Are you looking to learn/experience *nix? - sdf.lonestar.org
Hey Hey all..
I ran a quick search and this came up once as a single post in an old thread but without much detail. So I thought I'd throw this up.. Anyways here's my post.
I've noticed a lot of people, especially new users asking about *nix, if it's better and so on. I feel the best way to learn is experience yourself, but for a lot of people this is not always an option. This is where shells come in. Shells are great because someone else gives you access to their box so you can learn. I maintain my access to a few shells, both paid and free access shells, in order to test compiles on various systems and such, another plus even if you have your own system with *nix on it.
Anyways the meat of this post is on sdf.lonestar.org. I've used their free services, yes that's right.. they'll give you a shell for free, for a while, and I rather enjoy them. I decided to validate my account for $5 USD, this got me pretty much a full account, 15mb of webspace w/ username.freeshell.org as my addy, 15mb of email space (with webmail access) and 15mb of storage. Now i like shells for IRC, for the purpose of hiding from script kiddies. so for $36 USD I got myself a Lifetime ARPA membership which includes irc, ftp, ssh and telnet. This means i'll have my shell as long as SDF is around, and since they've existed since 1987 I don't think they're going anywhere. Along with the additional apps, i had more choices for my domain.. so now i have username.theunixplace.com ;) as well as 75mb for mail, 75mb for httpd and 75 storage. the httpd also includes php and is relatively cheap if you want to add mysql access.
Anyways just wanted to throw in my two cents and give you all an option, a relatively cheap option, to learn linux and get yourself some good webspace without having to use your own machine. To create a pre-validated account just telnet to sdf.lonestar.org and go from there.
Peace
HT
