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For as long as ive used computers, i was always a Windows guy. I didnt love Windows, but i never hated them. And by the time i learned Win XP inside out it was the only thing i would feel comfortable With.I did have to use Macintosh PCs in school (and hated every moment of it) I was also briefley interested in linux and even installed OSX on an old IBM thinkpad laptop i had. But to me these were pretty useless as i didnt have anything i could use them for. I couldnt even use them along with Windows as the file formats and filesystems were incompatible with each other and the only software i was comfortable using was Windows stuff (Also PC games cant forget those).I did recognise the superiority of Unix over windows, The unix architecture looked a lot more orgonised, stable and clean next to windows. I often wished windows was less messy or had some Unix-like features like autonomous software updates and dedicated gateways trough which you could get software that was exclusivley compatible with Your distro. (but windows still had all the good games hehe) I realised that linux was pretty much a pain in the bum to use because it was so orgonised. You would need to learn the OS architecture inside out to use it effectivley And the idea of heavy dependence on the command line interface turned me off (i hate command line interfaces). So i stayed with Windows and continued to ignore anything else

(the above will be relevan to what i will say later on)

A few days ago, me and a friend were geeking out at his place experimenting with this military OS he had. Then a completley insane idea came to us. Why not try dual-booting windows 7 with PC-BSD on my old acerlaptop with 250 gigs.

DAY 1

Dualbooting an x86 with a Unix was one thing. Dual booting them both on a single harddrive would have been a lot more fun. Now i have a very clear idea of what BSD was since i watched my friend for a few months as he assembled his own FREE-BSD from scratch using just the BSD command promt for his home server (First time doing it too, never had any experience with it at all). BSD seemed really cool to me but It was still very alien to me. Besides, I was more into computer/laptop hardware and From being that i learned how to Fix and diognose win XP software issues. (i am not even sure if i would be classified as a computer geek. I was more of a guy who likes computers a lot). I didnt expect myself to singlehandedley wedge PC BSD next to Windows 7 and expect them to work so my friend decided to help me as he was also interested in dualbooting the same config on his laptop. Here is where the fun began. First we installed windows 7, on one partition and began installing BSD on the other. To make things less confusing, we decided to leave root as the default login. But first we realised that the BSD ovaerwritten the windows boot loader, blocking our access to windows. We thought we might be able to fix it once inside BSD. Then suddenley! Out of nowhere it started to update the ports, and downloading updates through those from the internet. The laptop, was not hooked up to the internet, and the wireless button was in the OFF position.... So this operating system completley ignores hardware protocols and does its thing regardless of what we wanted it to do. Then i realised that the hdd LED wasnt blinking like usual and the "charging" led also didnt work. and eventually i found out that it REFUSES TO GIVE ME THE INSTALL DISK! IT LOCKED DOWN THE DRIVE FROM ME! Since i only used windows before which always obeyed me and did everything i told, This new behaVIOR of a laptop was completley insane to me.
Finally as the istallation finished and all the ports have been properly updated, The system led us to a login screen. Exept now it blocked us from entering as root. The next 2 hours were spent trying to figure out if we messed up anywhere, trying all the host names, user names and password variations that we might have made errors in. Eventually, we tried switching to the command line but it didnt let us use the console unless we restarted. After we restarted, the system booted us into the command line interface with # Login: then the BSD just started jerking us around....
Whenever a single charecter was entered, the system closed it and took us back to the PC BSD gui login, It continued doing it every time we used command prompt. (the problem turned out to be that unlike free BSD, PC BSD root account was locked, we waisted hours on the internet looking for a way to unfreeze it). We decided to reinstall it from scratch, We assumed the windows 7 partition was still in there somewhere yet upon, entering the partition manager, we found that the old installation that was still there, actually took over the entire disk!.... O_o
But we clearly installed it on a single 80gig partition! the other 170 were for windows 7 the entire 250Gb disk was ruthlessley taken over by PC BSD... After a moment of scilence, we went back to install windows 7 again. (we followed the guide on the internet that says you have to install Windows first and BSD later).
We couldnt install windows. The boot loader took control of the systems core functions. Luckily i came prepaired! I had a few Live CDs/Live DVDs with a bunch of system apps and tweaking tools, Defraggers, password brutforcers, partition editors, antiviruses, and tons of other stuff for the purpose of PC repair. One of my CDs was pretty much a windows XP live CD that booted off a unix kernel and it loaded a modified win XP with a bunch of tools for IT people.

Thechnically These kinds of disks are illegal pirate distributions but this is actually interesting- a lot of them are even sold for cheap among with other popular unoffisial distributions of software, like Windows ZVER meaning->beast[rus] and there is even one called "F*** **U Bill" (lol). Microsoft and the others are aware of these, but they let it go because they know that its pointless to fight piracy in russia. And according to the Russian Law, obtaining pirated content for private use isnt against the law, however distributing at least $3000 of software is a crime. from 1 year conditional scentence + a heavy fine to 2 years in prison. Just for the record these CDs were given to me at work as tools for fixing computers and since i am not distributing them and their total worth is about $30 bucks i am not breaking any law in Russia.

Anyway
Since the BSD boot loader replaced windows Boot loader, Windows couldnt even boot from the install disk. Before trying anything, with the disks, I first rebuilt the dual partition setup on the disk this time splitting it 150Gb=win7 and 100Gb=BSD, Then we tried to install BSD again, but after a while we decided to wipe the drive and install Windows 7.I loaded one of the live CDs, and started brousing trough boot sector tools. First i wiped the boot sector and the MBR, then i deleted the partition, and formatted 2 fresh partitions. After i restart i see a BSD LOADING SCRIPT!, WHOA!! ..there was no BSD CD in the drive, I formatted the harddrive, WTH is going on???? BSD didnt finish loading tho, there was some error that stopped it, but i tried wiping the MBR and boot again, using different programs on the CD, then after a restart, loaded the Live CD again to replace the boot and MBR with a default and the next thing that happened BLEW ME AWAY! The laptop already booted the CD, it was just running some of its Live CD scripts to load the thing into the ram when it froze, An error message popped up blaming the harddrive and right after that, out of the middle of the Live CD Script COMES OUT THE PC-BSD BOOTLOADER SCRIPT! WHAT SORSCERY IS THIS!????? did BSD come back from the dead and somehow managed to RIP OPEN A PORTAL TROUGH A LIVE CD LOADING SEQUENCE where it is not supposed to be. Even my friend who worked with BSD before never seen anything as crazy as this! As for me who never used anything but windows.... I began to suspect that the system is alive and is infact sentient and was trying to fight back to our attempts of deleting it.

It was then i realised what the architecture of Skynet was based on.....

I booted it from another CD, went to disk tools hoping to format it again when i realised that the partition which i deleted before BSD ripped trough the live CDs loading process is.... still deleted the disk had NO FILESYSTEM... and NO PARTITION!... not even a RAW (what windows calls lack of partition).... I checked it with another several disk tools all showed no partition or filesystem! It was just a disk where you couldnt possibly install anything, since it shouldnt be able to hold anything as there is no file system THIS WAS EXPLAINED TO ME IN SCHOOL BY MY TEACHER (not like i didnt know this before lol) WHO USED TO WORK ON UNIX MAINFRAMES BACK IN THE 60s, he STILL HAD A FEW ANCIENT GIGANTIC DISKS lying around from the Mythic age of computers. Out of all the people he should have known about this yet he taught us that a filesystem is neseseary for any kind of data storage on an HDD. Without one it should be Physically impossible! The harddrive cant store anything... cant support life... i mean data...

A tear rolled out of my eye as i wispered: "Teacher.... why didnt you tell me...."

All that i believed about how computer works... it was all a lie. Everything i was taught to believe and accept as the universal binary truth, Was it all a lie? If so, Why?

With all my previous beliefs shattered, i had nothing to loose. We formatted the drive again, we completley eraced the boot sectors, the MBRs used every formatting tool that could use (low level stuff takes days to format) After dozens of formatting sessions, even without the Boot sector or MBR or a partition with a filesystem... The freakiest part of the whole deal was when we sometimes decided to give the disk a partition, it automatically switched to the same 150/100GB configuration i crated earlier.
SOMEHOW ir remembered my setup that I made or maybe that setup stayed inside the disk and is able to survive removal of habitable file disk storage. And no matter what we tried, We could not change the partition sizes, they would always go back to the original setup which i made. We later tried installing the system but all we go was errors. I took the damned laptop to my home at the end of the day, Found a low-level format Formatting tool. The best format estimated to last me about 5 days. I chose medium which should lastonly 2 days. But i was confident that 2 whole non-stop days of formatting and reformatting was enough to banish the deamon fom within my laptop.

Day 2

2 days had passed and the formatting was done. Before trying to install PC BSD, i restored the proper boot sectors and MBR, split my Disk into partitions, ... After i was ready with the file system, for an instant there, i realised that this profile is yet the same one that i couldnt Kill 2 days ago!
Luckily, after i restarted, the laptop, In a rush of panic, i crated a new disk partition profile that i never had before, and immediatley, installed PC BSD. Everything went well so far. After everything was loaded the "Welcome to PC Bsd installation" screen appeared. I decided to read it.

"Welcome to PC-BSD installation. PC BSD was developed for a regular user of a computer. Installation of the system is just a few clicks away. Home Users will immediatley start feeling comfortable using PC BSD"..... I stopped reading after this...... IS THIS SOME IDEA OF A SICK JOKE ON WHOEVER USES THIS THING?
Developers have a sick sence of humour. Now aside from laws governing computer operations, Humour is dead to me as well as well.

As i continued to install it, During the ports update, boxes with text flickered on the screen. All of them loaded some set of packages. Then there was one that flickered quickly but i caught it just in the right time in the right spot to clearly read it before it was gone. It said something like "loading extended packages ...(just in case).
Meanwhile my brain: "Processing..... Processing..... Process complete". Who the ____ wrote this OS ?????? After realising that its better to not question the unknown, I continued with my installation. The whole day was spent with me and PC BSD and win 7 trying to be friends. And we almost did it. After a few tries i finally got the 2 OSs to boot from the same windows boot loader that i modified with some program i got that allows you to boot unix from Windows boot loader.
To get this to work, i had to avoid installing the BSD boot loader to let the windows loader to settle in without any disturbances. Then, i thought it would be neat to switch to the BSD boot loader just because i thought it was cooler. I Installed BSD boot loader. I restarted Now i have a BSD boot loader WIN=F1 BSD=F2. If i press F2 BSD starts loading... COOL if i press F1, win....i mean, wait a windows boot loader?.... with another windows and BSD choice? DERP!....
I forgot to deactivate windows boot loader before installing the BSD one, But Would it work? (i still dont know) I now have to go trough 2 bootloaders which made me feel pretty retarted. And worst of all, Windows system went all "derp" after this bootloader derp i made. i still dont know, Anyway I spent the rest of the day trying to figure out hou to fix this. and reinstalling it again eventually several times over (about 5-6 times i reinstalled it that day screwing up something every time... meh its fun to experiment)

Then a friend called me over (the one who helped me the first day) and said Dude, Ok, You should learn FreeBSD First. me: But thats INSANE! i am afraid of the command line! Friend: (in a drill sargent voice) Stop your whining soldier, If you at least get some of this FreeBSD through your thick scull, You might have a chance out there against those Linux punks all over the Place! THIS IS HARDCORE TRAINING MATERIAL SON! I WILL MAKE AN ADMIN OUT OF YOU! lol
Later that day, me installing Free BSD... the first thing i notice about this OS is that the command line has some interesting and funny things here and there. for example, i spotted a line that said, "Installing Mozilla (sucks)" I cant remember any other funny things i saw,
Overall Free BSD pleased me a lot more than PC BSD. Both of these OSs seemed tobe an intelligent life form but PC BSD was more Evil and Free BSD just kept amazing me with its abilities. It was just as unkillable and just as much of a "I dint give a damn about proper hardware procedures" i do this my way"
By this time nothing about it surprised me anymore, The whole Port system is really cool, and i like how the software can actually be compiled inside your computer to fit all your hardware just right (but really i swear its compiling in frigging assembly language). Finally i was a witness too the 8 hour exif GUI compilation. All of the BSD forums i went to ended up very helpful Also since i know English AND Russian, i can look up a lot more info on the web. And BSD was a popular system in russia. Infact Russia Wrote its own distro called RUS-BSD. The command line is all in russian tho.


To conclude this story, share the greatest moment (still unexplained by science) that i have witnessed. This is when i was still playing around with different installation options of Free BSD. I come home one night in a very "funny" mood. I start up the laptop, sit behind the computer, then i see and unusually large error on the screen. Then i saw at what it said.

The computer was talking to me it kinda scared me at first but... THIS IS THE FIRST TIME EVER A COMPUTER TALKED DIRECTLY TO ME AS A REAL BEING and not a computer. I had to take a picture quick, so i used a webcam. to take a screenshot.

so thats my first hands-on experience with Free BSD. My brain exploded many times.

i just crashed the whole system because i was trying to do something with user accounts. I noticed while BSD is really cool, its not very idiot-proof

tl;dr