Advocacy in Yucatan, Mexico
Eric De La Cruz Lugo <[email protected]>
Hi!
First of all, I have to say that being a FreeBSD user is a
great experience. I have been using this excellent OS since
1994 at my university, the ITESO. As a student, I was
attracted to the UNIX environment since the first time I
logged into a Sun SPARCStation running SunOS in 1993. After
that, I found 386BSD. By then, I was hooked because it ran
on a 386, which was much cheaper.
Back then, I was a poor mortal using a DOS based
environment with a graphical patch (read that as Windows 3.1).
I was unhappy with the poor performance and the frequent
crashes on this platform, but I was doomed to it then. Of
course, that was before I met the power of UNIX.
As a new UNIX user, I learned most of the useful commands
and programs that made my life easier. I did this via a
technique called RTFM (Read The F**king Manual). I got into
FreeBSD in the second half of 1994, with FreeBSD 1.1.
As time went by, I passed from being a UNIX user to a UNIX
admin. In fact, my first UNIX installation was FreeBSD
1.1.5 towards the end of 1994, at which time there were very
few UNIX gurus at my university. One of those few, Hector
Gonzalez Jaime, helped me with that installation. I have to
say that I owe him most of my FreeBSD and UNIX knowledge. I
will be forever thankful to him. Thanks Cacho (Cacho is
his nickname)! Cacho is the master sysop there, and the
main servers have been running FreeBSD since 1996!
My regular activites were fairly standard:
Read and write email.
Transfer files via FTP.
Read and post to newsgroups.
Talk with friends.
Connect to several BBS' via telnet (mostly the ISCA BBS
in Iowa, and the ClubBBS at my university, which has been
running on FreeBSD since 1994 and is one of the biggest in
Spanish in the world).
Create accounts for users.
Surfing the 'net, first with NCSA Mosaic and then
Netscape Navigator.
Around that time, I went to Merida, Yucatan (vacations
during winter break in 1994 and 1995), and showed FreeBSD
to my old friends at ITM (Merida's Technological Institute).
In fact, I can say (very proudly) the installation was very
successful, especially because it was performed with 3 1/2"
floppies! However, that installation never passed from
being a nice thing for them (in those days, they only used
Novell Netware 3.11 and Windows 3.11 workstations and had no
experience with UNIX systems).
As the time went by, I finished at university (1996) in
Guadalajara, Jalico, Mexico, and moved back to Merida,
Yucatan, Mexico in 1997. My experience with FreeBSD, Linux,
and other UNIX systems grew considerably. However, in all
of my jobs as a poor employee (the market for experienced
sysadmins is growing very slowly), I never got the chance to
install a UNIX system on my workstation. I had to use Windows
95, 98, or NT instead, so you can guess how frustrated I
was. No one knew about FreeBSD, and when I talked to other
people about it, they just stared at me not knowing what I
was talking about. They always thought that FreeBSD was a
Linux distribution, so I decided to do something about
it.
The first step I took was to read all the tips and advice
on the 'net about advocating on Windows-centric and
Linux-centric environments. One of my sources was this, the
FreeBSD 'zine, as well as the now defunct FreeBSD Advocacy
Project web site. Fortunately, there are several advocacy
sources on the net, some URLs are:
After that exhaustive reading (very insightful I have to
say), I started my way by writing articles about FreeBSD for
this ezine (thanks Jim!), and talking with one of my old
friends at ITM. His name is Enrique Pastor Gongora
Cardenas. Actually, he works in the Systems Department at
ITM. He was aware of FreeBSD, but because of lack of time
and the Linux excitement, he never installed a server with
FreeBSD. So, he asked me to help him with an installation.
I said I would, and that was that. Then I came up with an
idea and asked him to invite some of his friends along and
we'd show them how to install FreeBSD too.
With this, we started the first FreeBSD User Group here in
Merida, Yucatan, Mexico.
Pastor put me in contact with a good friend of his. His
name is David Perez Marfil. He involved himself immediately
with us and has been the most devoted FreeBSD user here in
Merida. He's installed systems in several institutions and
companies (mostly as routers, proxy servers, and DNS
machines). He also installed some boxes with Samba.
The name that we use for our group is FreeBSDYUC, and we
have a few pages under construction at http://freebsdyuc.dhs.org/.
It is currently in Spanish, but we are planning on
translating it to English as well.
We are very active as a FreeBSD group. Recently, on May
26, 2000, I gave a talk about FreeBSD at the Universidad del
Mayab (UNIMAYAB). There were only 40 attendants, but it was
a start! A week later, on June 1, 2000, I gave another talk
about FreeBSD. This time, it was at ITM. The attendance
was greater, about 60 people, mostly students with knowledge
of Linux who had never heard of FreeBSD. Both talks lasted
2 hours each, and at the end we sold CDs with FreeBSD
4.0-RELEASE for a small fee of 50 pesos (about $5 US).
Unfortunately, we ran out of CDs even though people still
wanted to get a copy, so we directed them to the FreeBSD web site in order
to obtain more info on how to download it.
The money we made went to support the group. In fact, some
of the people that organize the group donated money in order
to burn those copies and buy parts to assemble our FreeBSD
server in the near future.
It's hard to start and maintain a FreeBSD user group,
because we all give part of our free time and money to
promote and advocate our favorite OS. That is not easy here
in Mexico. Everybody has to work hard for a living -- we
have families and have to feed them too :-)
We are planning, in the near future, some install fests in
order to get more attention of the computer community. I'm
sure we will succeed with this. We HAVE to, because FreeBSD
deserves it. Even though this is a small contribution, it's
a start!
- Eric De La Cruz Lugo
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August 2000 Issue
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