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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.cs.su.oz.au!metro!metro!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.cis.okstate.edu!newsfeed.ksu.ksu.edu!news.physics.uiowa.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!newsxfer2.itd.umich.edu!agate!nickkral From: nickkral@america.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Nick Kralevich) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Linux vs. FreeBSD ... Date: 11 May 1996 19:04:27 GMT Organization: Electrical Engineering Computer Science Department, University of California at Berkeley Lines: 94 Message-ID: <4n2obr$f51@agate.berkeley.edu> References: <3188C1E2.45AE@onramp.net> <4mr1pk$cdi@dyson.iquest.net> <4n0dhd$cff@agate.berkeley.edu> <3194622D.41C67EA6@Ami-chan.res.cmu.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: america.cs.berkeley.edu In article <3194622D.41C67EA6@Ami-chan.res.cmu.edu>, Yun-Ching (Allen) Lee <yunching@Ami-chan.res.cmu.edu> wrote: >Also, Linux doesn't advise the user to follow safe partitioning >practices, i.e. have separate root and usr partitions. FreeBSD does and >warns the user if the partitions are not set up that way. This is just an installation issue. The RedHat install program does allow you to have and format multiple partitions. It just doesn't warn you that it's a good idea to do so. However, in the Linux Install and Getting Started guide (http://sunsite.unc.edu/mdw/LDP/gs/gs.html) it recommends that you install on multiple partitions (check out section 2.2.3 titled "Linux Partitioning Requirements"). >Once, Linux >crashed on me. I resetted and the superblock of the main partition was >corrupted, and the kernel wouldn't mount the root device at all. I'm not sure what you mean by "resetted". If everything is on one partition, the recommended course of action is to boot up off an emergency floppy that is created during the install. You can also download a generic emergency floppy from ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/Recovery/rescue02.zip . The one time I tried it out, it was excellent, and is somthing that you should keep around if you are running Linux. >I have not found a way to go into >single-user mode at will in Linux. At the LILO boot prompt, type your kernel name then the word "single". For example, if you told the lilo install progam that your kernel was named "linux", then you would type in "linux single". This is documented in the Linux Install and Getting Started guide (http://sunsite.unc.edu/mdw/LDP/gs/gs.html) on >However, I cannot figure out the way to list installed packages with the >"rpm" command line utility! "rpm -qa" (stands for: rpm query all) If you have a specific file, say /bin/echo, and you want to know what package it came from, then you can type "rpm -qf /bin/echo". All this is documented in the RPM-HOWTO which is available on the RedHat WWW site (http://www.redhat.com). >FreeBSD uses .tar.gz files with special >files to describe the packages, and store them in a very logical place >(/var/db/pkg). The problem comes up when you upgrade. With RedHat, it's a simple matter to buy a new CD-ROM and type "upgrade" (literally). Because the RPM format is so flexable, doing this type of upgrade is easy. With FreeBSD, the recommended thing to do is to do a complete reinstall from scratch. There is no feature in FreeBSD to do easy upgrades. (other than downloading the source and doing a "make world", and you better have LOTS of disk space if you want to do that). With Linux, upgrades are as easy as typing "upgrade". (actually, it would be pretty cool for FreeBSD to upgrade to an intelligent packaging system. I did a search for "upgrade" on the FreeBSD WWW site, and you should see all those poor people on the mailing lists who never had their question answred about upgrading. Perhaps FreeBSD could update their distributions to RPM or the Debian package manager instead of their modified .tar.gz format. It would make upgrading as easy for FreeBSD as it is for Linux.) >A merit of FreeBSD's centralized development, it is far easier to obtain >the source to FreeBSD system files than hunting for source code to >programs that came pre-compiled on a system. I'm not sure what your talking about. For preinstalled binaries from a distribution, all you have to do is look in that distributions source directory. For Slackware, that ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/linux/slackware/source/ . For RedHat, check out ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/current/i386/RedHat/SRPMS/ . All the source code you need for all the packages you installed can be found there. >The extent of foreign language support in Red Hat Linux 3.0.3 ends with >Kterm and pre-installed X11 fonts. FreeBSD has a whole packages section >devoted to Japanese programs. Check out the Japanese HOWTO at http://sunsite.unc.edu/mdw/HOWTO/JE-HOWTO.html All of these resources can be found at the Linux Documentation Project home page, http://sunsite.unc.edu/mdw/ , or by following the links from the Linux home site, http://www.linux.org/ Take care, -- Nick Kralevich nickkral@cory.eecs.berkeley.edu