"Roger E. Rustad, Jr" <[email protected]> wrote: > I still don't understand the compelling reason to use an old version of > BSD on non x86 hardware. What specific benefit are you getting from > your non-standard / non-traditional hardware setup? Is it... > > (a) the cool factor? > (b) doing it "just because"? > (c) mental masturbation / learning how to do something new? > (d) more suited to a particular task? > (e) because it's categorically "better"? > (f) because it gives you the fuzzy wuzzies?
It's (b) and (e). > (g) other This one too: the taste factor. I find x86 hardware disgusting and repulsive; ditto for "modern Unix", although for two separate and independent reasons. If I were forced to use an x86 machine running some "modern" OS (even Slackware) as my primary computing platform, I would be very very sad. However, I don't mind using such technologies as long as such use is limited to secondary functions of subjectively lower importance to me. There is also the control factor: I really like running an OS that is small and simple enough that I can understand every line in its source code (both kernel and userland) with my single-human brain. Let's take a look here - /me looks at a directory listing on ifctfvax.Harhan.ORG (the FTP site where the OS is distributed) - the complete source for 4.3BSD-Quasijarus0c weighs a little under 14 MB compressed (gzip equivalent compression) - and that's the kernel and the full userland combined! The Linux kernel alone is much much bigger than that. The latest Slackware distro is 3 CDs of binaries plus 3 CDs of sources; 4.3BSD-Quasijarus distro is small enough to be served comfortably over FTP from a server on a 384 kbps dedicated pipe (1/4 of a T1). > So BSD 4.3 > fits like "hand in glove" to your soi-disant "HAXen" hardware > because....? Oh, that one's easy - the hardware and the OS were built together to work together. The OS in question doesn't run on anything other than the hardware in question, and the hardware in question has been put together for the specific purpose of running the OS in question and nothing else. > BSD 4.3 is the "true and pure" version of nix because....? Hmm, the full sentence in my post to which you are responding was: : When I started : Harhan Project in 1997, I had asked myself the question of what is/was : the most "true and pure" version of UNIX according to my highly : subjective taste, and the answer I came up with was 4.3BSD. It looks like you have missed the "according to my highly subjective taste" part. The human sense of taste is highly subjective, doesn't need a rational basis and most often doesn't have one. MS
