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From: j@bonnie.tcd-dresden.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.386bsd.misc
Subject: Re: Why would I want LINUX?
Date: 22 Aug 1993 21:27:42 +0200
Organization: Textil Computer Design GmbH Dresden, Germany
Lines: 36
Message-ID: <258hbeINNli3@bonnie.tcd-dresden.de>
References: <55270001@hplvec.LVLD.HP.COM> <24gnu4$skm@nz12.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de> <24m779$b0h@isolar.Tujunga.CA.US> <BDC.93Aug15214130@transit.ai.mit.edu> <24rbb5$t51@hrd769.brooks.af.mil> <24vd7h$frk@horus.mch.sni.de>
NNTP-Posting-Host: bonnie.tcd-dresden.de

In <24vd7h$frk@horus.mch.sni.de> Martin.Kraemer@mch.sni.de (Martin Kraemer) writes:
[for Linux]
>Plus there is  much more support for  "cheap" hardware and for  two-or-
>more-OS's-on-one-harddisk.

Yep, the Linux support for two-or-more-OS's ain't the best. Not that
i hate Linux, but i'm still curious why they decided to have this silly
off-the-standard booting scheme (LILO). With *BSD using a normal dozz
boot scheme (load MBR, and then load the active partition's boot sector),
along with one of the fancy boot managers (i'm using os-bs), it works
like a charm. You could also boot those silly unices requiring their
own partition being marked active. (Another problem of Linux is, they
occupy a full dozz partition for swap instead of sub-partitioning their
primary one.)

Btw., i've been working with my old cheep PC from older dozz times.
A 386SX/16 w/ 6 MB of RAM and a bloody old Trident VGA, i even compiled
the whole XFree86 under 386BSD (approx. time: 24 hours:-).

The really disadvantage of BSD is it's lack of shared libs, thus consu-
ming much more disk space. But the original shared libs from Linux didn't
convince me either: i saw it at a friend, he quickly felt that his Linux
got binary-incompatible to itself. (Since the binaries had to match
exactly the shared libs.)

Last not least: take out all the `unnecessary' things from the BSD
kernel (IP, various file systems, SCSI, Ethernet, SLIP etc. etc.),
you'll get a (IMHO much useless) very tiny kernel:-)



-- 
in real life: J"org Wunsch |   )  o o  | primary: joerg_wunsch@tcd-dresden.de
above 1.8 MHz:   DL 8 DTL  |    )  |   | private: joerg_wunsch@uriah.sax.de
                           | . * ) ==  |
          ``An elephant is a mouse with an operating system.''