Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 19:50:13 -0600 From: David Kelly <dkelly@grumpy.dyndns.org> To: Christopher Farley <chris@northernbrewer.com> Cc: Ben <ben@cahostnet.com>, questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD and Linux (More Questions!) Message-ID: <200103130150.f2D1oDe06889@grumpy.dyndns.org> In-Reply-To: Message from Christopher Farley <chris@northernbrewer.com> of "Mon, 12 Mar 2001 09:48:14 CST." <20010312094812.F78116@northernbrewer.com>
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Christopher Farley writes: > Ben (ben@cahostnet.com) wrote: [...] > > Large hardware support > > Because of its larger user base, Linux has better hardware support, > however FreeBSD's hardware support may be sufficient for your needs. larger != better How many Adaptec SCSI drivers are their for Linux? DEC Tulip? Last I heard there were several of each. One driver works for some, another for others. You have to shoot for a combination which works for you. Adpatec support is simply excellent in FreeBSD. Same for the Intel Etherexpress Pro 10/100B. Neither is a shining point for Linux. If you need a driver for a parallel port gumball machine and soda dispenser, then Linux is the place. Otherwise FreeBSD supports all quality PC hardware. > You specifically mentioned cd burners and sound cards. My experience > is this: on FreeBSD you will be better off with SCSI cd drives, > particularly if you want to do disk-at-once copying. Believe Soren has put everything in the FreeBSD kernel for such in the ATA driver. Only waiting on somebody to customize the popular utilties (such as cdrdao) to the interface. Meanwhile rather than cdrecord, one uses burncd. For audio you can create a device for every track 01 thru 99, and read with dd. > However, Linux's lack of a 'make world'-type mechanism to upgrade the > operating system has always troubled me. I really like the idea > that on FreeBSD, you can sync your source tree and bring your OS up-to > date, even between major releases. Using CVS from a *single* source, no less. No "patch of the day" or need for incompatible patches from multiple sources. Somebody I know tried to do the "greater than 2G file" thing in Linux. Found 4 different patch sets to do the job. No single one was complete. No combination worked well. I won the argument and we wiped the machine and put FreeBSD on it. Later I submitted a couple PR's to FreeBSD as dd and tcopy were only counting with 32 fingers. They worked fine, but the display was off over 4G. The Linux patches had not gotten into that fine of a detail. > Linux upgrades usually require waiting for the latest release. > Between releases, you may need to upgrade specific binary files if there > is a security problem. Using the FreeBSD system there has been a time or two that I've needed to move something back a version. Recently /usr/ports/mail/fetchmail did something screwy with a POP3 AUTH command. Didn't find out until I had "upgraded" and deleted my older version. So I used cvs to "update" /usr/ports/mail/fetchmail to one that was a couple weeks old. And I had my good fetchmail once again. Many years ago when auto media detection was being added to the de (DEC Tulip) driver, it broke my version 0.0 21040 manually-jumpered "combo" card. Cvs was very helpful for keeping an older version of the driver for quite some time. -- David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@hiwaay.net ===================================================================== The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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