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Re: [Sheflug] BSDs

On Thu, 13 Mar 2003, Netsonic wrote:

> Following a message earlier that mentioned BSD again, are there any
> particular recommendations concerning which one is the best/easiest to
> use ?
>
> A few messages Ive caught elsewhere seem to have it down as a very
> secure and reasonably stable system on the whole.
>
> From what Ive seen so far, there is Net, Free and Open.
>
> I wouldnt mind taking a look so long as the learning curve isnt as steep
> as my overdraft....

If you're used to Linux, I doubt you'd find the learning curve that bad.
OpenBSD is renowned for security - everything they put in is audited,
though that doesn't stop some holes appearing.  They're all quite stable
as far as I can tell, and arguably more suited to certain tasks than Linux
is (if you've ever spent much time looking into writing CDs, Joerg
Schilling's comments on the Linux SCSI layer are... informative).  They
each have their own problems.

OpenBSD has rather limited hardware support if you're not using vanilla
x86 (RAID controllers were one major problem area last time I looked)

NetBSD, to my mind, puts things in weird places - /usr/pkg/bin, for
example.  I used to work at a university where many of the Computer
Science staff were NetBSD kernel hackers, so it was their x86 *nix of
choice.  I just couldn't quite figure out their filesystem layout.  NetBSD
runs on more architectures than even Linux.

FreeBSD looks much like any other BSD Unix - it's largely merged with the
commercial BSD/OS, so the filesystem layout is entirely standard.  The
only thing that I had to think about was the ports tree, and how to use
it.  Oh, and if you haven't ever compiled a BSD kernel before, it might
take a little getting used to.  They've got excellent documentation online
at www.freebsd.org, though.  The handbook is especially useful.

If you want to take a look, FreeBSD is probably the easiest to start with,
and I doubt you've find any learning curve problems if you're used to a
reasonable Linux.

Regards

Richard

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