[Welly Wu]

thanks

 

[JuveDuke]

The main feature of each of the major forms:

FreeBSD - Most mainstream and by far supports more cutting edge hardware and software. Probably the fastest as well.

NetBSD - Can be installed on any thing with memory and a processor.

OpenBSD - Security, one remote hole ever found or something like that.


I've only used FreeBSD at work (never anything more than command line work, though. we use it for our dhcp, firewalls, and dns), and only somewhat experimented with OpenBSD. I'd recommend FreeBSD unless you need the security (and FreeBSD is very secure as well) or compatability with an NES. At least in terms of making it an every day machine.

You should be able to get around in the BSD's with a working knowledge of linux. I use Gentoo linux (which I love) and have never installed BSD on my home system. If you're having troubles getting things done in linux compared to windows then it will only get worse if you are trying to use a BSD. But it seems like you're doing this to fool around with it moreso than making it your main machine.

And you could boot Windows, FreeBSD, and Linux all on the system if you like.

 

[azncookiecutter]

I'm quite interested diving into Linux (not so much as BSD) as an alternative to Windows XP. As a longtime Windows user, which Linux build would be the most user friendly and which can qualify as a full time alternative OS to Windows XP?

 

[crat]

I'm long time Slackware GNU/Linux user and few months ago I installed NetBSD on my little server ( httpd, ftpd, svn, ipnat ). I absolutely love Slackware, for me, nothing else comes even close to it. It could be just that Slackware is OS I know best and everything seems simple, clean and correct. About NetBSD, well, it's nice, pkgsrc is very cool, but somehow everything requires more work. NetBSD just doesnt seem right for desktop, for example, it comes with chs insted of bash and vi insted of vim, not that you couldn't install whatever you want, well, sometimes you cant, there is less software available then for Linux or FreeBSD. Chance to survive ? I don't see why NetBSD would die in foreseeable future, lots and lots of people are using it, or some parts of it. BTW, did you know that there is some NetBSD code in PlayStation Portable ? As for modern hardware, I'm not quite sure ( my server is old P2 box ), but I guess overally it's worse than on Linux or FreeBSD. Anyway, check out "What is NetBSD?" section in The NetBSD Guide and hubertf's NetBSD Blog.

azncookiecutter, try Ubuntu. Just don't expect too much, you're learning new OS, it takes time...

 

[the_villain]

With all the hassle that I had with various RPM based distros FreeBSD looks very promising. I had FreeBSD installed about three months ago and it's very nice - everything works flawlesly, ports are teriffic for automated install etc. Up to now I have started with Slackware, then I began using LFS(Linux From Scratch) and Gentoo. Of those I prefer LFS and Slackware. My advice is to use some linux distro like Slackware or FreeBSD if you want to learn how OS works and if you want stability. With cutomized to your needs linux there isn't a chance for anything to go bad. You have all the power in your hands. I shiver whenever I go back to using Windows at work. Last word - if you want to try BSd try FreeBSD first - it's the most mainstream BSD.

 

[Zanth]

I use FreeBSD on a gateway at home and I have a few OpenBSD servers at work. I like *BSD for sysem wherein I don't have to work in them, set them up and let them do their thing while letting me do mine. That is, they rarely fail, in fact, hardware will fail before the OS

Work enviro though, I much prefer Linux, particularly Debian.

 

[majid]

BSD stands for "Berkeley Standard Distribution". When Bell Labs invented UNIX, AT&T was prevented by consent decree from getting commercially involved with computers. That was the main reason why they agreed to the 1984 break-up - they thought they could make more money from competing with IBM than they would lose from the loss of their regulated monopoly. Suckers... Anyhow, they just gave away UNIX for free, and UC Berkeley ported it to DEC's VAX and released it. As an OS, it has over 20 years of history, and is very mature and stable. Yahoo runs on FreeBSD, for instance.

As BSD is not as mainstream as Linux, it has not benefitted from all the work companies like Mandrake, Red Hat or SuSE have put into making (relatively) it easy to use and install for neophytes. It is best for people who already have a fair level of UNIX experience, at least basic programming skills, and who are not afraid of compiling software packages from source code when pre-compiled binaries are not available. Usually, this just means unpacking the source, then typing "configure;make;make install", but sometimes it gets more involved, and you may need to know the C programming language to find out what is going wrong. There are also many commercial software packages like VMware that are available for Linux but not on BSD, and that will not run under FreeBSD's Linux compatibility mode. On the other hand, Apple's Mac OS X (soon available on Intel) includes BSD and has access to commercial software unavailable on Linux like Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Office.

In terms of basic usage, BSD is a UNIX variant, just like Linux. Some of the administrative commands are different, but the systems share 95% of the same tools. Most programs that compile on Linux will also work on BSD, unless they rely on Linux extensions. It's the engine under the hood that is different, arguably the BSDs are superior (FreeBSD for performance, OpenBSD for security), and managed in a way that is less free-wheeling and anarchic than the Linux community. The more conservative approach also means they are less likely to make questionable choices in the realm of security vs. performance.

I burned out of Linux in 1993 after having to reinstall the entire operating system and dependencies twice in a week because they were changing the fundamental system APIs without forethought and planning, or heeding (or even acknowledging) the need for backwards compatibility or stability (as in not making changes for changes' sake, or at least thinking them through, not as in "does not crash every 5 minutes).

Actually, my experience with recent versions of Linux is that there is so much feature bloat and too-many-cooks-spoil-the-broth syndrome that it is less reliable today with 2.6 than it was in the early days of 0.9. At my company, I let my employees have their choice of OS on their desktops, but I often see the Linux users struggling because they need a special version of the kernel to support their video card, but a different version for their sound card. Configuration management has always been problematic on Linux due to the lack of tight control. The good thing is this means a lot of oddball hardware is supported, but the bad thing is, there are no two Linux machines on this planet that have the same version of Linux installed.

You can install up to 4 operating systems per hard drive if you partition it, so trying out multiple OSes is not hard if you reserve disk space for them ahead of time. All you have to do is use a boot manager to choose which OS you want to boot into when you start your PC.

My OS of choice on Intel is Sun's Solaris. It is derived from AT&T's original UNIX System V Release 4, with some BSD heritage as well. It is remarkably stable (one of my company's Solaris web servers has been running continuously for over 1050 days), and as an OS designed for mission-critical databases and the like, it has very high-performance under load, not just high performance for light workstation use that falls off under stress like Linux (the BSDs are closer to Solaris in terms of robustness). With recent features like DTrace, the amount of visibility you have into the system to identify performance problems or the root cause of problems is simply phenomenal.

My ideal setup, and indeed the one I have at home, is a Solaris/x86 server and a Macintosh desktop.

Finally, spending a couple thousand dollars on a PC seems like a lot. Building yourself does not make as much sense as it did ten years ago, because prices on complete systems have fallen and you do not get volume discounts on components when you buy retail the way computer manufacturers do. I wouldn't spend more than $1500 on a PC, and I would actually get one ready-made then customize it by changing out a couple parts like the video card or upgrading memory rather than building something from scratch (I know how to do it, it just doesn't make economic sense to do so any more). Sun's new Ultra 20 workstation is very nice, as are Dell's Precision Workstation lines and Shuttle's XPC line of compact shoebox-sized machines.

 

[the_villain]

Quote:

Originally Posted by majid At my company, I let my employees have their choice of OS on their desktops, but I often see the Linux users struggling because they need a special version of the kernel to support their video card, but a different version for their sound card.

I like that part. I wish that was the case with my bosses. Actually this gives me the idea of installing Linux or FreeBSD on my computer at work and booting from floppy or cd to be safe.

 

[Welly Wu]

done

 

[Welly Wu]

nevermind

 

[majid]

You don't need 4 drives - a single drive can be divvied-up into 4 partitions.

Newegg.com seems to be the goto place for DIY-ers.

I can't vouch for any of the books you mentioned, but I would be suspicious. The publisher of reference for UNIX books is O'Reilly and Associates. Addison-Wesley has some good books as well. Most others just publish me-too books that are often not worth the paper they are printed on. But why don't you start with the official documentation, specially the FreeBSD Handbook before spending your hard-earned cash on books that may just be paraphrases of it?

If you told us what you want to do with the OS, it would be easier to help. Is it for programming, to build your own Internet server, as a general-purpose desktop OS, or what?

 

[dsavitsk]

Quote:

Originally Posted by majid I can't vouch for any of the books you mentioned, but I would be suspicious. The publisher of reference for UNIX books is O'Reilly and Associates.

The Complete FreeBSD (which, in its current incarnation, is published by O'Reilly) is the defacto standard. It is what got me started. It is written by Greg Leyey who is an all around smart guy who looks like a *nix hacker should. http://www.lemis.com/~grog/Photos/20...in-office.jpeg

Fwiw, I run FreeBSD on a Packard Bell Pentium 150 with 64MB of EDO RAM.

 

[D-EJ915]

Quote:

Originally Posted by majid You don't need 4 drives - a single drive can be divvied-up into 4 partitions.

Well, if you're lazy, ghetto, have many hard drives, and don't like the bother of partitioning (I've been killed by it before, argh!) then multiple drives is an easy, ghettofabulous way to multiboot, haha

 

[Welly Wu]

>

 

[Elec]

If you really just wanna mess around with a bunch of different OSes, I'd almost recommend you buy a copy of VMWare, since that makes it easy to do what you're talking about in a nice safe sandbox. The downsides are that it can be slow and it's expensive (like almost new pair of headphones expensive). Hard drives are ridiculously cheap these days, but it adds up if you need a bunch of 'em.