2011/4/13 Jed Clear <[email protected]>: > 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!
TOTALLY AGREE with that! :-) Why a lazy penguin when you can show your devi linside!!! jajaj :-D > > OK, I've wasted enough of your bandwidth. > > -Jed > _______________________________________________ > Soekris-tech mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech > _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
