Why FreeBSD? ----------- 1) I like to tinker, and it's fun. 2) Descendant of one of the Grand old Ladies of Unix - BSD 3) Reliable (most of HotMail is still running FreeBSD) 4) Compatible - can run linux binaries 5) Can install on tiny systems - 8Meg memory anyone? 6) Good performance on large executables.
Differences from linux - my experiences -------------------------------- 1) Most of what you already know (unix common stuff) and applications works just the same on FreeBSD. Most packages in use on linux today have been ported to native FreeBSD or they will run as linux binaries on FreeBSD. The latest news is that Java will be available on FreeBSD 4.5 later this month. 2) If any of you have followed my posts about gentoo, you are familiar with the installer pacakge portage, modeled after the FreeBSD ports software. FreeBSD actually has two distribution methods - packages (binaries) and ports (install from source). After install you setup a cvsup base and you maintain everything from ports. You cd to the appropriate directory (example /usr/ports/mail/sylpheed) then type "make install." Ports downloads, the source, checks dependencies, installs any missing dependencies on the fly, makes and installs the software, and records everything in its /var/db/pkg directory. 3) Within a couple of days - working from the kde base - I was able to put up the equivalent of what I have on any linux distro - gnome, galeon, xfce, sylpheed. Executing large executables (kde, gnome, galeon, etc.) is a much quicker process than on linux (about 2-1 startup speed). FreeBSD appears to be more sparing with memory - not much swapping. Equivalent installs from source appear to run faster than on linux (no exact measurements). Installing gnome was only about a four hour process, and I'm sure it took much longer when I did that on gentoo. 4) Building a kernel is a totally different process than linux. I haven't tried it yet. 5) FreeBSD does not use anything like the SYSV init process. The init scripts are well described in the FreeBSD handbook. There is more than one /etc. /etc and /usr/local/etc are the main ones. 6) FreeBSD is neither more nor less reliable than linux. There are plenty of users with problems on freebsd-questions, and they usually get answers fairly quickly. All the usual stuff you see on linux-users - kde, modems, dhcp, security, networking, cups, my disk crashed, shell scripts, mp3, sound cards, etc. They seem not to mind newbies. 7) I haven't upgraded to the latest Xfree yet, and I've had a few lockups in X. Many of the applications on FreeBSD run from linux binaries, so that is a potential sorce of error. Most of the failures I've had have been while using GTK+ apps - sylpheed, xfce, galeon. I'm experimenting with running only kde to see if that makes a difference. konqueror is my browser for now. It's not so draggy as on linux, so I don't mind it, but I do miss the tab support under galeon. 8) Speaking of kde, there is not such thing as stable. kde has a habit of refusing to start. I have to go in to /tmp and clean out everything in sight. 9) Documentation is very good. There's a lot of stuff at the FreeBSD main site, and google will find you lots more. I was able to answer a lot of my own questions by RTFM and it was quick to find TFM. 10) FreeBSD primarily uses /bin/sh but you can run bash. 11) I'll stay here until something drives me away. -- Collins Richey - Denver Area WWTLRD? - FreeBSD 4.4 + xfce + sylpheed _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list Archives, Digests, etc at http://linux.nf/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
