Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 12:04:27 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: bitter@noah.org Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Need comparative data Message-ID: <19990803120427.M62948@freebie.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <67650953.933580567520.JavaMail.nobody@shell5.ba.best.com>; from bitter@noah.org on Mon, Aug 02, 1999 at 12:56:06AM -0700 References: <67650953.933580567520.JavaMail.nobody@shell5.ba.best.com>
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On Monday, 2 August 1999 at 0:56:06 -0700, bitter@noah.org wrote: > I've been browsing through the mail archives look for the > "Linux Versus FreeBSD" type messages. They all seem to go something > like this: > > Newbie Q:"What's the difference between Linux and FreeBSD?" > Guru A:"It all depends on what you want and even if I knew > the answer I would not tell you because I refuse to > lower myself by getting involved in a religious OS war." > > I'm coming from a large company that uses mostly Sun Solaris and a bit of WinNT. > A group of us is trying to put together a low cost system to run a load > balanced web server (currently 4 Ultra2 running Netscape Enterprise server) > with some server side database application code. We're a bit tired of Sun and > we are fed up with Netscape. We are currently evaluating Linux versus FreeBSD > (originally we were considering WinNT, but we have a lot of legacy scripts > that make the web server work. Also I was the only WinNT advocate and when > it was suggested that my penis might not be big enough I finally relented > and decided to stick with a UNIX variant. But which one?) > > As far as administration and support goes I think it's clear that Linux > has a big advantage. Many packages (like Apache and Squid) come prebuilt > in RPM format. Also Linux seems to have good Java support. I don't see this. FreeBSD also offers prebuilt packages. What happens with Red Hat when you need an upgrade? With FreeBSD, you just reinstall the port. It takes a little longer than installing a prebuilt package, but that's the only difference. And I don't see any difference in the Java support, though I'm prepared to be corrected on this one. > As far as performance and reliability go I have not seen any arguments > one way or another. I suspect that FreeBSD is more stable (another reason > we decided against WinNT). Also, it seems that FreeBSD might be more > modular. We would like to remove as much crap as possible to get a clean > and easy to maintain system. But I don't have any real reason to believe > that Linux isn't dependable compared to WinNT. I think you can assume that both systems are much more reliable than Microsoft. But it's difficult to determine just how reliable FreeBSD is relative to Linux. I'd guess that it's probably more reliable, but it's difficult to quantify. > We could also stick with Solaris since the Intel Solaris licenses > are not very expensive. Solaris is pretty good as far as I can tell, > but I'm not real fond of the Sun techs. Depending on what you're doing, you may find that Solaris outperforms FreeBSD, especially with Squid. I'd be interested to see comparative figures here, but I heard something to that effect from some ISP friends of mine, who happen to run FreeBSD. The background is the lack of kernel threads in FreeBSD. > One thing I keep reading is that "Linux and FreeBSD are really more alike > than they are different." If that is true than can someone give me one > reason why I should use FreeBSD? If all the support and momentum is with > Linux then why risk going with FreeBSD? You'll probably find it easier to use after coming from a Solaris background. Greg -- When replying to this message, please copy the original recipients. For more information, see http://www.lemis.com/questions.html See complete headers for address, home page and phone numbers finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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