Philip J. Koenig wrote: >On 15 Jan 2002, at 8:23, BOF boldly uttered: > >>The biggest problem I have had with installs is with network cards. >>While FreeBSD supports many, many brands, most of them are not available >>during installation, including Tulip-chipped ones (I use Netgear 310's >>almost exclusively). This is easily corrected with a kernel recompile, >>which I think is even simpler than with Linux, but a nuisance to have to >>do right off the bat! (There may be a way around this using modules, but >>I just do the kernel recompile since I end up doing one eventually anyway). >> >I do not recall ever having to do this with FreeBSD. I have a >FreeBSD box here that was installed with v4.2 and updated via sources >to 4.3-Stable and the Netgear NIC was recognized off the bat using >the "dc" driver. The line "device dc" appears in the GENERIC kernel >configuration file. (/usr/src/sys/i386/conf/GENERIC) > What I meant was that the Tulip-based cards are not recognized during the initial installation: the choices I see on my install screen are: cd0, ed0, fe0, ie0, inc0, and sn0. The Tulip card is in the kernel configuration file and loads during bootup, but the fact that it is not available during setup led to much confusion on my part as I thought I would have to designate it to continue installation instead of simply removing all the choices. The same goes for the 3C905C card in one of my other systems.
To continue in this line: while FreeBSD supports a very large number of cards, finding out which driver is for which card is difficult, as there is no central list showing the drivers and the cards they support. It's a sort of educated guess that really needs improvement. >It's not the "porting concept", the FreeBSD base system is based on a >collection of source code maintained via CVS mirrors around the >world. > This is correct: it is a cvs-based system. One of the nice things about it is that it will allow both a complete and selective updating of the ports collection to keep the system current, and can be pretty much automated. >THE biggest feature IMHO that FreeBSD has over typical Linux distros >is that there is a single, unified "FreeBSD". You don't have to >spend your life trying to keep up with all the minutiae and >idiosyncracies of every distro and which kernel variation it has, >what utilities are present, what security patches are installed, bla >bla bla. You simply update your sources, "make world", and you're up >to date. Everything in /bin, /usr/bin, /sbin, /usr/sbin are updated >to current. Sendmail is updated, BIND is updated, NTP is updated, >etc. (I have found that oftentimes updating Linux distros to a newer >version ends up being futile, most people just tell you to re-install >the whole stupid thing. I do NOT consider this a reasonable option, >considering all the work that goes into getting a machine customized >the way you like it.) > Amen to this: it is one of the best features of FreeBSD, although there are some who do not advocate doing a full system update this way, and recommend a fresh install. Of course, then all the customization done to the system is lost, and, in my case, this is about 15 hours of work. >BTW, the reason BASH does not come with the default system is that it >is GPL. FreeBSD uses the BSD license, which is less restrictive than >the GPL about returning modified work back to the public. Therefore >BASH can never actually be included with the base system because >AFAIK its license conflicts with the BSD license. > Ah, so. I wasn't aware of this: after all, BASH is included as a package. I know that some of the ports, such as the KSH shell, are set up to pause and require the installer to acknowledge the license before going on. Overall, I am very impressed with FreeBSD, to the point where I am tempted to make it my default system. It fills very well the uses I have for a computer, and I like the way it does things. On the whole, I would say that if you like Slackware, then you will like FreeBSD. BOF _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list Archives, Digests, etc at http://linux.nf/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
