FreeBSD

*Reclaims forum for Windows*
Har!

 

Never tried BSD personally - is it pretty good then? What's it offer over (say) your favourite flavour of Linux?

 

Hello

This is somewhat off-topic, so forgive me, but I happened across a rather amazing full-color ASCII depiction of the FreeBSD logo the other day. I don't usually go in for that kind of stuff, but this was rather impressive. Anyway, it goes without saying it's no longer around when I actually need it I did however find this, which although a little dull it still rather clever (although probably automated): FreeBSD ASCII Logo.

Kind Regards

 

linux rules all.

never tried *BSD, might give it a go if i ever get one of my old machines working.

 

freeBSD is sweet as, i got it on an old box for tinkering with. :touch:

 

Somewhat along the same lines, has anyone got suggestions for which OS to use on a Web server I'm setting up? I'm contemplating either some form of BSD (Free or Open?) or a Linux distribution, minus X of course. If nothing else presents itself I'll probably go with RedHat 9 due to familiarity, but there is the issue that RedHat will stop supporting that at the end of April...

 

I'm currently using Debian GNU/Linux (stable release) - nice and easy to control what's installed and what isn't, a working network installer(!) and good patch support / response to security alerts..

Phil.

 

Hmmm, I've had a rather nasty experience with Debian in the past - after a week of fighting with it, I had managed to get neither my network nor X working properly. So I thought "Sod it" and went back to Redhat.

Might be worth another look though, especially now that I'm perhaps a little more Linux-savvy than I was then.

 

Hi
FreeBSD is great IMHO - it's so easy to maintain and upgrade unlike some other Unices. Plus you have the option of Linux compatability mode for adding specific Linux related stuff also. FreeBSD, my favourite O/S hands down.
Thanks

 

I`m a FreeBSD fan. My headless P2 333Mhz, 256M ram has been running FreeBSD4.6 for over 2 years (no reason to upgrade) with an uptime of now over 270days. I do all my webdev on it, it serves my ftpz and even dloads torrents for me while I`m at work. Tis da bomb.

I do admit though, that since I hardly ever need to do maintenance on it. I kinda forget how to quickly administate it. If it ever needs rebuilt, it will sadly be replaced with Gentoo which I faff around with a lot more so the knowledge sticks in my head.

 

Even bearing in mind I haven't got a huge amount of experience configuring *nix?

 

If you have little experience then I'd suggest FreeBSD over OpenBSD. Being a more popular distro it has much greater support available. The FreeBSD Handbook is an excellent source for starting out and the ports system is so much more newbie friendly when it comes to installing and upgrading software.

The main BSD distro's can be described thus;

FreeBSD - Most popular, all round general distro.
OpenBSD - Most secure (1 security flaw since its birth)
NetBSD - Most supported hardware (runs on over 30 platforms)
Darwin - MAC OSX without the good bits (ignore)

 

Solaris clearly rules.

 

When run on a 72 processor E15K possibly. The x86 port on a uniprocessor box, nah. It might do when Solaris 10 is released though.

 

Each flavour of *nix has its' own pros, cons and share of fanatics. In my experience:

Solaris - Excellent on Sparc, terrific docs from Sun and very very stable. A bit unproven on Intel though (Although its' fans rave about it). Not as 'complete' as some of the Linux/BSD distros out there. You'll need to do a fair bit of compiling and installing to get all of the software you'll want. Well worth the effort though.

Linux - Stable, huge community of active developers and widely available. Distros can vary a fair bit though. Debian has, by far, the best package management of all the distros. I'd stear clear of Redhat for a while though. They've recently ditched the standard Redhat in favour of Enterprise ($$$) and Fedora. SuSE is the other big distro and is well worth getting hold of. It has been around for nearly as long as Redhat and is very well supported. Get Slackware if you like to get your hands dirty.

BSD - Always seen as being the most secure of all the *nixes. Can seem a bit weird if you're used to Solaris or Linux though. However, once your used to it's layout, it's an excellent *nix. Very fast, secure and stable. Just ask Apple.......

In short, all of the above will run a web server, Apache or Tomcat, with ease on pretty minimal hardware. If you're a beginner, stick with a popular Linux distro as they will do most of the messy installation work for you. Once you get to know what you are doing, try the others.

 

I was "brought up" on SCO UNIX - talk about backing a loser - I still think it was a Microsoft plot!!! Still, sysadmsh rules

FFS, I really must get into linux, especially now it's got all those lovely GUIs and it actually recognises your hardware

 

The dark side indeed. Especially what with their 'let's try and sue anyone who's using Linux' shenanigans.

They are nice. Although you can't help but get the feeling that some distros are, if anything, trying a little too hard with the GUIs.

If you are into your GUIs, take a look at the Ximian desktop project at http://www.ximian.com/products/ . It's the best one out there. It also includes the mighty Evolution e-mail client and their own version of Open Office. I really can't recommend it enough.

 

As others have made mention of Debian GNU/Linux has a great package management system. I've a machine here that's been through 3 releases of Debian without a reinstall, and not a problem. New stable release? Just twiddle a few lines in /etc/apt/sources.list, apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade, and answer the few prompts (necessary for some packages when versions change stuff).
The more advanced user can also munge the config a little to let them use most packages from stable, a few from testing, and if library versions allow even some from unstable. If the library versions are a problem you can probably 'apt-get source foo' and compile it yourself (cd foo && debian/rules binary -> a .deb you can dpkg -i).

Ok, ok, enough Debian evangelising for now .

If Linux had never been I'd likely have ended up a FreeBSD user. NetBSD is fine, but a lot of the code was getting a bit crusty (naff VM and scheduler), when I used it. OpenBSD whilst very secure (but a lot more than 1 vulnerability ) tends to be a bit too bare bones for a lot of applications.

Oh, and if I wanted to compile everything from source (BSD ports system) I'd still be using Slackware . I did used to find it handy to find where to download source from though, to sling something on Linux. But these days I'd probably just check Freshmeat, and failing that Google.

Now, who wants a nice toasty editor discussion ?

-Ath

 

I swore that I would never get into another one of those again. Besides, everyone knows that Vi is where it's at.

 

Well, vim is my preference, dunno if you count that as vi tho.

 

Games are the only reason that Windows is still taking up space on my hard drive. OK, you can emulate them using X-Wine e.t.c. but that just sucks in comparison to running them native.

Yep, Sun have got it right with Solaris/SPARC. It's nice that the company who make the hardware also make the OS. Just seems to make things work.

BSD vs Linux? OMG....

I really think it doesn't come down to much more than personal preference to be perfectly honest. Devotees of both camps can, and often do, argue about it till the cows come home. BSD edges it security wise, Linux is probably better for the more casual user. They're both good at the end of the day.

 

Thanks for the advice Gurnox, I will do. It really is well overdue for me to partition my PC at home and get linux on it. The last distribution I installed was Red Hat 5 (proxy server at work), so it's been a while!

Regarding editors, I agree with above posts. vi clearly owns, even if you need a degree in double escaping to do anything sophisticated with the substitute command. But then vi demonstrates one of the things that still makes Unix superior to Windows - the plethora of built in command line tools that enable you to do everyday tasks with ease.

However, I must admit to having a sneaking penchance for Windows Notepad Oh, and I noticed the other day that Microsoft enabled * in cd in Windows 2000 the other day - the sneaky gits!