Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
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>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
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




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?Marcel-1.46-0529185805-345Zsav>