Past history with BSD
inveghing on cognitive fog
In 2008 was when I got what I asked for my birthday : a copy of openbsd's install disk (then version 4.3) as well as the British Green shirt I wear on the iconic shot of my arrival to the end of the hike at La Fruitière (Cauterêts).
I was formerly still a novice in UNIX-likes, having converted my personal computer (present from dad in 2006) to FLOSS not long before. I had very fast understood the point in the authenticity of the *BSD code originating from the Source, but this did not suffice to contain the general enthusiasm for the penguin. Of course I started with Ubuntu.
It was at the turn of Summer when I attempted to take the leap and use for the better an OS both “free” and neatly designed. I was, alas, wrongly as detailed below, intimidated by the apparent elitism and the demanding level required by the blowfish team. Unaware therefore I pulled back to the dæmon community leaving the former to contemplate my nascent hacker face from its case.
My great big venture went wrong. It was precipitation and my ignorance of the concept of “slices” –absent from Linux– that anointed me. Less is more though, and my data was recovered many thanks to the princeless testdisk utility.
Frustration got the better of curiosity and I put aside the descendants of the original family to get back to Linus. Another reason (in addition to the crash) for the fact resides in the manifest uneasiness of ncurses interfaces (which certainly may be mouseless yet mostly use directional arrows ...) for something like an operating system install which should be a simple formality. As demonstrated by openbsd which I would discover more than a decade later, biting my fingers off.
I could have been a badass UNIX wizard ... I ended up a wannabe Linux sysadmin.
OpenBSD installation tutorials :