*BSD News Article 67041


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From: j@ida.interface-business.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc
Subject: Re: BSDI as host to terminals? and ...
Date: 26 Apr 1996 12:50:29 GMT
Organization: interface business GmbH Dresden
Lines: 49
Message-ID: <4lqgqm$cdp@innocence.interface-business.de>
References: <4lq2i9$82@orb.direct.ca>
Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@interface-business.de (Joerg Wunsch)
NNTP-Posting-Host: ida.interface-business.de
X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6

hossers@Direct.CA (Randy Dufresne) writes:
>Is BSDI suitable as a host for dumb terminals in an office
>enviroment much like most SCO boxes are used?

Most likely.  The mere question is whether you've got the applications
to run that will talk to the dumb terminals.

>Why so many variations of BSD? Lites 4.4 BSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD
>FreeBSD, BSDI and others, What are the major differences?

``Lites'' is something different the 4.4BSD-Lite, it's a Mach BSD
server.

4.4BSD-Lite (or 4.4BSD-Lite2) is the grandfather of all the modern BSD
implementations.  As the name ``Lite'' suggests, it's an incomplete
system, since the people at the University of Berkeley, California had
to rip out all the ``legally encumbered'' parts from the system before
releasing the remainder into the public.  (This are those parts of the
system that were considered to be inherited from the 15-year old
Western Electric UNIX/32V that served as the starting point for the
3BSD development ages ago.  Since their ownership was claimed by
<insert today's owner of the UNIX source code here>, they could not be
released into public.)

Starting with the 4.4BSD-Lite predecessor, the Net-2 release, two
offspring systems have been developing, the commercial BSD/386
(maintained by BSDi), and Bill Jolitz' freeware 386BSD, intended to be
a research operating system.  BSDi continued to maintain a commercial
system (now called BSD/OS), while Jolitz abandoned the development on
386BSD for various (not completely known) reasons.  The result out of
this was that two independent groups of people continued developing a
freeware BSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD, starting by about the same time
both.  Both groups never merged together for various (mainly personal)
resons, but later focused on different goals: NetBSD on a good multi-
platform support, FreeBSD remained on the i[3456]86 platform by now,
but tries to provide an easy-to-install system with improved usability
also for those end-users without Internet access.

OpenBSD started much later as a splitoff from NetBSD, also for
personality reasons.

>Which is most stable?

All of them. :)

-- 
J"org Wunsch					       Unix support engineer
joerg_wunsch@interface-business.de       http://www.interface-business.de/~j