On 06-Jul-06 Ian bell wrote:
I recently read Cliff Stoll's excellent book 'The Cuckoo's Egg' about tracking early net crackers in the late 80s. It got me thinking about BSD Unix (Stoll was at Berkley using a very early BSD Unix). From what I can gather it was BSD's law suit with AT&T that allowed Torvald's kernel to take the high ground which resulted in Linux being the most popular Unix based OS today.
However, for me, the core of Linux is seriously disparate - endless kernel revisions, each distro with its own patches, file layout, start up scripts, endless dependency issues and so on. So I was very pleased to find this is not the case with the various BSD flavours. In fact I have just installed NetBSD on an old PC. It has a single source code tree that compiles on 57 different platforms which says a lot about the quality of the code. Its pkgsrc app is what gentoo is modeled on apparently and there are over 5000 apps to choose from (nearly as many as Debian).I am seriously tempted to roll it out across my other PCs.
Ian
I have to say that the {Net|Free|...}BSD people I know are solid in their view that this family of Unixoids are the way it should be done, on essentially the grounds that you describe: BSD is BSD and that's that. You know what you're getting. These people include people who have migrated from Linux and do not want to migrate back.
Another reason they like is that the update procedure is sublimely simple: go on line and execute
make world
and there you are (and this can be done overnight if -- as most have these days -- you can enjoy a full-time connection at no extra cost).
And I have to confess that I could have been a BSD person myself, were it not that, when FreeBSD and Linux first came out (at about the same time, 1992), FreeBSD wanted the whole HD to itself, while Linux could co-exist with DOS (an inportant consideration at the time). So Linux was the way I went, for that sole reason at the time.
I've not regretted Linux at all, though have long considered that the kaleidoscope of variants (which are not particularly compatible with each other) is a Bad Thing. But then I'm conservative in these matters. Other may well have the opposite preference, for opposite reasons.
However, it does seem to be true that the range of available software for Linux outstrips what's available for BSD. Though I do wonder to what extent Linux source code can be compiled on BSD -- one may need to install BSD versions of various libraries, for instance, and some libraries may depend too much on the Linux kernel to be compileable on BSD.
Best wishes to all, Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 06-Jul-06 Time: 16:01:50 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------