yes hello

[LK-]

Hai, LK- here. I mainly lurk and such. I *may* post from time to time :P
I'm interested in anything from networking, to system administration(mainly *nix). Now, I just need my gigabit ethernet to extend beyond my router...
Sup?

[Renai]

I just implemented gigabit Ethernet at home courtesy of a new Fritz!Box ... and man, after a decade of 10/100Mbps, it is so sweet

Question from a former sysadmin myself (Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD plus a bit of SCO Unix): What variant of *nix do you mainly like working with? I used to really enjoy Solaris, but of course Linux is now huge. I wouldn't mind tinkering with FreeBSD more at home.

[LK-]

Linux, but that's most likely because most of my experience lays with it. Debian and Arch Linux(depending the circumstances) are my distributions of choice.

[Renai]

Interesting. I understand Debian, but curious why Arch Linux? And why not Ubuntu? It seems to have a lot of momentum behind it these days, although of course it's based on Debian itself.

[LK-]

I've generally considered Ubuntu to be unnecessarily bloated. Arch Linux is very lightweight, and always up to date. Debian because it's incredibly stable.

[Renai]

I take your point about Arch Linux being quite lightweight. I lot of people I know used to use Gentoo because it was a great deal more configurable, and they could easily remove 90% of the crud that pops up in 'heavy' distributions such as Red Hat (or Fedora), Ubuntu and so on. I ran Debian for a number of years, however I never found it necessarily 'stable'. Primarily I found the software either quite dated (in the case of running the 'stable' branch), fairly buggy in the case of running the testing branch, and quite unstable when using the unstable branch, as the name would imply.

Ubuntu has always seemed to have that great mix of packages where most of the key software you use on a day to day basis is quite up to date and modern, while most of the underlying libraries and so on are a step behind, so they rarely break due to unexpected compatibility issues associated with new software and so on.

However, each to their own. These days I actually run purely Windows 7 x64 and Mac OS X. So go figure

[dettol]

I have FreeBSD 8 on my desktop and once I get a copy of PC-BSD 8, I will put it on my U36 laptop replacing the obligatory Win7 installation. I did have Debian 5 but decided to switch to BSD because I wanted something as close to UNIX as possible. I'm also building up a library of BSD books and pdf information. These are better than using the tedious manual pages.