Ed Hurst is Associate Editor Emeritus of Open for Business. Born in 1956, Ed has spent his entire adult life in the Gospel Ministry. However, that seldom paid the bills, so he took a large variety of secular jobs. Aside from a stint in the US Army Military Police and another in Field Artillery, Ed has worked in the trucking industry, public education, agriculture, and numerous semi-skilled jobs. As a disabled veteran, he is now semi-retired and pursues a ministry offering computer assistance to elderly folks in his area, and leads a house church. Currently residing in Choctaw, OK, he’s been married to Veloyce since 1978 and has two adult children.
What follows is a tutorial aimed specifically at the ordinary desktop user interested in getting started with FreeBSD. Ed provides an easy to understand guide through FreeBSD's Sysinstall installer in part one of this series.
It will always be about freedom.
I have long contended that the ordinary desktop user cannot afford
to become a partisan for any operating system or software. I don't
begrudge partisans their love; we all need a place to call home. What I
can never appreciate is the degree to which a vocal minority have so
identified themselves with their favorite OS/distro that anything less
than worship is taken as a personal insult. My sense is that,
thankfully, most Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) users are not
there.
There is no lack of publicity these days knocking The Redmond Giant
for its inherently insecure software. There's even
a
recently announced lawsuit against them for just that. Those of us
who have actively promoted Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) are now
hoping that, finally, the balance of perception with the average
computer user is in our favor.
If you haven't read part 1 of this --
"Babe
in the Woods: A Linux User Migrates to FreeBSD" -- you may be at a
loss. For those who
did read it, many are still at a loss. That
is, they didn't grasp the subtle purpose behind the article. Of those
who commented, most were hardcore geeks, the techies who are in a
position to really understand computers.
Most people know what GNU/Linux is, but fewer know about BSD and fewer still have actually used one of the major BSD variants (other than the highly customized Mac OS X). Ed Hurst, a writer and a long time GNU/Linux user, decided to give FreeBSD a try. Will Ed join the ranks of happy FreeBSD users? Read on to find out.