Welcome to Beastielabs

FreeBSD Endeavors

This space will be used to report on my adventures with BSD (predominantly FreeBSD) and other Open Source software. I will provide descriptions of configuration issues and installation procedures (e.g. for FreeBSD on devices like Soekris 5501 and PC Engines APU2,) that are not available in the "official" documentation and for which other descriptions are really out-of-date.

I will also share my experiences with using IPv6, concerning both networks and applications.

Finally, I probably won't be able to resist the urge to offer opinions about what is going on (and not going on!) in the various BSD projects and comment on why I am still using FreeBSD for various applications and why I am moving away from it for others, especially for networking, where I recently have become more in favor of OpenBSD.

For now, you could take a look at my FreeBSD Glitches page, dealing with issues that I encountered with FreeBSD.

Who am I?

I am Hans Ottevanger, a software engineer, consultant, entrepreneur and occasional educator based in Eindhoven, Netherlands.

I have been working on Unix and especially BSD based systems for many years, from far before the source code escaped from Berkeley. I use FreeBSD as my main platform for about 30 years now, though professionally I also see a lot of Linux these days, for high-end HPC (a.k.a. supercomputing), but also for embedded applications.

After all those years I still enjoy using FreeBSD, both as a general purpose OS ("daily driver" as it is calles these days) and as a software development platform. I am able and willing to share most of my findings, hence this website.

Minix

Like many people who are currently involved in Open Source software development, I have been using Minix in a distant past, which of course was quite a different beastie. I am still keeping a version for the Atari ST and TT alive (just a hobby, won't be anything big and professional like Linux 8-).) I mainly use a cross-development toolchain based on modern versions of GCC (currently up to GCC 12.3)

For more information see my Minix-ST and Minix-ST Cross Development pages.

Contact

You can reach me via email as hans@beastielabs.net.