[techtalk] *nix comparisons

[Susannah D. Rosenberg]

Telsa Gwynne wrote:
> 
> On Sun, Jul 16, 2000 at 09:23:38PM -0700 or thereabouts, Julia Coolman wrote:
> > Kind folks:
>
> One of the *BSD people was explaining the updating process to me
> at LinuxTag. What has long put me off is the same reason I keep
> delaying Debian: you either wait for a new CD or you do big upgrades
> over the net via CVS checkout. I have a titchy modem. Apparently
> this is ameliorated for at least the BSD flavour he was talking
> about (which I forget) by periodic (daily?) deltas being made of
> the CVS differences so you can grab those, which is apparently faster.

but *BSD tends in general to update things like the kernel far less than
Linux; the reasons why come down to design 
philosophy and what the BSD kernels are attempting to do (the initial
4.2 BSD-Lite was basically released to provide the world with a free,
open-source, stable BSD codebase). maybe two releases a year or so (this
is part of why the BSDs tend to be more secure than Linux); other than
that, you really only need to update/download software that you use a
/lot/ or that you care to keep current, and security fixes -- which is
really no different than what you'd be doing on a Linux. there aren't
daily/weekly/monthly kernel releases that you need to keep up with, and
the ports collection works fine for most of the rest. (you can also get
CDs with 'snapshots' of the ports and packages collections on them, if
you really need a certain piece of software).

as someone who's used both *BSD and Linux, i'd say that linux is
actually harder to keep up with if you want a bleeding-edge-current
release. (ie, installing every single new kernel release as it comes
out). cvs-upping can be a pain, but it's a very infrequent pain and not
as bad as downloading new kernels over a titchy modem. :)

> I would think the most immediate UI difference after installation is
> package management: you have the BSD 'make world' versus RH and others'
> rpm, Debian and others' apt-get install and Slack and others' tarballs.

ehhh... i think the ports collection is about as easy to use as apt-get,
if not easier. it's a very similar concept, anyway.

another UI difference is that Linux is sort-of-SysVish and BSD is...
well... BSD. the device names are different (i hate this. SysV does have
much better device names), the way init works is different, the layout
of /etc and /var are quite a bit different -- i'd say the SysV-vs-BSD
problem is about the biggest UI difference, especially if you have to
administate the box. getting over expecting the first ethernet device to
be /dev/eth0 and then finding out it could be something like /dev/cp0 or
/dev/en0 or /dev/ne1k depending on your NIC can be very disconcerting.
ditto fixed and removeable drives.
 
> If you're a "power user" when it comes to the shell, I suppose the
> bash (Linux) and ash (BSD) differences might bite you when you're
> not expecting it. The only clever things in the shell I use are
> ^A/^P etc for line-editing, backticks, and changing window titles
> with escape codes, so I don't worry about that kind of thing too much :)

you can install bash on FreeBSD trivially, as part of a standard
install. :) fairly easily on Open and Net as well. all my *BSD boxen
have bash as the default user shell. :)

i'm suprised no one seems to have brought up Solaris x86. the last time
i gave it a try i decided it was really primitive, but apparently the
recent versions have improved greatly. anyone have any (recent)
experience with it?