One User’s Thoughts on FreeBSD 4.9

I’ve been using computers since I was quite young and have been using Unixlike OSes for about two years. Most of my life I’ve used Macs and only
started using Windows and Unixlike OSes recently for programming. I’m good at learning OSes as long as they are documented. I’ve been using FreeBSD
for about a year and a half.

I built the computer I am using myself. It has a Asus A7V266-E motherboard, Athlon XP1900+ CPU, 512 MB DDR
2100 ram, Matrox G400 video card, Asus 52x cdrom, Teac floppy drive, Western Digital 40GB hard drive, Hauppauge WinTV Radio tv card, Jaton Explorer
V.90 Ex external serial modem, ps2 oem Logitech optical mouse, ps2 Happy Hacking keyboard, and a G75F ViewSonic CRT monitor.

FreeBSD can be compared to the less user friendly versions of Linux. Popular distributions of that style being Debian and Slackware. Unlike SuSE or
Redhat the time spent configuring and installing programs after the installation is likely much longer then the installation itself. In my experience
this period is made pretty easy because of the great documentation in the handbook.