On Apr 13, 2011, at 6:06 PM, Ken Hornstein wrote: >> I'm really curious why those that chose BSDs chose them? > I'm a BSD user from waaay back; I cut my teeth on SunOS 4 in college, and > I ran a actual BSD 4.3 system on a derelict VAX 11/750 just for the pure > hell of it.
I have a similar story to Kens. It all started when a busy coworker handed me some QIC cartridges with SunOS 4.0.1 on them and asked if I wanted to learn Unix. We needed to get a big 9U Sun SPARC VME board working and since I couldn't do anything with the VME cards I was designing until it was loaded, I got the job. What was the GUI back then ... oh, yeah, SunView! But I digress. Anyway SunOS 4 was very BSD, so that's what's seemed right to me ever since. > I was around when 386BSD was forming, Not much later, when I wanted a Unix for home on a 386 box, I somehow stumbled on Walnut Creek and FreeBSD 2.0 (.7 I think) CDs. I was also impressed that WC ate their own dog food and ran their busy FTP site on FreeBSD. Pretty much a bullet proof network stack from BSD. Even AT&T and Microsoft thought so... but I digress again. This was early '95, or at least it says Jan. '95 on the jewel case. I don't recall if I'd even heard of Lunix back then. When I built my third tower system, I planned to turn the prior one (486DX/66) into a firewall for my new "always on" DSL line, running OpenBSD because of its hard earned security reputation. But I ran into trouble with the driver for one of the used NICs I'd picked up at a computer show. Even though Theo responded personally to my bug report, I couldn't wait for a fix, so that got FreeBSD as well. When eventually replacing failed parts on that tower became less like fun and more like work, I decided on something smaller and quieter, which led to a net5501 and the discovery of NanoBSD. I hadn't known it, but I had been installing its build tools for years as it's part of the FreeBSD base (thanks Poul). I can echo Ken's comment about cleaner. The BSDs are designed as complete OSs. Each project does their own kernel AND userland (helping themselves to the best of the other projects' code, of course, but more on BSD License in a moment. You can compile a very capable OS solely from each projects code base. None of the *BSDs are "distros" as they aren't distributing outside code in the base. Of course they do include a lot of optional third party software. The Ports system is just amazing, but no longer that unique to the BSD camp. And if you add the Linux compatibility to the kernel, you can run almost any Linux binary as well. And this all adds up to the control that allows an orderly directory hierarchy. I'll defer to Ken on kernel building being cleaner as I haven't built a Linux kernel. Obviously there is a big difference in the licensing between BSD and GPL. Personally it doesn't make much practical difference to me as I don't write a whole lot of code, so is outside the scope for my response to the original question. But it does matter to many. There's a reason that my second favorite OS, MacOSX, has a FreeBSD middle. And of course Microsoft's original IP stack for Windows was also BSD code. And of course the most important reason for any OS choice, mascots. Beastie is cuter than Tux! OK, I've wasted enough of your bandwidth. -Jed _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
