*BSD News Article 18937


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From: osyjm@cs.montana.edu (Jaye Mathisen)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc
Subject: Re: BSD/386 Commercial Product
Date: 27 Jul 1993 20:14:25 GMT
Organization: Computer Science, MSU, Bozeman MT, 59717
Lines: 48
Message-ID: <2342b1$on2@pdq.coe.montana.edu>
References: <1778.2C53F9EF@mechanic.fidonet.org> <23136o$aa6@pdq.coe.montana.edu> <1993Jul27.053721.6646@spcvxb.spc.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: pdq.coe.montana.edu

In article <1993Jul27.053721.6646@spcvxb.spc.edu>,
Terry Kennedy, Operations Mgr. <terry@spcvxb.spc.edu> wrote:
>In article <23136o$aa6@pdq.coe.montana.edu>, osyjm@cs.montana.edu (Jaye Mathisen) writes:
>> In short, if you don't mind being trailing edge, and just want
>> a solid platform to run X, and some TeX, and News, and SLIP, and
>> stuff like that, then it's fine.  And they have excellent technical
>> support people available.
>
>  I wouldn't characterize BSDI as "trailing edge". Development and user

I with to retract my statement about BSD386 being "trailing edge".  It didn't
come out the way I meant.  What I meant was that BSDI is very well suited
to people that want application stability, robustness, good technical
support, and is good enough for those "mission-critical" type apps.  It's
very good at the application level.  What BSD386 1.0 is not, is it's not
well suited for those that want to experiment with what may be the
"latest and greatest".  ie, putting in and removing whole subsytems and
completely rebuilding the system on a semi-regular basis.

Anybody who took this as a "slam" against BSDI were mistaken.  I like it,
I have it, I run it, I just haven't decided if to keep it, given the above.

Actually, in reality, I will probably keep it, and run it on one PC so I kind
of have a "known quantity" out there, and dedicate another machine to 
playing around. Running *bsd.

I guess the people that use BSD386 "seem" to be more interested in doing
things at the   application level, and not ripping apart the guts of the
OS.  And I guess my interests are leaning towards guts, rather than skin.

>interest is less obvious because it isn't done in newsgroups. 

Where is it done at?  I've seen a mailing list, and 1 alt group, and
a group in rain.bsdi-users or somesuch? (What is rain anyway?), but
there doesn't seem to be much chatter about it at all.

>  And, as you point out, the technical support is excellent.

This point can't be stressed enough.  If you the user don't want to mess
around with *why* it works/doesn't work, and you just want it to *work*,
BSD386 is a clear winner.  I think I've sent in 5-6 questions, and all
of those have been answered, (some with diffs), w/in 4-6 hours, and even
some on the weekends.  These guys are great at that.
 
-- 
 Jaye Mathisen, COE Systems Manager                (406) 994-4780
 410 Roberts Hall,Dept. of Computer Science
 Montana State University,Bozeman MT 59717	osyjm@cs.montana.edu