Date: Thu, 9 Oct 1997 21:31:45 -0700 (PDT) From: Annelise Anderson <andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Cc: Robert Rusk <rrusk@thorung.eeng.dcu.ie>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Linux vs freeBSD Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.971009211417.27017A-100000@andrsn.stanford.edu> In-Reply-To: <19971010102923.54565@lemis.com>
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On Fri, 10 Oct 1997, Greg Lehey wrote: > On Thu, Oct 09, 1997 at 09:55:00AM -0700, Annelise Anderson wrote: > > > > > > On Thu, 9 Oct 1997, Greg Lehey wrote: > > > > Drivers: Drivers are available for most standard hardware, right? > > OK. How about: > > As a result of the smaller user base, FreeBSD is less likely to have > drivers for brand-new boards than Linux. :( Is this really true? Maybe it's just some odd-ball stuff for which FreeBSD doesn't have drivers? There are drivers for the latest SCSI cards (2940UW), latest video cards (Matrox Millenium, Number Nine whatever, etc), Awe 64? All the Ethernet stuff? > > Software installation: Some people have found that installing software > > on Linux is far more of a hassle than it is on FreeBSD, because of the > > variety of versions of software that may be included on any particular > > distribution of Linux. This may be one of FreeBSD's greatest and growing > > strengths--that the version of the software on which port A is dependent > > is there....basically installing software from ports or packages is > > really pretty easy with FreeBSD. > > That's a good one. How about: > > As a result of the centralized develop- The ease of installation of Linux de- > ment style, FreeBSD is straightforward pends on the ``distribution''. If you > and easy to install. switch from one distribution of Linux to > another, you'll have to learn a new set > of installation tools. > Actually I wasn't referring to the initial installation of the operating system; I was talking about the ports & packages. I read one extended comparison of installing and configuring FreeBSD (2.2.1R) vs. Linux (slackware) that I found quite informative, by someone named Chris Johnson. Here's what he says about this: There is a statement in the Linux community that goes something like "What Version are you running?", "I'm running Slackware 96, 2.0.29, with xyz upgraded to version..." It is a running joke that no two Linux boxes are the same. Even at my shop, no two Linux boxes are running exactly the same software load. The reason for this is that bug fixes are rapidly developed... Against the LATEST software version. There is no time or effort spent on maintaining old releases. Rather than patch a bug against 1.3.20, the bug is fixed in 2.0.28. And oh by the way, in order to run kernel 2.0.28, you need to upgrade to bintools x.y+1, and if you do upgrade to bintools x.y+1 you also need to.... There is this vast amount of inter dependence that you need to be aware of when maintaining a Linux box. The FreeBSD people run just one development tree. They use CVS, an extension to RCS, to control all the source for the base Unix that is FreeBSD. Any bug that is fixed is usually fixed against the released version and then merged into the developmental version. This means that you can keep your released version very clean. It also seems that the third party packages and ports are kept in a fairly clean configuration by the FreeBSD people so that future ports are easy. A brief digression into the concept of FreeBSD ports is in order. Normally when you want to install some piece of third party software, you find an archive with that source, down load the archive. Put the source into a source directory, configure, build, fix,fix,fix,port,fix, patch, install. On some packages, this can happen in a few minutes, on other packages, this can take hours, days or weeks. FreeBSD has a Makefile system that starts with a "ports source skeleton." Once you say "make", the make file looks up where to get the source from, in order it is: Local disk, primary site for that package, secondary site for that package, the FreeBSD site. The source is the transfered to your local disk. An MD5 checksum is computed and compared against the ports recorded checksum. If they match, the source is unpacked, generic patches are applied, then specific FreeBSD patches are then applied and finally, the port is built. This makes porting software darn near trivial. And more and more people are contributing their FreeBSD ports back to the FreeBSD people. This also means that the amount of disk space needed for source can be greatly reduced because after you have done the install, you can delete the modifications. Linux uses the more conventional porting algorithm, with one extra bit of confusion. If this package is one that comes with Slackware, it is likely that it was installed into the system libraries and binary areas. I.e. /usr/lib and /usr/bin. This means that you have to be extra careful when installing upgrades to make sure that the upgrade replaces all of the old parts. This had caused GREAT problems for me in the past. I thought that interesting--If you'd like all of what he wrote, I'll forward it to you. He also says Linux is easier to install on "cheap" PC hardware (ide disks) but FreeBSD on scsi is trivial. > > FreeBSD as well as Linux is "bleeding edge" in -current....you don't > > want to give the impression there's no advancement going on. But the > > "current" release of FreeBSD (2.2-R and its descendants, 2.2-Stable, > > right now) aim to be reliable environments for production etc.etc.etc.... > > Note that Yahoo! uses FreeBSD (2.1 as of a few months ago), > > Yes, they're not the only ones. > > > but there's one big search engine (AltaVista?) that uses Linux. > > I thought AltaVista was DEC's showcase for Digital UNIX. Are you > sure? No, I'm not sure, and I'm surely wrong. It must be some other search engine. Annelise
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