Date: Fri, 19 Nov 1999 18:28:43 -0500 From: Jonathon McKitrick <jcm@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: General thoughts and questions on FreeBSD Message-ID: <3835DD2A.5E9751AE@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org>
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A 'hacker' friend of mine who is quite a Unix guru and who loves Linux
gave FreeBSD a try recently. These were his comments:
I *really* dislike the kernel configuration -- enabling/disabling
features causes the compile to crap out in different areas, so
doing anything fancy becomes a time-intensive trial-and-error
job. Awful. And inflexible too; I was not able to select a
PCMCIA NIC and a normal NIC [yeah, I was just toying around, but
what if I had a docking station?] without the compile
crapping out. And the recommended FP stuff ['use GNU'] caused a
kernel panic when I rebooted.
The docs seem more sparse for BSD --no NAG, so LPG, no SAG-- but
maybe I just never poked around enough. A lot of
FreeBSD is the same as linux, of course, as linux is rather
heavily influenced by the BSD camp and they use many of the same
tools.
I like linux better even thouhg the bsd daemon is cooler ;) Linux
seems more flexible and seems to be a general unix with
enhancements --like vim is to vi-- whereas FreeBSD is quirkly
like the other unixes. For some reason, linux never seemed
to have many 'quirks' to me [relative to other unixes that is] --
everything is straightforward, and the tendency to implement
both SysV and BSD features means it will act however you expect
it to.
Of course I like BSD better than SysV [another factor influencing
by Solaris views], but the SysV init stuff is quite nice....
<end quote>
Any thoughts on his kernel issues? Those seem to be the only ones that
are major issues here. Is FreeBSD 'quirky' ? And what
advantages/disadvantages does FreeBSD kernel configuration have compared
to Linux ?
-jm
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