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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!newsmaster From: Nathan Hand <Nathan.Hand@anu.edu.au> Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy,comp.unix.bsd.misc Subject: Re: Linux vs BSD Date: Sat, 15 Mar 1997 09:50:31 +1100 Lines: 50 Message-ID: <3329D637.2B611B3F@anu.edu.au> References: <32DFFEAB.7704@usa.net> <slrn5fejrn.353.bet@onyx.interactive.net> <5d7spf$8n6@web.nmti.com> <5d9p55$t1h@news.ox.ac.uk> <5dadfr$cnu@web.nmti.com> <n4stf5.tq2.ln@zen> <E6sIEF.1qE@truffula.sj.ca.us> <3324DD43.7BD4304B@anu.edu.au> <5g6k71$5v9@innocence.interface-business.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: 150.203.148.93 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.0b2 (X11; I; Linux 2.0.18 i586) X-Priority: 3 (Normal) Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.advocacy:88362 comp.unix.bsd.misc:2802 J Wunsch wrote: > > Nathan Hand <Nathan.Hand@anu.edu.au> wrote: > > > When I was dumping ISC I was looking at FreeBSD (maybe NetBSD?) and > > Linux. The FreeBSD installation was 40 x 3.5" floppies and I didn't > > even have a 3.5" drive! > > But it was available on 5.25" as well. We have just dropped the > support for 1.2 MB floppy installations, since almost nobody was still > using it, and the additional space on the boot floppy was required now > (remember, FreeBSD uses a single boot floppy for everything). 1.2 MB > floppy installations have been supported for more than three years. Whoops. Well, at that time internet access was difficult to get, so I was getting this stuff off a local archive (at a government sponsored science organisation: CSIRO). They had local copies of the FreeBSD in 1.44MB files, and local copies of Linux in 1.2MB. I guess I should've realised the local admin hadn't dl'd all of FreeBSD. Oh well, it's all pretty much for muchness. They're both UNIX. > > The Linux distribution was only 10 x 5.25" > > floppies, and that included X. My choice was instantaneous. > > You forget to mention that the major part of these 40 floppies were > for the (optional) source distribution. The bindist was probably > about the same size as Linux by that time. So it seems you didn't > look very closely before you made your decision. Not very. I had limited access to the site (dl to a PC via PCNFS, and no tar or gunzip or uncompress access on the PC). I was going off the filenames, and they didn't make much sense, so I based my decision on how easy it was going to be to get it all on floppies. A very trivial concern, but still an immutable constraint. At the time both were just free unices and so I was expecting another half-arsed attempt like minix. So I wasn't bothering to research both products: I wasnt expecting either would be worth it. How wrong could I have been! Instead of just toying with a minix-like kernel over the weekend, I ended up wiping my commercial UNIX off the hard disk. Anyway, the point of my post wasn't to put down FreeBSD (which I have now played with, and it's on par with Linux in all the most important areas, or would you say Linux is on par with FreeBSD :-). I am trying to show how often a major decision is based on irrelevant information like disk sizes. Packaging makes a helluva lot of difference. -- Open mind for a different view, and nothing else matters.