Return to BSD News archive
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.uwa.edu.au!classic.iinet.com.au!news.uoregon.edu!news.orst.edu!news.cs.indiana.edu!purdue!mozo.cc.purdue.edu!not-for-mail From: bilgerar@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Aaron Bilger) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.questions Subject: Possible (re)convert from Linux - specific questions Date: 8 Sep 1995 14:01:30 -0500 Organization: Purdue University Lines: 50 Message-ID: <42q3ua$f1t@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: mentor.cc.purdue.edu Greetings. I used to use FreeBSD back in version 1.5. Once it went into a non-working state, I felt the need to upgrade anyway, and got the (Walnut Creek, I believe) 2.0 CDROM. After it failed to install, I installed Linux and have been using it since. However, I have been following both OSes, and two particular items make me consider switching back. 1) I now have NCR PCI SCSI2, and almost everything I read indicates that it is better supported and faster under BSD, 2) the improved memory management/cache features now claimed by BSD. If these are indeed advantages, I still have several specific questions that I have not seen addressed in the groups or literature recently. (note: I am not interested in a general comparison/argument about Linux vs. FreeBSD; I know many features of both and have a respect for each at least in certain applications. I would just appreciate answers on these questions) 1) What is the status of Mitsumi proprietary CDROM support? This is why the 2.0 BSD would not install; it read extremely slowly, and got random errors. It took many tries to get small packages to install, and was hopeless to install, say X. Support for this CDROM would have to be at least reliable and hopefully faster to consider BSD. 2) How about the status of FAT write capability? When I started using BSD 1.5, it had FAT read and write capability. Soon, messages came out mentioning corruption using the write capability, and stating that only read should be used on FAT. By 2.0, this was claimed to be fixed. Of course, soon after 2.0 came out, again issues arose about corruption on writing to FAT, so write support was removed. I have not seen this made an issue either way since. Is FAT file-system supported reliably for both reads and writes now? 3) Is there any support, even experimental or read-only, for HPFS or NTFS? 4) Is there any support, even experimental, for striping file-systems across multiple physical drives? Thanks for any answers and clarifications on these questions. If things are generally positive on these points, I'll probably switch back to FreeBSD at 2.1. Farewell- Aaron