from Neo Sze Wee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > How does BSD compare to linux? Are they better for small memory system? Thank > you.
Typical BSD install is much smaller than typical Linux install. You stil need to install some packages to make it usable for the Internet and other things. OpenBSD can install anywhere on a big hard disk but can't boot from above 8 GB or 1024 virtual cylinders. A small memory system usually doesn't have such a big hard drive. FreeBSD is not user-friendly for the initial pre-configuration before install, and at one point takes forever or nearly so to probe devices. I downloaded boot/root diskette images for FreeBSD 4.5 slightly before the full release, and it was probing devices for 30 minutes or more before I gave up and hit Reset, thinking it might just have been hung. That was on a 1300 MHz Athlon which is normally very fast. In contrast, Ralf Brown's PCI program for DOS found all the PCI stuff and wrote to a file in about one second, so fast I thought at first it just did nothing. I got NetBSD installed but when I boot, I can't get past the first keystroke after the Login: prompt. I hit r, it responds with 6 more r's and pckbc: command timeout, then 9 r's on the next line, followed by a Password: prompt, but no longer responds to the keyboard, so I have to hit Reset. It remains to be seen if fixing the faulty fstab will fix it. I managed to mount an msdos-formatted floppy and make a /netbsd directory on it, and copied the fstab for editing in Linux, though the DOS port of elvis2.1_4, which I am using to type this now, may also work: should write the file with ASCII 10 newline, not ASCII 13,10. By the way, when I 'type' or 'more <' a Unix text file in DR-DOS 7.03, with ASCII 10 newline as opposed to ASCII 13,10, the file displays straight, no staircase effect such as I got with MS-DOS and OS/2. By the way, I've come to the conclusion that the DOS port of GNU Emacs is too bloated for DOS, with the good features of other OSes not available in the DOS port due to DOS limitations. DOS port has no network/Internet functionality. So I guess that leaves Arachne as the leading graphic Web browser for DOS; maybe Net-Tamer is a distant second? Apparently Caldera DR-Web Spyder is no longer in the picture.
