operating systems

I've progressed through operating systems over the years. In 1996 I'd vaugely heard of this thing called Unix. I got my first shell account around then and started playing around. Having decided this Unix thing was quite fun, I installed RedHat 4.something on my own machine. It was nice. I played with it quite a bit.

After a year or so, it bored me. Well that isn't strictly true. More like it fustrated me - it was inconsistant, and had become bloated with silly features. A bit like M$ products actually. So I switched to FreeBSD and have been a dedicated evangelist ever since.

As the years when past, I started doing things for the operating system. Mostly on machines I ran, but I've release a few things publically;

I started by contributing to the ports system, and currently have two ports that I maintain; ezmlm-web and p5-mail-ezmlm.

I've also made some minor changes to FreeBSD's world. Mostly they were kludges to get things to do what I wanted, but recently I've done some nice hacking - I've even send-pr'ed one. I'm also waiting for my coco/r port to be committed.

I also believe that one should know thyn enemy, so as a result I've played around with NetBSD, Solaris, HP-UX, IRIX, AIX, Linux (RedHat, Debian), and even Windows 3.x, 9x, 2000, CE, ME, etc.

A friend of mine and I resurected some Sparcs including a Javastation last year, so NetBSD/Sparc and Debian/Sparc were added to the list.

My department bought some iPAQs, and I played with Linux/StrongARM on one of them. It's not yet as developed as I'd like it, but it is getting there.