is automatically patched to compile on FreeBSD, and compiles and takes care of dependencies automagically. As if this wasn't good enough, the source is usually downloaded from the homepage of the site, not some centralized server (such as ftp.freebsd.org), which adds redundancy and insures that, as long as the patches are kept, the software should always be available. It also tries many different sites; although I haven't gotten HTTP to work through the proxy yet.

How is this different from the gentoo portage system (which I think they copied off of freebsd's)? Well, just to appease all of you out there, it really isn't. True, the portage system has searching (which is good), but its limited to whatever is in your servers (as with the apt get). The ports system automatically updates its listing and is mirroed (or in some cases splattered) accross many, many servers. One of the most unpleasant things I had to do with Debian was add more sites to the apt-get list. (wait, you can "make search key="keyword" .. so nevermind, you can search).

What does BSD bring to the table as far as software is concerned? Admittedly, not as much as BSD, but all of the big players (and all of my favorite software) is there.

After compiling in soundblaster live support and discovering the ports system, I've come to realize that I feel much more at home in BSD than linux. The system just seems more organized, and makes more sense. Security seems beefier by default, and the autoconfiguration seemed to work as well as most Linux distro's that I've used (XF86Config was left untouched, as was anything having to do with my Ethernet card).

So, ridicule me if you must, but I am enjoying myself playing with this sexy sleek old school daemon.

Anyway, after discovering the ports system, I've decided to destroy the previous install that I spent the better part of a weekend creating and start over from even more scratch than previously. The reason? To use the ports system to my advantage in creating a clean, minimal system. Of course, because of XFree86 and other hulking pieces of software, it will probably still leave a rather large (700 ~ 1000 MB) footprint on my hard drive.

My progress, or lack thereof, says a lot about where I've come in one short semester. The following words will be from here on known as "why I will burn out and fail out of stevens". I completed cs365, cs465, and worked on compilers (494) assignment 1 for a while this weekend. I also installed bsd, expanded my horizons, etc. But this is upsetting. Why? cs494 remains to be done, and I have yet to touch TCP/IP. I haven't read much and I haven't made any progress in Code Complete, a book I really do want to read. So another words, I accomplished more than I should have, and this is annoying to me. What the fuck.

Class starts in an hour, I still reek of must-compile-my-OS-to-fucking-work-on-projects induced non-showerage, which I hope to remedy shortly (or kill the 3rd floor maggot who is in the damned shower). I'm sure I'll update again sometime later today while I'm trying to stay awake at work to little or no avail.