Return to BSD News archive
Xref: sserve comp.os.linux.misc:664 comp.os.386bsd.misc:769 Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.386bsd.misc Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!uunet!mcsun!sun4nl!tedux.hobby.nl!mo.hobby.nl!compi.hobby.nl!muts From: muts@compi.hobby.nl (Peter Mutsaers) Subject: Re: Why would I want LINUX? In-Reply-To: j@bonnie.tcd-dresden.de's message of 22 Aug 1993 21:20:38 +0200 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> <258gu6INNlef@bonnie.tcd-dresden.de> Sender: muts@compi.hobby.nl (Peter Mutsaers) Organization: My unorganized home Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1993 20:40:45 GMT Message-ID: <MUTS.93Aug24214045@compi.hobby.nl> Lines: 46 >> On 22 Aug 1993 21:20:38 +0200, j@bonnie.tcd-dresden.de (J Wunsch) >> said: JW> i hate Linux, but i'm still curious why they decided to have JW> this silly off-the-standard booting scheme (LILO). With *BSD JW> using a normal dozz boot scheme (load MBR, and then load the JW> active partition's boot sector), along with one of the fancy JW> boot managers (i'm using os-bs), it works like a charm. You JW> could also boot those silly unices requiring their LILO is just very flexible; apparently you are not informed about the possibilities of its use. I for example, have a very standard LILO installation, where the original MBR is left untouched, and the active partition is the one where LILO is in the boot sector. Then LILO starts through this, and I can select a number of kernels in this partition, or other operating systems on other partitions. If I don't touch a key, the default /vmlinuz image is loaded. You *can* also overwrite the MBR with LILO, but it is not recommended and not necessary. JW> own partition being marked active. (Another problem of Linux is, JW> they occupy a full dozz partition for swap instead of JW> sub-partitioning their primary one.) You can use swap files, which reside on a normal filesystem. So you don't need a partition for swap. But of course, swap on a raw partition, not bothered by a present filesystem structure, is much more efficient. JW> The really disadvantage of BSD is it's lack of shared libs, thus JW> consu- ming much more disk space. But the original shared libs JW> from Linux didn't convince me either: i saw it at a friend, he JW> quickly felt that his Linux got binary-incompatible to JW> itself. (Since the binaries had to match exactly the shared JW> libs.) Since there are DLL libraries everything stays compatible. I have binaries which run still fine that were compiled months ago, 4 versions of the shared libs back (for a 'normal' operating system that would be equivalent to running binaries that are decades old with todays shared libs :) -- _______________________________________________________________ Peter Mutsaers, Bunnik (Ut), the Netherlands. Disclaimer: This reflects the official opinions of my employer.