About

I figured that if you’ve been reading my blog, you may also want to know a little more about me, what I’m doing and what I’m interested in.

About this website

If you’ve come to this page,

1. you’re probably interested in BSD/UNIX systems in general and maybe FreeBSD in particular,
2. you want to learn more about FreeBSD and/or
3. you want to stay up-to-date with the latest news and developments

For those unfamiliar with FreeBSD, FreeBSD is a free, open-source and UNIX-like operating system. Though relatively unknown, it’s  a versatile and powerful work-horse, capable of coping with massive work-loads whilest remaining fast, ultra-stable and rock-solid.

By blogging about FreeBSD and operating systems based on it and by providing news and updates, I’d like to generate more interest in the family of BSD operating systems and hopefully take away some of the myths around FreeBSD. I’ll be sharing howto’s, notes, linking to reviews, and pointing to websites that you may find useful. Basically, spreading the word.

With this blog I’d like to generate more interest in FreeBSD as a server/desktop operating system and try to raise its profile to those who are looking for an alternative for Windows. FreeBSD is a viable and perfect alternative to Windows and Linux, and in some cases maybe even superior. If you need a safe, rock-solid, performing and secure system for your desktop or server, you should definitely consider deploying FreeBSD!

This website tracks news around the development of FreeBSD and the following O/S based on it:

PC-BSD - DesktopBSD - FreeNAS - pfSense - m0n0wall - DSBSD - FreeSBIE - RoFreeSBIE - TrueBSD;

Great systems and proud members of the FreeBSD Family.

You may wonder, why is this blog called “FreeBSD – the unknow Giant”? Good question! To be honest, this is not a title that I’ve come up with, it’s what IBM has said about FreeBSD:

The FreeBSD operating system is the unknown giant among free operating systems. Starting out from the 386BSD project, it is an extremely fast UNIX®-like operating system mostly for the Intel® chip and its clones. In many ways, FreeBSD has always been the operating system that GNU/Linux®-based operating systems should have been. It runs on out-of-date Intel machines and 64-bit AMD chips, and it serves terabytes of files a day on some of the largest file servers on earth.

You may subscribe to my RSS feed, comments feed or subscribe to delivery-by-email. Feel free to contribute by emailing stories, leave comments on articles or to contact me with queries or suggestions.

So far about the website, now a little bit about me.

About me

My name is Gerard van Essen. I was born in Holland and living in the UK now with my wife and children. I work for a financial instutution where I’m involved data analysis and reporting.

My first contact with open source software was in the late-nineties when I tried Redhat (6.0) and FreeBSD (4.0) for about two months but was struggling to get all the hardware working. Maybe it was the PC, maybe a lack of patience and persistence to overcome some of the challenges.

Anyway, I formatted the hard disk and reinstalled Windows 2000 and didn’t touch any open source operating systems until 2004 when I took Kanotix Linux for a spin. I liked it – it was fast and all my hardware was recognised out of the proverbial box.

In July 2005 I read an interview with Kris Moore, the founder of PC-BSD, on OSNews.com. This got me interested again in FreeBSD and and I downloaded PC-BSD 0.7.8 and have used PC-BSD ever since.

I am very fond of FreeBSD and BSD in general, but that being said, I’m not anti-Microsoft, anti-Windows, anti-Apple or anti-Linux. I even think that every operating system has its good points and features that makes it ‘better’ or stand apart from others. A common attitude found in the BSD community is, that we should borrow these ideas and implement them into BSD operating sytems.

Apart from computers, FreeBSD, web development, Web 2.0, I’m interested in mountain biking, hiking and playing chess.

I am in not affiliated with the FreeBSD Project or the FreeBSD Foundation and I’m not being paid for promoting FreeBSD. I’m a happy *BSD user and like to promote this branch of operating systems and make more people aware of it.

Many thanks for visiting my blog. Hope you enjoy reading it, and please let me know if you know of any way to make this the best BSD website.