Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 05:37:07 -0800 (PST) From: <unknown@hades.riverstyx.net> To: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Guess we've lost the server market too...? Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.04.9903100514290.9316-100000@hades.riverstyx.net> In-Reply-To: <19990310141119.B68675@bitbox.follo.net>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
I guess I'll toss something in here... I was a Linux guy for quite a while, ran a lot of servers with Linux, got pretty familiar with it... and then I tried FreeBSD. And it was really great, as far as initial installation and getting new software to work on it. The kernel configuration is easy to use, and actually pretty cool the way you can have multiple profiles and stuff. The ports collection is probably the single coolest thing I've ever seen in a distribution. No Linux distro has anything that comes close to comparing to that. On the plus side, it appears to be really nice and stable as a web server or mail server, no problems encountered there. Software installs seamlessly on it, whereas on a Linux server half the time I have to go in and tweak some minor environment variable or some such because every distro's a whole new breed. It was a matter of running 'make install' to go from a console only machine to a fully functional X-windows machine with Enlightenment installed. Unfortunately, it's irritatingly arcane in certain areas, and some parts of it are utterly ridiculous (the partitioning system.. who made that up???). If there were more documentation, and a better directory hierarchy it'd be a whole lot better. Also, if the TCP/IP stack was a whole lot better, and a whole lot more useful, that'd be a big plus. Check out the features that Linux 2.2's got going right now. It's also a lot harder to get FreeBSD to interoperate with other OS'. In Linux, if I bring up a standard distro, it's trivial to mount and work with the filesystems of other OS'. FreeBSD gave me grief about the way I'd partitioned my first drive, and totally corrupted my second ext2 drive. It didn't want to touch my second partition on my first drive because of a missing label problem, and the fdisk program was crippled in usability compared to the partitioning programs that even MS-DOS comes with. Browsing through the kernel source, a good deal of that code is just weird and idiosyncratic. Like that whole 'root/swap/whole disk/other stuff' partitioning scheme that you appear to have to use. The process of making a new filesystem newfs program is painful and unnecessarily complex when compared to the mkfs style programs that Linux comes with. NFS didn't work all that great with my Linux or Solaris NFS servers or clients. In fact, it was totally non-functional with files over 200 bytes talking to a Linux NFS server (with both knfsd and nfsd). It worked great when talking to other FreeBSD servers. Anyhow, that's just my experience so far. I'm not going to run FreeBSD as a workstation again. I'm thinking of using it as a server for some essential services, like DNS and mail, 'coz from what I've heard, it's really quite stable, but that's about it. It doesn't appear to be usable in a really high performance environment for say, web hosting, but again that's a matter of poor documentation and information. Where can I get information like this? It's pretty sparse out there... On Wed, 10 Mar 1999, Eivind Eklund wrote: > On Sat, Mar 06, 1999 at 09:23:31AM -0500, John S. Dyson wrote: > > Pat Lynch said: > > > at this point, I want to step in and mention a phenomenon that seems to be > > > happening everywhere. It happened to me, and its happening to alot of > > > people I know. > > > > > > X installs linux, X likes linux, Y says "Try FreeBSD", Y happens to be > > > somewhat of a "guru" in FreeBSD, X respects Y, X listens, X tries FreeBSD, > > > X *loves* FreeBSD, X starts to get clued and starts spreading the word. > > > > > > I think its this type of "Grassroots" marketing that works very well for > > > us. > > > > Well, that is encouraging... I wonder if that has enough impact to > > effect a critical mass for FreeBSD? > > I'll just note that at least 1/2 of the people I see that start with > FreeBSD has already tried Linux. I'm one of them myself - I started > with Linux, and tested FreeBSD due to recommendations from one of my > friends (now a coworker). Using FreeBSD felt sort of like "coming > home" - the system felt lived in, with most of the sharp edges gone. > So I stayed :-) > > Eivind. > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?Pine.LNX.4.04.9903100514290.9316-100000>