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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msuinfo!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!uunet!easix!knobel.gun.de!knobel.gun.de!andreas From: andreas@knobel.gun.de (Andreas Klemm) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc Subject: Re: Nailed down to 386bsd or linux, now which one? Date: 9 Oct 1994 10:45:15 GMT Organization: home, 41469 Neuss, Germany Lines: 123 Message-ID: <378hjr$c4@knobel.gun.de> References: <36djkn$nm8@girtab.usc.edu> <jmonroyCx10D8.3yu@netcom.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: knobel.gun.de X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Jesus Monroy Jr (jmonroy@netcom.com) wrote: : Po-Han Lin (plin@girtab.usc.edu) wrote: : : 2) more software available that runs on it : By your comment, I guess you would want the broadest : assorment of software to run on you platform. : Linux wins hands down. However, most Linux applications : fall under *copyleft* legal issues. So, if you plan : to make (or use) your code in a commercial manner, : you may want to investigate that issue with the poeple : at Linux, as they have the best answers. Linux ftp servers in fact store many many programs already compiled for Linux. But there are BSD servers, which carry all the stuff you generally need, too ;-) It's not always an advantage, to have everything precompiled there without having the source handy. I know of some Linux binaries, that were not very well configured in the past (smail, uucp,...). It's due to the fact, that the amount of available binary packages were made on various Linux distributions, which in the past had different ideas about paths / filesystem layout in the OS environment. So you have to be careful as user and as distribution maintainer not only to add the binary package to your distribution / system, because there is a concrete risk, that it doesn't run ok. Me as the author of apsfilter watch it some times, that my package, which is intended for any system, that runs a lpd based print mechanism, doesn't run on a Linux system because some things are broken from one lpd version to another or simply because magic(5) entries are wrong. Thats because of grabbing everything together without testing very well. This never happened between FreeBSD releases from 1.0 on. The reason is, that one source tree is really maintained and bugfixes are fixed for the future ... In Linux that's not always true... Ok, bugs are fixed until a new grabbed version of a program introduces new bugs. Linux means ... always hacking and bug reporting ... the next release brings surely newer software and introduces new bugs ... The user is in most cases the _Beta_ Tester ... : : 3) faster : : : Again, no benchmarks (or stats) are available for : any of the above. Numbers generated depend heavily : on equipment used and application (program) design. How can you say that Jesus ?! Very poorly investigated ! German magazine: iX, 06/94 Review "BSD PC Unix" BSD/386 1.1 in comparison with FreeBSD 1.1gamma. 5 pages. General description and the benchmarks: SSBA, bonnie. The SSBA and the bonnie benchmark show also values of a Linux System, that was installed exactly on the same hardware as the BSD systems. : : 7) platform for programming. : : : Linux, at this time, has the serious lead in documentation. : By my book, even the best tricks are just that, if you : dont' know how to use them. BSD is a standard. So there's a lot of documentation around in a very good quality. Since 4.4 BSD Lite was introduced and Usenix / O'Reilly offer very nice books about 4.4 BSD it's out of question, that BSD docu is available in high quality, too. Manual pages are in general more complete and more up to date than in the rapidely changing Linux environment. : : that the other OS is better. Has anyone actually used both systems? : : I'm running the FreeBSD and 386BSD versions in house. : I run both, because I'm still waiting for 386bsd release 1.0 : Since I need to do X-windows development and TCP/IP testing : at this time FreeBSD is of choice. And I also ran different flavours of Linux as well... To be more informative: 386BSD 0.1, 386BSD with patchkit, SLS, Slackware 1.X-2.X, LST 1.8, FreeBSD 1.1, FreeBSD 1.1.5.1) There were some nice Linux distribs among these. But BSD offers me a stable, fast and well tested working environment. I think that's also true for NetBSD. Ok, there are nice Linux Versions around, too. But I currently prefer BSD for the above mentioned reasons. : Is one system better than the other? : FreeBSD is better only in terms of getting the latest : versions of applications to run on it. In other words, : if I want the latest version of Mosaic to run in house, : I am forced to used FreeBSD because the latest version : of X-windows no longer supports 386bsd release 0.1. Which FreeBSD version do you run ? I hope you speak of 1.1.5.1 ? Then you should perhaps notice other advantages, too.... Nice high speed serial interface, nice networking, nice overall system performance (!), nice X11, nice stability, nice ppp support, nice sound suport, ... it's a nice BSD system ... Well, I don't know NetBSD very well and I'm sure, that their OS has it's strength, too ... I only want to give further informations from another users view ... I don't like Jesus's mis- or uncomplete- informations Cheers Andreas /// -- andreas@knobel.gun.de /\/\___ Wiechers & Partner Datentechnik GmbH Andreas Klemm ___/\/\/ - Support Unix - akl@wup.de -