Date: Tue, 5 Aug 2003 17:26:58 US/Eastern From: csmith@icdc.com To: Valentine Kouznetsov <vk@mail.lepp.cornell.edu>, freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Subject: Re: which version to pick up Message-ID: <200308052128.h75LSrcD006810@ns8.icdc.com>
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Hi I read your post and would like to give you my 2cents for what it's worth. I personally use FreeBSD with my Laptop. I've used it on a number of laptops from a Compaq M700 to a old toshiba 320ct. I've found the drive suport and usb support to do the things that I wanted it to do. most noticeably Play music from my archos hard drive MP3 player and download pics from my digital camera. PCMCIA support has worked well for me for nics I haven't tried any other devices that where PCMCIA because I simply don't own any. you can check if your hardware is supported at www.freebsd.org on the right hand side there is a link to hardware. It will take you to the hardware support page that you will find on the ISO or handbook. If you look currently you'll see 2 links one for 4.8 and one for 5.1 New Technology. 5.1 gives cardbus support I'd give it a try even though it's not considered "stable". I've found the bsd community to be a concervative on the meaning of the word stable so my personal opinion is it's good for day to day personal use. Versions of FreeBSD follow 2 paths either stable or current. I'd suggest staying stable in most server/workstation uses. According to netcraft you can easily measure up time for BSD servers in months and years. Kinda over kill for a laptop. I think that every time I go somewhere and shut it down. :) Yes they are but I don't think they're default while installing. GCC is the same. as it is on your linux system. we lag on versions but that again is the stablity over bleeding edge technology moto that seems in my opition to go with *BSD. It seems to be a system that works over a system that has the latest and greatest bells and whistles. You can complie what you're most familiar with and use that as default on your system. The Family of BSD's are built on differnt ways of thinking. FreeBSD is the first one and the daddy to the others. They are all compatable via a FreeBSD compatablity layer in the other kernels. FreeBSD is very generic in it's goals. and limited in the type of hardware you can run it on. NetBSD runs on everything. If there is a toaster with a cpu then they have a team to make it run NetBSD. Great OS if you're like me and run older hardware. Open BSD is security minded. It comes with the greatest security out of the box. Then they're sub projects that are yet to be as muture as the top 3. There is the Freesbie project that let's you create freebsd live cd's and The new Dragonfly BSD that wants to fork off Freebsd that's just getting started picobsd that puts it on a floppy. Linux has distro's that create the OS. The BSD's don't create distro's. A new project is created and a new kernel is sometimes built. That's my 2 cents I hope it's helpful. Please feel free to correct me if I made any mistakes. > Hi, > I would say that I know nothing about FreeBSD and something about UNIX > and even more about Linux. > I was grown up with Linux. And I don't want any response like: "ah, > you're Linux guy, we'll not talk to you since > BSD is BETTER then Linux". I don't want this discussion. I want to try > FreeBSD and here my questions: > 1) how good/bad support for laptops (in particular pci, pcmcia, usb, acpi) > 2) where to check that my hardware is supported > 3) which version of FreeBSD to choose for desktop/server/laptop > 4) is there any journaling filesystem available on FreeBSD (and I want > it be default while installing FreeBSD) > 5) how different gcc/ld on BSD from Linux (mostly loader) > 6) what the difference between Free/Open/Net and why (give me the real > reasons) should I choose FreeBSD > rather then Open/Net clones. > And don't get me wrong, I'm reading FAQs and Handbook, I just wanna hear > real voice with real > opinion. > > I'll appreciate if you cc me as well since I'm not in a list, hmm yet :) > With all respect to FreeBSD, > Valentine. > > > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-newbies > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-newbies-unsubscribe@freebsd.org" >
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