Date: Mon, 29 May 2000 19:58:05 +0100 (MESZ) From: Rainer M Duffner <Rainer.Duffner@surf24.de> To: Haikal Saadh <wyldephyre2@yahoo.com> Cc: newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Some food for thought...(aka rant of the day) Message-ID: <Marcel-1.46-0529185805-345Zsav@duffner.surf24.de> In-Reply-To: <008001bfc97b$a4064d20$95a093cb@timberwolf>
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On Mon 29 May, Haikal Saadh wrote: > I've just finished a network admininstration unit at Uni, which involved > setting up a unix server. > Over the course of 2 weeks, we learned about a lot of things...samba,X,nfs > and so on. > For better or worse (my vote being for worse), we had to use......Red Hat > Linux!!! You could have hit worse (things like Corel, or SuSE spring to my mind)... > Well, now that I've actually had a chance to play with linux and freebsd, > the conclusion I reach regarding which of the two is better, as far as the > newbie/hobbyist sysadmin is concerned is freebsd hands down. Depends. If you just want to have a trendy dual-boot Win98/Linux box without actually being interested in the things that happen in the background - why bother with FreeBSD's /usr/local/etc/rc when SuSE's yast will do it all for you (if you installed it from the SuSE-CD - god help you if you didn't...). Or do you think that all those millions of CDs that RedHat et.al. shipped last year and will be shipping this year went to a growing, increasingly informed, eager-to-learn user-base like in 1996 or so ? Linux has long-since left that niche. The growing user-influx for FreeBSD, from former Linux-users speaks for itself, as the daily number of posting to linux.setup-newsgroups.... > How on earth is anyone supposed to make heads or tails out of /etc on a > linux box? Depends on what distribution it is. SuSE has almost anything in /etc/rc.config. SuSEConfig parses that each time you run yast and adjusts all other files in /etc. Or mostly all. At least the one you changed manually three weeks ago.... :-) I don't know off-hand for RedHat, but I think they manipulate the original config-files. > What with all those /etc/rcX's and so forth... They represent different run-levels. This is a SysV-concept. BSD only has single-user (boot -s or shutdown now) and the normal multi-user boot, while SysV and Linux add several more to this, to have a finer-grained control over the process). It's not that bad, as it creates a way of consistantly shutting down a system. E.g. larger databases a la Oracle have several processes that need to be shut down in a specific order. At least, that's what I seem to remember. But then, you shouldn't have to reboot an Oracle-Server that often anyway ... ;-) > And I must say that also regarding installing software, ports/packages beat > RPMS anytime. RPMs may come handy when updating binary-only, pay-only software to registered customers. You could still have the update be downloadable by anyone, but only registered customers could use and install it (rpm -U). RedHat are no idiots - they knew from the beginning that this was going to be a critical issue. > I find the ports system way more intuitive than the RPM. On the other hand, the RPM-tool somehow breaks the unix-philosophy that a tool should only do one thing at a time (RPM does lots more, like more-or-less checking system-integrity - but then, what does that all mean in the days of StarOffice5 forking several 50meg processes at once...) > <insert comments praising freebsd here> When I try to compile a kernel on Linux, I often end up with errors during the make-process - despite the fact that I used a GUI to build the config-file that should take care for all dependencies... Also, why does the Linux kernel complain when it is bigger than 570+K ? I mean, my FreeBSD-kernel is 1.5 or so, and I thought that the 640K-limit really got abolished in unix-land some time ago... cheers, Rainer -- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ |Rainer Duffner, E-Mail: duffner@fh-konstanz.de | | & Rainer.Duffner@surf24.de | |Fachhochschule Konstanz, Germany | |"What's a Network ?" - Bill Gates, early 1980s | | WWW:http://www-stud.fh-konstanz.de/~duffner | ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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