FreeBSD -- Debain: any good reason?
I'm trying to figure out if there is a good reason to move from FreeBSD to Debian Linux, or run both. I have FreeBSD 3.1 installed and I've done some perl web programming, running only X-windows, emacs, apache and netscape. I was fine and happy. A Slackware Linux fan at work told me FreeBSD is behind the curve, too conservative. Linux has all the latest drivers, etc, -- go with Linux. So, I thought I would give Linux a try. First I got lost in which distro to go with. I spent a whole bunch of time before I decided on Debian. Debian seems to be the most conservative of the bunch, kind of the freebsd camp of the Linux world. As far as graphic card drivers go every one depends on Xfree86 so end of story there. As for drivers for my soundblaster live, they are in the experimental stage in FreeBSD and in Linux you need a special version of the kernel. which leads me to ease of installation. FreeBSD is a snap to install. I got lost in the Debian installation guide. There's 4 different versions of the kernel you can choose from, there's files to pull from several different directories, etc. I wanted to do a multi-boot system, win98 and Debian. I used partition magic to set up these little slivers of partions, 500 MB for /root, 100 MB for /tmp, 2 gigs for /var, etc. Partition magic took forever, created half of them and gave up. Maybe FreeBSD was easier to install because I gave it its own disk. Just make 2 boot floppies, do a network install, and off and running. So now I see no really good reason to leave FreeBSD for Linux. Am I missing something, besides the license issue? greg strockbine
Re: FreeBSD -- Debain: any good reason?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- On Wed, 9 Aug 2000, Greg Strockbine. wrote: I have FreeBSD 3.1 installed and I've done some perl web programming, running only X-windows, emacs, apache and netscape. I was fine and happy. You'd notice virtually no difference at all regarding that environment on either Linux (any flavor) or FreeBSD. A Slackware Linux fan at work told me FreeBSD is behind the curve, too conservative. Linux has all the latest drivers, etc, -- go with Linux. I've heard similar things, and it seems to be that the development groups have slightly different foci. In FreeBSD you've got the core development team working on improving and optimizing core kernel features, where as in the Linux kernel development you don't have a really central group of core developers. The result is that in Linux anybody can write a driver for whatever obscure piece of hardware they've got, and if it's any good it stands a pretty good chance of being incorporated into the kernel. As I understand it that's not the case in FreeBSD. So, I thought I would give Linux a try. First I got lost in which distro to go with. I spent a whole bunch of time before I decided on Debian. Debian seems to be the most conservative of the bunch, kind of the freebsd camp of the Linux world. A wise choice. Debian really is, from my experience with several distros, the most well engineered and best designed distribution available. which leads me to ease of installation. FreeBSD is a snap to install. I got lost in the Debian installation guide. There's 4 different versions of the kernel you can choose from, there's files to pull from several different directories, etc. Debian really is very easy to install. If you have a reasonably fast Internet connection I strongly recommend you check out Debian's network installation capabilities. It's been a while since I installed Debian, since the upgrade process between major versions tends to be very easy, but last time I did the network installation required 7 floppies. You can install with just a CD-ROM and no floppies if you are able to boot from a CD. Installing from CD is quite easy, and really doesn't involve much work beyond selecting the packages you want installed and providing some info about your hardware. I wanted to do a multi-boot system, win98 and Debian. I used partition magic to set up these little slivers of partions, 500 MB for /root, 100 MB for /tmp, 2 gigs for /var, etc. Partition magic took forever, created half of them and gave up. 2 gigs for /var is a bit much. I'm not sure how FreeBSD organizes it's directory structure, but on my Debian potato machine (potato is soon to become Debian 2.2, but is in pre-release testing at this point) /var occupies only 47 Megs. /usr should have more space given to it, as here it occupies 1.3 gigs. So now I see no really good reason to leave FreeBSD for Linux. Am I missing something, besides the license issue? Honestly, as much as I love Debian, I'm sure FreeBSD is just as good. If you are interested in expanding your horizons a bit, then definitely check it out. The Debian community is great and always willing to help new users get comfortable. But if you're happily productive in FreeBSD then you probably won't gain a whole lot by moving to Debian. noah ___ | Web: http://web.morgul.net/~frodo/ | PGP Public Key: http://web.morgul.net/~frodo/mail.html -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: PGPfreeware 5.0i for non-commercial use Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBOZGPx4dCcpBjGWoFAQFtUgP/SYAvbGVecz0Cyy9vXKvfeX2szGCjE+n4 /yf73LRHK3SFwpfvLVqBQD7HLadU2Vf8cSwYprH0OUe0SGX6zGGRaNu1gNk6/PlX FRZ71c2XCEDE24sTMytboMfX5k2ur5lBTDbFm7S68avTgO1WUGprCdU49Q5sR94Q woihf5ImzVk= =YtBC -END PGP SIGNATURE-
Re: FreeBSD -- Debain: any good reason?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Wednesday, August 09, 2000, 8:58:01 AM, Greg wrote: So now I see no really good reason to leave FreeBSD for Linux. Am I missing something, besides the license issue? For me not ever having to compile stuff unless I want to and a real packaging system more than offset the ease of install. Of course, I find Debian easy to install anyway. :/ - -- Steve C. Lamb | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your ICQ: 5107343 | main connection to the switchboard of souls. - ---+- -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: PGP 6.5i iQA/AwUBOZGUg3pf7K2LbpnFEQJYwwCg4vakv9s7lfIzjGuhN/3igfzAujQAoKhQ lMkyPhAv821uJTu0RJWefnIv =Z2nl -END PGP SIGNATURE-
Re: FreeBSD -- Debain: any good reason?
On Wed, Aug 09, 2000 at 08:58:01AM -0700, Greg Strockbine. wrote: A Slackware Linux fan at work told me FreeBSD is behind the curve, too conservative. Linux has all the latest drivers, etc, -- go with Linux. Whether or not the latest drivers thing means anything to you probably depends on your hardware and what you do with it. For example, I have a 3dfx Voodoo3, and I like to use it with 3D acceleration in a couple games like Myth II and Heretic II. Linux has drivers for using this card's 3D hardware acceleration, but I can't find any reference on the net to similar drivers for FreeBSD. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong, please. :) ) If you are having no problems, though, and you're not interested in doing anything that you can't already do in FreeBSD, then I don't see any really big reason why you should switch. (If you do switch, though, Debian is definitely the distribution to go with. From what I've read, Debian's package management is similar to FreeBSD's (and possibly better, but I can't do a comparison myself of course)--if you're used to that good package management, you might find the package management of other distros to be quite pathetic.) Also, one of the other respondents mentioned the net installation... I'll add on to that by saying that you don't necessarily need 7 disks--if you toss the tgz's for the base files and driver files onto a hard disk partition (and then load them during the installation), then you only need 2 floppies. Tom
Re: FreeBSD -- Debain: any good reason?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Wednesday, August 09, 2000, 11:24:16 AM, Thomas wrote: Also, one of the other respondents mentioned the net installation... I'll add on to that by saying that you don't necessarily need 7 disks--if you toss the tgz's for the base files and driver files onto a hard disk partition (and then load them during the installation), then you only need 2 floppies. For the net installation you only need 2 floppies. Well, at least as of Potato as one of the options is to retrieve base from an http server. I think there is also an NFS option but I didn't have NFS setup on my main boxen at the time I was doing the install. - -- Steve C. Lamb | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your ICQ: 5107343 | main connection to the switchboard of souls. - ---+- -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: PGP 6.5i iQA/AwUBOZGj5Xpf7K2LbpnFEQJmkQCfVrno1S+MMgz9d0Cg2q3j820lRuoAoIzP ejHfJ4jJ7CA4D0G8Ao4nxtyt =8684 -END PGP SIGNATURE-
Re: FreeBSD -- Debain: any good reason?
Thomas J. Hamman wrote: (If you do switch, though, Debian is definitely the distribution to go with. From what I've read, Debian's package management is similar to FreeBSD's (and possibly better, but I can't do a comparison myself of course)--if you're used to that good package management, you might find the package management of other distros to be quite pathetic.) It should also be noted that FreeBSD is developing an apt clone for their packages. In future, moving from FreeBSD to Debian will be even less painful (at least when initially becoming familiar with the system and its package management). Warren
Least # of disks install, Re: FreeBSD -- Debain: any good reason?
Quoting Steve Lamb ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): Wednesday, August 09, 2000, 11:24:16 AM, Thomas wrote: Also, one of the other respondents mentioned the net installation... I'll add on to that by saying that you don't necessarily need 7 disks--if you toss the tgz's for the base files and driver files onto a hard disk partition (and then load them during the installation), then you only need 2 floppies. For the net installation you only need 2 floppies. Well, at least as of Potato as one of the options is to retrieve base from an http server. I think there is also an NFS option but I didn't have NFS setup on my main boxen at the time I was doing the install. If I have already partitioned the disk and got a functional OS on the machine, I do it with a DOS boot disk. In case it's useful, my method is Make a DOS partition where the swap partition is going to be. Copy base, linux, drivers and install.bat files, plus dosutils/loadlin.exe and images-1.44/root.bin and rescue.bin to the DOS partition. Boot the DOS floppy, type C: and install.bat . Perform the installation from harddisk. Reboot and, after typing in the root password or 1st username, switch to VC2 and login. Fdisk the dos partition to 82 (optional I think), mkswap, (I take the opportunity to add a few lines to /etc/fstab as well as the swap line) and swapon. If you leave the last bit any later on 32MB memory, you have to do it while been inundated with out-of-memory messages: quite tricky editing in ae! Cheers, -- Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: +44 1908 653 739 Fax: +44 1908 655 151 Snail: David Wright, Earth Science Dept., Milton Keynes, England, MK7 6AA Disclaimer: These addresses are only for reaching me, and do not signify official stationery. Views expressed here are either my own or plagiarised.
Re: FreeBSD -- Debain: any good reason?
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far way, someone said... I'm trying to figure out if there is a good reason to move from FreeBSD to Debian Linux, or run both. I'll make it easy: try both. Use whichever you like the best. I have FreeBSD 3.1 installed and I've done some perl web programming, running only X-windows, emacs, apache and netscape. I was fine and happy. A Slackware Linux fan at work told me FreeBSD is behind the curve, too conservative. Linux has all the latest drivers, etc, -- go with Linux. Debian is _very_ conservative. So, I thought I would give Linux a try. First I got lost in which distro to go with. I spent a whole bunch of time before I decided on Debian. Debian seems to be the most conservative of the bunch, kind of the freebsd camp of the Linux world. As far as graphic card drivers go every one depends on Xfree86 so end of story there. Isn't it nice when the same basic driver can be used on many operating systems? :) As for drivers for my soundblaster live, they are in the experimental stage in FreeBSD and in Linux you need a special version of the kernel. You'll need the current 'frozen' (aka potato) distribution of Debian to make that sound card work. You might need to recompile your kernel, though. I don't remember if the potato install system installs the sound drivers. There are three states to Debian Linux: stable, frozen, unstable. Debian stable (aka slink) is like sticking with FreeBSD 3.1: you can depend on it to work 100% (or nearly so). Debian frozen (aka potato) is the beta release. In many cases you can depend on it nearly as much as stable :). At work the web server run Debian potato, and it's had 100% uptime thus far Debian unstable (aka woody) is the current development branch - it's kinda like tracking the 5.0-CURRENT FreeBSD tree. Depending on what's happening to the distribution it's about as stable as the release RedHat 6.2 (from what I've heard). which leads me to ease of installation. FreeBSD is a snap to install. I got lost in the Debian installation guide. There's 4 different versions of the kernel you can choose from, there's files to pull from several different directories, etc. I wanted to do a multi-boot system, win98 and Debian. I used partition magic to set up these little slivers of partions, 500 MB for /root, 100 MB for /tmp, 2 gigs for /var, etc. Partition magic took forever, created half of them and gave up. That's not a fault of Linux - if you were trying to re-partition the disk for FreeBSD (or NetBSD or OpenBSD) you would have run into the same problem. IMO it's much easier to dual-boot when you have more than two hard disks. Maybe FreeBSD was easier to install because I gave it its own disk. Just make 2 boot floppies, do a network install, and off and running. Linux _can_ be a 2-floppy install as well. You just need to consider that there are more disks since there are more drivers available at install time. Many times I've wanted to install FreeBSD, but the ethernet card is unsupported by the install floppies, and there's no CD drive. Oops, here comes Linux... So now I see no really good reason to leave FreeBSD for Linux. Am I missing something, besides the license issue? Nope. You're not missing anything. PS: I use Linux and FreeBSD (4.1-STABLE), so I feel I'm qualified to comment kinda authoritatively... -- -- Phil Brutsche [EMAIL PROTECTED] There are two things that are infinite; Human stupidity and the universe. And I'm not sure about the universe. - Albert Einstien
