Return to BSD News archive
Received: by minnie.vk1xwt.ampr.org with NNTP id AA2237 ; Mon, 01 Mar 93 10:50:30 EST Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!usc!cs.utexas.edu!geraldo.cc.utexas.edu!slcs.slb.com!ut-emx!tivoli!steveb From: steveb@tivoli.UUCP (Steve Benz) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: BSD or Linux? Message-ID: <11135@tivoli.UUCP> Date: 25 Feb 93 18:47:10 GMT Reply-To: steveb@tivoli.UUCP (Steve Benz) Organization: Tivoli Systems Inc., Austin, TX Lines: 41 Well I finally entered the 32-bit club with a newly purchased 386 box, and I just don't think I can stand it if I don't install either 386BSD or Linux on it. The question is, which one? It's not like I'm the first one to ask this question, but I still haven't seen anybody who asked get an actual answer. Figuring that this is one of those issues where emotions run high & an actual coherant answer is hard to come by anyway, I figured I'd see for myself and install both... I've pretty much decided that Linux is the choice for me, but I'm while I've still got the floppies for both, the decision remains open. Right now, the only thing that BSD has over Unix seems to be that BSD has a complete set of Man pages... I think. (I haven't yet found them. Are they in the src distribution??) Oh, and I kindof like the fact that BSD doesn't change every two jerks like Linux does (i.e. patch level 5 of release .99?? I'm not sure I have time to keep up with that.) Of course that can be both good & bad, but from my standpoint, I rather like the impression of stability the slow rate of fire gives. (Even if it's only an illusion :) As far as Linux having advantages over BSD, I can think of a number of areas: Size (Linux seems to require about half as much space, but I could be exadurating the difference.); installation (in spite of what's been posted, installing BSD from floppies is truly hellish... If anybody who's thinking about improving that aspect of BSD and wants some constructive criticism of the current process, send me mail.); ability to mount MSDOS disks (there must be a utility under BSD to do this, but I'll be darned if I can find it.); virtual consoles (maybe Holger Veit's enhanced console driver has this, but I can't find docs that'll tell me whether that's so or not, and the kernel that I found on agate (under XFree86-1.2) doesn't work on my system.). One final point, Linux seems aimed at being a production-quality OS, where the written intent of 386BSD is to be a testbed for OS research. While I think OS research is a fine thing, I just want a reasonably stable Unix environment to hack application code. Am I being unfair to BSD in my judgements? Is there something I've overlooked? Do I just not know about some serious portability problems in Linux? Or is there some other reason that makes BSD a better choice? - Steve