Having had OpenBSD for a number of years on my second computer acting as my firewall, when I got my third computer back in April the idea was to turn my formerly main computer from a Windows maching into a un*x desktop.
My experiences with OpenBSD have shown me that while it makes an excellent firewall or server operating system, because it lags behind in certain key areas (like third party applications support), it's not really the best OS to have for a workstation. This meant that I would have to choose between FreeBSD and some Linux distro, with perhaps Darwin x86 from Apple as a minor contender. Using one of those three operating systems, I would be able to get things like a Flash player, a decent office software system and many other things I could not get on OpenBSD.
Well, as it happened, shortly after converting that formerly main computer from Windows XP to OpenBSD as an interim step, my brand-new Xeon behemoth stopped working. The motehrboard had ba capacitors and had to be RMA'ad back to Asus and that took forever. The first replacement motherboard they sent back, which took 6 weeks, simply would not POST so a second one had to be sent, and that one also took 6 weeks. After talkign to the guy at the computer store I usually shop from, I found out that Asus's support has been slipping dramatically. The 1-800 number they used to phone for RMA info and the like simply no longer worked and they no longer were getting responses back in 24 hurs to email inquiries like they used to. Needless to say, I doubt my next computer will be Asus-based after all this.
So in the mean time, I wasn't about to do a whole 'nother OS installation my once-again-main computer until the Xeon behemoth came back. But never expecting 3 months without it, I got kind of comfortable with the formerly main computer as an OpenBSD workstatin, in spite of what I feel it lacks.
I switched the window manager from WindowMaker to KDE, installed both Firefox and Thunderbird because I disliked KDE's konquereor and kmail apps. I set up NFS shares so that all my MP3s were available to the firewall where I set up two different multimedia servers so I could listen to my MP3s when not at home. The firewall had also been a Samba server and had hosted the home directories for the users with accounts under Windows XP on the formerly main computer, so I moved them over, shut down the firewall's Samba daemon and NFS'ed /home back to it. All in all lots of modifications over the three-plus months I was waiting for the Xeon behemoth to return.
When that day finally came, I just re-integereted it into my home network, started Samba daemon on the former main computer so /home would be available to the Xeon behemoth running Windows XP. And that's how it has been for the last few months.
So today I decided to install the Ubuntu distro of Linux since a number of people I know on-line had recommended it. But where did I install it? Not on the formerly main machine which stil hasp OpenBSD, but onto the Xeon behemoth into the partition which had held Windows Vista RC1 for the past month. :-) I almost feel like a traitor to BSD, installing a Linux distro.
Ubuntu seems nice, and eventually I will wipe the formerly main machine and install it there, but knowing me that will take a few months. Mostly because of all the data which will have to be copied off of the *BSD-type FFS file systems in order to be able to set up proper Linux-type EXT3 partitions for everything. Also, doing all the system administration tasks on Linux rather than on BSD is a little like being dropped in the Scottish hinterlands — you know that they're all speaking English but you can't understand half of it. On the bright side, by the time I do ge around to it, I should know enough about Ubuntu specifically and Linux in general to make the switch over go smoothly in a single day.
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