Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2003 09:00:28 +0100 From: Michael Josefsson <mj@isy.liu.se> To: advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: James Hicks <ytwok_karate@hotmail.com> Subject: Re: [Fwd: freebsd curiosity] Message-ID: <950B3814-2471-11D7-9B20-0003939BCCF2@isy.liu.se> In-Reply-To: <3E1E5F82.3020306@u.washington.edu>
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Troll or not, I have sliced in my comments... On Friday, January 10, 2003, at 06:52 AM, paul beard wrote: > forwarded from questions > > -------- Original Message -------- > Subject: freebsd curiosity > Date: Thu, 09 Jan 2003 21:26:10 -0800 > From: James Hicks <ytwok_karate@hotmail.com> > To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG > > To whom it may concern, > My name is James. I'm a junior college graduate with an A.S. degree in > Computer Applications. I took a class in UNIX about a year ago. The os > we > used was Mandrake Linux. I've learned to like Red Hat and have version > 8.0 > on my home machine. I have been doing a lot of reading in magazines > like > pcmagazine and sought info online using sources like the freebsd > homepage, > zdnet, cnet, etc. I'm hearing alot of your UNIX os. I have a few > questions > about the system. First of all, is freebsd a real UNIX? > By that I'm asking whether or not there is real UNIX code in it or is > it a clone just like > linux is? Real? Well some of the code is probably old enough to qualify, but since the legal trouble a the AT&T code has been removed. Does this really matter? It is definately not invented from scratch at a later date, like linux. One thing I like about FreeBSD is that it is conservative in a way. No fancy stuff unless really needed. And only fancy stuff that really works is there. > Second, what type of file system does it use? Does it have a > journaling one like ext3? It uses UFS (the Unix File System) with some later mods due to performance. Do a google for 'softupdates'. Softupdates has been incorporated into the default system since quite some time. It is not a journalling file system, but it makes journalling file systems unnecessary, sort of. > Do UNIX systems require any kind of defrag? Not really. The algorithms for laying out the data on disk are clever enough to minimise fragmentation on the fly. Copying a file makes the system redo the redo the anti-fragging, possibly making the file even less defragged. But I have never bothered. It just works. One percent or two may be fragged but not more than that, in the normal case. > I was told by my UNIX instructor that freebsd had hardware recognition > trouble. Is > this true and if so has it been fixed? Hardware is a really moving target. Yes, I feel (!) that the hardware support may be less than for the average linux. But that is not necessarily a bad thing: The hardware that is supported really is! My feel (again...) is that Linux has more '90%'-ready hardware support, while BSD has '100%'-ready. For normal hardware I have only had problems with newer graphics adapters. And that was several years ago. On the whole I wouldn't quit FreeBSD for not supporting hardware, I'd get the right hardware instead. > I have also read that a lot of sysadmins are nervous of putting > mission critical apps on a enterprise linux > system and prefer to use freebsd. What is the problem that I'm hearing > that linux has? The reason I left linux in the lurch was that FreeBSD 'just worked'. Years on end. I run it on both servers and my desktop, it doesn't fail me. As I have not used linux a lot I can only go by rumours, and the rumours are that FreeBSD takes heavy load better than Linux. Performance may level off at high loads but it keeps on going. Never stop! (Yes I am one pleased sysadm:) > Do you believe the berkeley system to have code that has better > stability than the GNU systems? Since FreeBSD also relies a lot on GNU it would be stupid to say that GNU is bad, it isn't. But the core code of FreeBSD has been tested for over 30 years, and have stood the test of time. There is no way Linux can have had that long debugging time. > I look forward to your reply. Thanks The best you can do is to download and install it. I did that in May 1997 and have never looked at another system since. In fact that was a lie. I have looked at other systems but there is nothing in them that attracts me since my any longer. I write this on an Apple Powerbook. The only system that actually has attracted me since 1997. I have always been an Apple-hater, but this new Mac OSX really is a gem! And since its core relies on BSD-code I also can rely on it:) /Micke > James Hicks > ytwok_karate@hotmail.com > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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