From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Nov 19 15:28:46 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from smtp3.erols.com (smtp3.erols.com [207.172.3.236]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4EF3C1508F for ; Fri, 19 Nov 1999 15:28:39 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from jcm@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org) Received: from dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org (216-164-168-190.s190.tnt1.xcb.nj.dialup.rcn.com [216.164.168.190]) by smtp3.erols.com (8.8.8/8.8.5) with ESMTP id SAA12709 for ; Fri, 19 Nov 1999 18:28:38 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <3835DD2A.5E9751AE@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> Date: Fri, 19 Nov 1999 18:28:43 -0500 From: Jonathon McKitrick X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.51 [en] (X11; I; FreeBSD 3.3-STABLE i386) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: General thoughts and questions on FreeBSD Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG A 'hacker' friend of mine who is quite a Unix guru and who loves Linux gave FreeBSD a try recently. These were his comments: I *really* dislike the kernel configuration -- enabling/disabling features causes the compile to crap out in different areas, so doing anything fancy becomes a time-intensive trial-and-error job. Awful. And inflexible too; I was not able to select a PCMCIA NIC and a normal NIC [yeah, I was just toying around, but what if I had a docking station?] without the compile crapping out. And the recommended FP stuff ['use GNU'] caused a kernel panic when I rebooted. The docs seem more sparse for BSD --no NAG, so LPG, no SAG-- but maybe I just never poked around enough. A lot of FreeBSD is the same as linux, of course, as linux is rather heavily influenced by the BSD camp and they use many of the same tools. I like linux better even thouhg the bsd daemon is cooler ;) Linux seems more flexible and seems to be a general unix with enhancements --like vim is to vi-- whereas FreeBSD is quirkly like the other unixes. For some reason, linux never seemed to have many 'quirks' to me [relative to other unixes that is] -- everything is straightforward, and the tendency to implement both SysV and BSD features means it will act however you expect it to. Of course I like BSD better than SysV [another factor influencing by Solaris views], but the SysV init stuff is quite nice.... Any thoughts on his kernel issues? Those seem to be the only ones that are major issues here. Is FreeBSD 'quirky' ? And what advantages/disadvantages does FreeBSD kernel configuration have compared to Linux ? -jm To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message