On 6/8/07, Ted Unangst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 6/8/07, Pieter Verberne <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I wonder how much time it took for the average person to 'master'
> OpenBSD or a similar OS. With 'master' I mean you have all skills
> to configure and use the system. You know reguar expressions,
> thorough cli skills like pipes/vi/mg/scripts etc.
>
> Probably most would say that you also need to know programming
> languages and networking knowledge to master an OS but in this
> case I want to ignore them.
[using 'you' below in the abstract sense.]
i'm going to be different and say 3 months, but probably much less than that.
i switched to using openbsd with no previous unix experience. i
installed it myself (into a triple boot windows/linux setup. linux
was installed the day before. i actually used linux maybe 2 times.).
i was pretty much using it without issues within a month. i was a
student at the time, so of course i had infinite time and no
deadlines, but still, not that bad.
if you've never installed any OS before, the installer may be
confusing. pushing enter a lot helps. i had previously screwed
around with dos extended partitions, ramdisks, norton disk encryption,
whatever, so disklabel was nothing new.
you can learn enough vi (or mg) to do basic tasks like editing config
files within a day.
you can learn enough about starting apache, named, or whatever to use
the shipped default configs in about a day for each service.
a basic pf setup that just does nat takes maybe a day.
so even assuming notepad is the only text editor you've ever used, i'd
expect you could setup a personal web server that also nats your home
network in a weekend.
learning stuff like regex or scripting can take however long you want
to spend on it, but you learn these things as you go.
i used openbsd for several years before ever going beyond the most
basic shell tasks, or perl at all. it was maybe 2 years before i
needed to learn regex back expressions. yes, to master openbsd takes
a long time, but you don't need to be a master to use it successfully.
you only need to master the parts you use.
It's awesome hearing Ted's experience. I'd paraphrase the saying of a
popular board game, it's easy to get started with, and one can
continue mastering OpenBSD as long as they want to.
To get a SOHO OpenBSD server set up it doesn't take long to get that
level mastered.
Greg
