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From: mju@mudos.pc.cc.cmu.edu (Marc Unangst)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc
Subject: Re: bsd vs linux????
Date: 13 Sep 1993 14:02:53 -0400
Organization: The Programmers' Pit Stop, Pittsburgh, PA
Lines: 51
Message-ID: <272ckr$c7c@mudos.pc.cc.cmu.edu>
References: <26arjt$hkl@news.bu.edu> <1993Sep12.183113.9251@ichtys.rni.sub.org>
NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.pc.cc.cmu.edu
kmw@ichtys.rni.sub.org (Karsten M. Winkovics) writes:
>I was rather disappointed, I had liked the concept of porting a mature OS
>like bsd to the easily available pcs, but bsd/386 just couldn't cut it...
>after 2 months of waiting for the Jolitz' new release I tried Linux, I think
>0.96.6.
I'd like to add my two cents from the other side of the fence. I
started looking at free Unix for the PC about a year ago, and started
with 386BSD 0.1. The original release was unstable, of course, and
I barely had enough disk to apply the patchkit. The fact that I was
running it on a 386SX/20 with 6MB of RAM didn't help much. After
a while, I got frustrated and decided to try Linux. Linux was
smaller, but somewhat less functional. Shortly after I installed
Linux, the DMA controller on the SX/20 motherboard (a non-socketed
part, sadly) died, and I gave up playing around with free Unixes for
a while.
About 4 months ago, I got a 486SLC/25 laptop and became interested
in free Unix for the PC again. I tried Linux for a while, because
of the smaller size. Linux had improved considerably since I first
used it, but what finally turned me off from Linux was the networking
code. The Linux folks have entirely rewritten the TCP/IP code
instead of porting the code from BSD Net-2. As a result, it isn't
nearly as stable, flexible, or rich as the BSD code. The last time
I checked, it didn't support fragmentation, had a serious memory leak
if you tried to run it on a busy network, and the Unix-domain sockets
implementation was lacking. The Linux filesystem is also considerably
less mature than the BSD FFS.
So, I tried NetBSD. NetBSD has been almost everything I wanted --
stable networking, working X11R5, builds much of the freely-available
software easily. The BSD kernel configuration process is also a lot nicer
than the Linux equivalent. On the other hand, NetBSD has a few
drawbacks -- it isn't as POSIX-compliant as Linux is, there's no
DOS emulator, no console multiscreens (not with the distributed
console driver, at least), and many shell scripts don't work unless
you replace /bin/sh with Bash. (Unfortunately other shell scripts
don't work *if* you replace /bin/sh with Bash. Hopefully Bash 1.13
will fix this.) But NetBSD runs smail3 and INN 1.4 and XFree86, which
are the three big things that this machine is used for.
I think Linux and NetBSD are different solutions to different
problems. If stable TCP/IP and a stable filesystem are important
to you, but POSIX-compliance is less of an issue, go with NetBSD.
If you like your OS to have a SysV-ish feel, or if you want things
like the DOS emulator or WABI or iBCS2, go with Linux.
--
Marc Unangst, N8VRH | "Free software is NOT the same thing as
mju@mudos.pc.cc.cmu.edu | free beer."
| -Philip Knapp in comp.os.linux