Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 11:40:43 -0700 From: Garrett Cooper <youshi10@u.washington.edu> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: What's so compelling about FreeBSD? Message-ID: <4533D22B.2000405@u.washington.edu> In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.0.20061016140214.01938450@totaldiver.net> References: <af8b40ce0610151526h6aba1785mb77eb2a76e69fdfa@mail.gmail.com> <80f4f2b20610151556l18c5adcci4196ab107b6b9907@mail.gmail.com> <4533C553.3040609@schrodinger.com> <7.0.1.0.0.20061016140214.01938450@totaldiver.net>
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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Jeff Palmer wrote: > At 01:45 PM 10/16/2006, Simon Gao wrote: >> I have a few FreeBSD machine from 4.x to 5.x. I have asked people how to >> upgrade them to latest version 6.x cleanly. All I was told is that I >> need to wipe them out and reinstall. However, this is not the case with >> Gentoo Linux. With Gentoo, version release does not matter that much, >> you can always keep your system up to date if you like. Of cause, you >> can also choose staying at a certain version. >> >> Linux supports more devices than FreeBSD, especially new devices. > > Whoever gave you the 'wipe and reinstall' advice for the 5.x to 6.x > migration was insane. > > 4.x to 6.x is a pain, due to major changes in /dev (5.x and later use > devfs, 4.x doesn't) but can still be done. > but the 5.6 to 6.x migration is fairly straight forward with a > buildworld and a couple minor caveats as noticed in UPDATING. > > Jeff > > P.S. while 4.x to 5.x is possible, I'd still personally do a > wipe/reinstall. 5.x to 6.x, I'd build world. No kidding. Only if you want to get rid of obsolete/unused files from previous system / ports should you do this. This is more of a time dependency though and not a version dependency, i.e. if I move from from 4.x (used for 1-2 years), I may consider wiping stuff clean and reinstalling from scratch. But if you've used PCs enough you should have known this from experience. This is sort of a good rule of thumb with all OSes to some extent.. My thoughts... Pro-FBSD: 1. Better kernel and userland 'linking' (is 'cooperation' a better term?), due to better overall dev and planning organization. 2. Better documentation; you can find more properly documented manpages and the documentation-for the most part-is centralized on freebsd.org, which helps a lot. Pro-Linux: 1. More bleeding edge hardware support. 2. In general, better software support due to more devs working on Linux than FBSD (or *BSD in general). Another sidecomment: *BSD tends to be better organized in terms of networking and server configs, but in general Linux tends to be better in the desktop arena, depending on what you're trying to accomplish of course. Besides, all good ideas in either camp eventually equilibrates out to the other camp due to proper collaboration and open-source ideology. The main thing that separates the Linux and *BSD group, apart from organization, is the GNU license (more restrictive to devs and for resale of designed product, perhaps, possibly too idealistic in design) vs the BSD license (better for devs and business folks if they come up with an idea and want to market it or maintain their copyright/idea properly with less restrictions in a given respect). But, you should read the BSD and GNU licenses and compare them for yourself to determine where and how they differ. Hopefully I won't get a lot of flak from the list about my comments :). - -Garrett -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFFM9Ir6CkrZkzMC68RApBHAJ9q0cJNQo3oBZEsNwR9HI5D2I7AtwCfX33B 0lVGmqBF7/vhPTTqTQapHAU= =xGhZ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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