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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!foxhound.dsto.gov.au!fang.dsto.gov.au!yoyo.aarnet.edu.au!news.adelaide.edu.au!news.cs.su.oz.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msuinfo!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!decwrl!usenet.coe.montana.edu!bsd.coe.montana.edu!nate From: nate@bsd.coe.montana.edu (Nate Williams) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: Re: Stable *BSD for Intel Date: 11 Mar 1994 18:25:14 GMT Organization: Montana State University, Bozeman MT Lines: 52 Message-ID: <2lqd2a$12e@pdq.coe.montana.edu> References: <2l4r3i$cb6@hq.hq.af.mil> <2l81of$rmp@pdq.coe.montana.edu> <CMGMoA.F03@apollo.hp.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: bsd.coe.montana.edu In article <CMGMoA.F03@apollo.hp.com>, Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld@apollo.hp.com> wrote: >In article <2l81of$rmp@pdq.coe.montana.edu>, >Nate Williams <nate@bsd.coe.montana.edu> wrote: >>FreeBSD 1.1 is more stable than any other public release of *BSD you'll >>find. > >Your claim is somewhat vague, because you don't define "stable" or >"public release". Because of the broad nature of your claim, I have to >assume that you don't count NetBSD-current as a "public release". You are correct in that assumption. Getting NetBSD-current running is non-trivial, and requires that you must at least install NetBSD 0.9 which as you point out is unstable. I'm basing my opinion on the experiences and observations I've made on 386BSD, FreeBSD 1.0, FreeBSD 1.1, NetBSD 0.8, and NetBSD 0.9. (All of the public released code which can be installed by a 'normal' user from scratch. >However, I will make the following assertions, based on my personal >experience with NetBSD; others can draw their own conclusions. > >1) I have no direct experience with FreeBSD; I run NetBSD-current on > the i386 systems I use. >2) In my experience, NetBSD 0.9 is *not* stable on machines with two > IDE drives, because of bugs in the wd.c driver. I did not > experience these problems with either 386bsd 0.1 or NetBSD 0.8. > It may well be quite stable on non-IDE systems. It is also not-stable on many single IDE systems, with disk corruption happening to folks. Again, speaking on NetBSD 0.9. >3) NetBSD-current appears to be quite stable, though until very > recently it still had some lingering bugs in the wd driver which > could result in data loss. Until a 'public' release of NetBSD-current hits the streets it requires that a user install NetBSD 0.9 (which may or may not work depending on their hardware configuration) and that they are ON network and have a good idea what's going on in order to upgrade to NetBSD-current. *I* don't consider this a public release, although the code is publically available. This is similar in nature to 386BSD 0.0, where the code was available but the installation was non-trivial for the average user. Nate -- nate@bsd.coe.montana.edu | FreeBSD core member and all around tech. nate@cs.montana.edu | weenie. work #: (406) 994-4836 | Graduating May '94 with a BS in EE home #: (406) 586-0579 | - looking for work in CS/EE field.