This is a page devoted to one of my greatest interests, the computer.
On here, you will not find a single link to a Mickey$*ft page or product
(though some of these pages may contain that, but I cannot control the
contents of others' pages :-) ) because I have discovered the best operating
system: UNIX. Specifically, on my PC, I am running FreeBSD.
This operating system is based on the 4.4BSD-Lite code produced at UC Berkeley.
Those of you who have used Windohs and/or Macintosh for years might be wondering what is so good about FreeBSD? Well, for starters, it is a fully functional UNIX® system based operating system that is, and as far as I know, will remain freely distributable. It is extremely well-written, possesing few major bugs that I have noticed in the last year since I first installed it on my PC. The longest period I have thus far had the machine running before performing a reboot is about 43 days. In all my years of using Windoze and Mac, I have never seen one of those machines run for so long without the OS encountering some fatal internal error. If a UNIX® system based operating system crashes it is quite often something obscure that will rarely come up.
In addition to the great stability of FreeBSD, it offers a wide range of applications, most are availble freely, if not as true freeware then they are free for non-commercial use. For the cost of my computer and monitor I have put together a fully functional workstation, equiped with Netscape Communicator, the X11 Window System from The XFree86 Project, Inc., the LyX wordprocessor, which uses LaTeX as its backend, and I also have numerous graphics packages for manipulating most of the standard formats. If you are interested in system specs, it is an Intel Pentium® 133 with 32 megs of RAM and other miscellaneous cards.
FreeBSD also makes the source code available, so that someone expert in the C programming language can customize the environment more to his likings. I wouldn't expect Mickey$*ft or Apple to do this anytime soon!
I said fully functional? Well, here is what the FreeBSD handbook has to say.
This, I think, says it all.
UNIX Is a registered trademark of The Open Group.
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