Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1999 15:50:24 -0700 (PDT) From: Tani Hosokawa <unknown@riverstyx.net> To: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG, advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: NT vs Linux vs FreeBSD Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.10.9907141536230.30302-100000@avarice.riverstyx.net> In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.19990714163037.045b9f00@localhost>
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Is there any significant difference between either of the two FreeBSD "distributions"? On Linux, for example, the differences are really massive between distributions. Different libraries, different apps, different configurations, different file layouts,different administration tools... For example, Slackware has your basic installation wizard, a rudimentary package manager (really, it manages tarballs with an install script embedded in them), libc5 (libc6 now, but most of the binaries still are linked against libc5), and that's about it. RedHat has a spiffy installation wizard, all the authentication is PAMified, it supports MD5 passwords, has the RPM package manager, it uses SysVinit, all the configuration files are in /etc/, all the software is configured completely differently, Vixie cron instead of Dillon cron, different version of the C compiler, additional X drivers, ... in fact, most utils are significantly different. Stampede, also radically different. And it has the Stampede package manager. SuSE, uses RPMs, but again massive differences. ROCK, from what I understand, consists of a handful of shell scripts and some sourcecode. Debian uses the .deb packages. Again, not compatible with any of the others, although Debian can use RPMs. Now, if I log in to any one of these distributions with only knowledge of one, chances are I'm going to be functionally useless aside from basic tasks for about a week. I can't even copy binaries between some of these. If I log in to a Walnut Creek FreeBSD machine, then I check out a Cheapbytes FreeBSD machine, I'm probably not going to have any difficulty whatsoever. I can FTP down any packages I want from any standard FreeBSD FTP site, I can use the ports collection, it's all compatible, and for the most part, identical. I don't see any real difference between the two. Their fundamentally the same, and anything different is just fluff. On Wed, 14 Jul 1999, Brett Glass wrote: > At 03:28 PM 7/14/99 -0700, Tani Hosokawa wrote: > > >Actually, there is no CVS tree for Linux :) I don't see what the big deal > >is. Who cares? > > We all should, because there's an important question here: What constitutes > a distribution? I say that any package that includes a significantly different > selection of components qualifies. > > --Brett > --- tani hosokawa river styx internet To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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