About BSD


Recommended Posts

Here's my 2 cents..

I started using unix based systems about 4 or 5 years ago when a co-worker took me through setting up slackware boxes for being webservers. from there i tinkered and played and the learning curve was some what steep after coming from a back round ruled by windows 9x and Novell Netware 4.

After a year of slackware another co-worker and myself decided to try FreeBSD as we only ever heard good things about it from the *nix community.

After a quick install and a small read of the documentation we were both overly impressed by the ease of use ( for lack of better term ) that FreeBSD had with it. Kernel builds were a frightening short 4 commands in total. The first time we did it we had though we had missed out a page or 2 of the instructions, but we had not. After that we played with ports.. This is where both myself and my co-worker became infatuated with FreeBSD. No more module dependency hell. we tried installing everything we could and never had issues with packages. Updating packages in ports is about as easy as installing them.

From that day forward myself and my co-worker have used FreeBSD for every server install.

I do however prefer linux as a desktop based os still but i'm in the middle of setting up FreeBSD 5.2 on my laptop to see how it performs..

--pete.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

burgers pretty much summed it up. One thing to keep in mind though is that the BSD's are often very different from each other. I'm particularly fond of FreeBSD as I've used it for several years now. The nice thing about FreeBSD is that it never attempts to be something it's not - a desktop OS; though it can be quite a nice one if you get into it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Kernel compiling in linux is two commands =)

make menuconfig

make bzImage modules modules_install

Anyways, back on topic:

I can't really make a recommendation for FreeBSD, because I've never used it (well, I tried to once a long time ago, but it did not support my network card). Another thing - if you like the ports system from FreeBSD, but Linux is your thing, Gentoo's portage is based on FreeBSD's ports. I *can* make a recommendation on this - Gentoo's portage system absolutely rocks.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

FreeBSD does have issues with some hardware, ussually the odd ball stuff though. But then again what OS doesnt have problems with vendor support?

Gentoo's installation process is not overly friendly in regards to getting a system up and running. With FreeBSD i can have a machine with a barebones FreeBSD install up and running in 20 minutes. Then its just a matter of getting cvsup set up for ports and kernel updates and then we let the compiling begin.

Given, the FreeBSD installer ain't no anaconda but it is similar to the debian installer with the whole ncurses feel.

Kernel, if you have a spare machine or spare disk space i'd suggest installing FreeBSD and giving it a go.

--pete.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm rather sure I was referring to English being capitalized when referring to the study (ie, a class or course). The point being that if you're going to make an unrelated post in a thread by focusing on someone's lack of grammar skills, then you'd better damn well be spot on with yours.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.