Marcelo Barboza runs BSD

I’m Marcelo, a brazilian mathematician that recently discovered the joy of (Open)BSD.

As kids my brothers and I didn’t have computers at home since our parents couldn’t afford them. It never meant any more than that for the three of us as there were plenty of other things to do.

At college I had my first personal encounter with a computer. It was in an introduction to programming with an eye toward the Pascal language. Back then, the faculty lab ran Fedora Linux (version 4 or something, I think) and it didn’t bother me (since I didn’t know any computers at all, any OS would be just the same for me at that particular period of time). Moving two years forward in time, my mom gave me, as a gift for my bachelor’s degree in Mathematics, my first personal computer — which was an Acer laptop.

That laptop came with Windows Vista in it and because of that I kept reinstalling the system every two months. It occured to me that by installing Linux things could get a lot easier for me (and I already knew Fedora, so…) Ever since August of 2008 I’ve been running open source software — exclusively.

After years running either Debian or Slackware I developed an increasing curiousity about other OSes and even came to install FreeBSD one or two times but couldn’t quite handle it due to my own ignorance about the system and sometimes the lack of time to learn it properly.

After some searches for one line solutions to some of the questions I was facing I started following Tim Chase on Twitter (and we all know how skillful he is in this field). It was just a matter of time until I heard from Roman Zolotarev and, to be fair, from many others in the BSD community. What I mean here is: the BSD community is a lot more vibrant than I could have perceived in the past.

Finally, I got to Roman’s personal web page. There I read many of the very didactical tutorials posted there. It gave the push out I needed to make the move to OpenBSD. I now run it on my personal laptop and also at work, on my desktop. In fact, I’m encouraging my students to make the same — hey, OpenBSD is proactively secure.

Find me on Twitter.

16 May 2019

Maintained by Mischa Peters and Roman Zolotarev
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