Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2002 11:18:55 -0800 From: Johnson David <djohnson@acuson.com> To: Tim Uckun <tim@diligence.com>, freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: First impressions of freebsd 4.5 Message-ID: <20020214191906.387B637B402@hub.freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20020213225337.00a4b150@mail.diligence.com> References: <20020213145939.GG19456@roman.mobil.cz> <4.2.0.58.20020213225337.00a4b150@mail.diligence.com>
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On Wednesday 13 February 2002 11:23 pm, Tim Uckun wrote: > Hello all. > > I just installed freebsd 4.5. I am migrating from debian. I just wanted to > share my experience. None of this is meant as a question just some ranting. First off, on several mailing lists, including the Debian lists, this would be classified "troll" and you would receive the obligatory "go away" notes. But we're a little more open here. So I won't even mention my horrible experiences with Debian. I think the heart of your problem is that FreeBSD is not Debian. Your rants all seem to say "that's not how Debian does it." No it's not. Get used to it. Different does not mean worse. It just means different. FreeBSD and Debian have two philosophies of how to organize, maintain and operate a Unix-like system. Neither is better or worse than the other. Some tiny parts of one may be worse, but overall they're just different ways of doing things. Get used to it. You're computing knowledge will expand by leaps and bounds if you don't tie yourself to just one outlook. Here's a few examples of why FreeBSD does stuff differently from Debian: 1) Never modify anything the user may already have modified. This includes httpd.conf. Even on an upgrade from one release to the next you have to use mergemaster to finish up with. 2) Follow the File Hierarchy Standard. All packages get installed to /usr/local (or /usr/X11R6) including their configuration files. 3) Use the Source, Luke! Everything from the kernel on up can be built relatively easily from source code. cvsup is your friend. Even the prebuilt binary packages are really just prebuilt ports. Mix and match ports and packages or even stuff built by hand and nothing gets out of sync. 4) The user is always right. Even if he is wrong, he is right. If he wants both Sendmail and Postfix installed at the same time, it's his business. > The KDE seemed to install with the minimum items. No cool transparent > effects, no neat sysadmin tools. Just a gui and nothing else. I was a bit > disapointed but no biggie I don't use X all that much anyway. There was a packaging problem with KDE. Quite serious really. A major miscommunication caused everything but kdelibs and kdebase to be left off the ISO images. Oh well, no use crying over spilt milk. They are sill available through ports or as packages. (I hear there's still a problem with kdegraphics, but it may be fixed by the time you read this). David p.s. Read the man page for ports, pkg_add and check out the portupgrade port. cvsup+portupgrade may be all the apt-get you'll ever need, though "pkg_add -r" comes darned close. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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