Date: Sun, 17 Mar 2002 10:31:51 -0500 From: Scott <scottro@nyc.rr.com> To: Mike Meyer <mwm-dated-1016790998.1dee4e@mired.org>, questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Which Linux for a long-time FreeBSD user? Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20020317102048.00bbb310@pop-server.nyc.rr.com> In-Reply-To: <15508.26709.552773.464882@guru.mired.org>
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At 03:56 2002/03/17 -0600, Mike Meyer wrote: >Hello all, > >No, I'm not going to quit running FreeBSD. However, I want to use the >Linux kernel module from the Gatos project. I may at some point try >and port it into the FreeBSD kernel - especially if someone agrees to >convert the Brooktree driver to provide the same API. However, for >now, I'm going to run it under Linux. > >The question is - which one? Anyone have recommendations for the most >BSD-like Linux distro? I'll need one that I can add the module to, >etc. There is a relatively new Linux out, called Gentoo. The downside is that as it's new (only RC stage) it's still a bit buggy, and not that well documented---one can, however, download their mailing list archive, unzip and then search. (The online search function isn't working yet.) Also, if you decide to download the 16-18 meg ISO and build it all from source, it takes several hours, even with a high speed connection and fast machine--there is a 650 or so meg ISO that has all the binaries already compiled. The upside is that's it's fast, BSD like in many ways, and uses a system called portage, which works quite similarly to ports--it'll check dependencies, etc. etc. You can even do a make world type thing--however, consider that if you do that, it will update EVERYTHING save what isn't specified--that is, if you have X 4.1 it'll download and compile and install X 4.2. There's ways around this though. A few gotchas if, after looking at it, you're interested. The documentation is still quite sparse---when doing the build, you have to make a separate boot partition or it fails because Grub is looking for that separate boot partition --there's a workaround that I don't remember (as I only found out about it after having already made that partition). SSH 3.1---when you add a user (which should be done with adduser -m--otherwise no home directory is created, etc, it doesn't give the user a shell, so you have to manually add a shell in /etc/passwd, or the user won't be able to login. Also, adding a user to the wheel group---there are command line switches for it, but if, as I do, you manually do /etc/group the syntax is weird. In most distros it's (on the wheel line) root, otheruser. In this one it's root ,otheruser (Note the space between root and the comma). Anyway, if you find it worth looking into it's at http://www.gentoo.org HTH Scott Robbins To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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