From owner-freebsd-stable Sun Apr 1 7:52:20 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from klima.physik.uni-mainz.de (klima.Physik.Uni-Mainz.DE [134.93.180.162]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6350037B718 for ; Sun, 1 Apr 2001 07:52:15 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from ohartman@klima.physik.uni-mainz.de) Received: from klima.Physik.Uni-Mainz.DE (klima.Physik.Uni-Mainz.DE [134.93.180.162]) by klima.physik.uni-mainz.de (8.11.3/8.11.3) with ESMTP id f31EqDw06368 for ; Sun, 1 Apr 2001 16:52:14 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from ohartman@klima.physik.uni-mainz.de) Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2001 16:52:13 +0200 (CEST) From: "Hartmann, O." To: Subject: Linux 2.2.18 vs. FreeBSD 4.2-RELEASE Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Dear Sirs. A little stupid story ... Here at my institute for atmospheric research we have to parties: the party of mine for our backbone servers, prefering FreeBSD and those, reading nice papers and watching the nice PR magazines introducing Linux as the best choice for academic research server systems. I can not explain how hard it is to convince others not to use Linux for our main backbone and use instead FreeBSD (our department for nuclear physiscs did this step (Linux -> FreeBSD) and they are really happy now ...). Our computing center offers Linux Suse 7.1 with kernel 2.2.18 at the moment as its favorite choice and my chief got theses days his new computer and due the fact that many Fortran 90 based libraries and compilers are primarily released and offered for Linux he wished to get Linux (he is not very convinced about the FreeBD emulation although many software, inclusive StarOffice he uses every day is under FBSD and Linux emulation without any problems up today ;-)). Well, one of the responsible admins came and tried to install Linux Suse 7.1 on his new machine. A night before I wished to test the hardware and would like to see what FreeBSD will do with the hardware (ABIT BX133 mainboard, 512 MB PC133-Cl3 RAM, 30 GB Fujitsu drive attached to the HPT370 ATA-100/RAID controller, 1GHz Intel PIII CPU, ATI Rage128 with DVI-socket and TFT display, ATAPI-DVD and ATAPI CDROM burner). Within 15 minutes FreeBSD occuppied the machine and a running system has been installed. The CD I installed with was from last year, FBSD 4.2-STABLE (IOS-Image) as dated from 22.11.2000. Same procedure was done on a second, identical machine with one difference, a IOMEGA ZIP 250 drive. Well, I was really surprised due the fact that I expected several problems with new hardware or some problems with the ATA100 controller. A day ahead the came and wished to delete FreeBSD in replacement with Linux Suse 7.1. The result of this day was (it was Friday last week ...): 10:30 am they came and prepared for the installation. 19:00 in the evening they were not ready with installation after several hardware changes, tricks, new kernels and other twaekings ... SuSe Linux 7.1 wasn't able to occuppy this machine although the professionals accused FreeBSD's installation routine to be very user unfriednly and does not support most hardware ... Well, this weekend I slept very good ... 15 minutes compared to more than eight hours of installation ... ;-) Oliver -- MfG O. Hartmann ohartman@klima.physik.uni-mainz.de ---------------------------------------------------------------- IT-Administration des Institut fuer Physik der Atmosphaere (IPA) ---------------------------------------------------------------- Johannes Gutenberg Universitaet Mainz Becherweg 21 55099 Mainz Tel: +496131/3924662 (Maschinensaal) Tel: +496131/3924144 FAX: +496131/3923532 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message