Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 05:58:11 -0600 From: The Unknown User-ID (24155) <unknown@eyry.econ.iastate.edu> To: root@isis.dynip.com Cc: freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Very Common Question Message-ID: <199902191158.FAA27091@eyry.econ.iastate.edu> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 19 Feb 1999 16:09:50 %2B0300." <199902191310.QAA44457@isis.dynip.com>
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an unconfigured system wrote,
> Hi there,
> Continuing the series of questiions,
> I am hearing tooooo much now about linux.
> I'm sick of it, now I hear that IBM is making some deal with Linux
> people for installing Linux on their new machines, I am very very sad,
> and very very gelous.
^^^
careful, it's hard to move after you gelatinize, and you quiver
whenever anyone pokes you :)
But any gain for linux, or any non-window OS, is useful to
FreeBSD. The biggest issue is the stranglehold . . .
> I wan too know, in full detail, the difference between FreeBSD, and
> Linux, why is linux more popular,
Three years ago, i went looking for what I thought was called netbsd.
Turns out what I was really looking for was 386/BSD, which I'd figured
would be finished. What I found was linux, and didn't find FreeBSD
until later. But I think linux's biggest edge is the license.
This is the third or fourth time I've installed FreeBSD, and maybe
I can keep it this time. A few reasons I haven't been able to
keep/use it in the past:
1) getting questions answered. I can't speak for other distributions,
but for debian, it's usually a matter of hours on debian-user. I've
never succeeded in getting a question answered on freebsd-newbies or
freebsd-questions, and when i've subscribed in the past, i've
generally noticed most other questions going unanswered. Sure,
critical mass is part of it, but people need to get over the initial
hump.
2) installation.
a) You almost have to know what you're doing to get
installed far enough to figure out what you're doing . . . when
configuring from boot.flp (now with the 2d disk), it takes a couple of
minutes to clear out the other drivers, and set the io address for my
ne2000. This information isn't saved, and I have to do this *every*
time. With 3.0 (i think it was 3.0), I could at least get this
configuration menu back when I booted again, so I could set it again
until I compiled a kernel. Yesterday I never succeeded in getting it
back.
b) repetition. As near as I can tell, miss one source package in
initial install, and it wants to install them all again. I can't
figure out how to go from a minimal to more. And this morning, to get
the rest of the security sources, I end up with bin, man, etc. all
downloading again. And unless I chose the ports collection (again),
it would unmark the other source.
c) can't stop. If something is entered wrong, and you can't reach the
network, the timeout is several minutes. But if you abort at this
stage, the entire installation is aborted.
d) the kernel. It seems that you pretty much have to compile one,
whereas most linux distributions get away with a precompiled. This
takes a bit of knowledge.
> why the heck FreeBSD doesnot have
> support for simple things like Parralel port scanners,
noone wrote any? :)
> * if you are still asking which is better, you did not do your homework
> * Linux is unix-like, FreeBSD IS unix
so?
> * Linux comes from 3 vendors, FreeBSD comes from one .ORG
which 3? I can name several. ANd the same thing can be said about
Free/Net/Open . . .
FreeBSD certainly fits my thinking better. I do feel more comfortable
compiling my own stuff. And the "GPL uber alles" attitude does bad
things to my blood pressure. But it needs to be possible to install.
And I've found more death-traps in bsd than debian. I marked the vim
package, then tried to use it to edit config files. The latest
version (5.x), which wasn't marked as a devel package, leaks memory so
bad that it kills my machine when run as root. A runaway memory leak
so bad that I don't even get a chance to reboot. Run as a user, it
brings the sytsem nearly to a halt until it faults on an illegal
instruction.
And more works out of the box on linux. I finally figured out (with
some help) how to get apache running; it arrives with config files
pointing to nonexistant places. I finally found ssh, and compiled,
but it's not running yet, as near as i can tell.
I have X running, but xdm won't let me log in (and during
installation, wouldn't let me out of it's vc.
And then there's hardware support; the first time i installed, I found
it wouldn't support the scsi card I had, which was far from bleeding
edge (since then, the *)$&W Zip drive died, and it doesn't matter).
ANd file system support makes it hard to switch betwen linux &
frebsd. At 3.0, i installed, and tried to keep my /home shared while
I figured out if i could switch. I compiled in ext2fs support, and it
turned out that random chunks get inserted during write to the ext2fs
partitions . . . and at least prior to 2.2, linux had only read
support for UFS (write is now labeled experimental), and will destroy
a UFS partition beyond recovery if it tries to mount it as ext2.
rick
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