On Fri, Aug 04, 2000 at 11:26:44PM +0200, Sven Burgener wrote:
> Could anyone using (or having used) Slackware please tell me what's
> (particularly) good about it? -> What particular things made you
> choose Slack?
It was around and (IMO) better than Yggdrasil when I used it. :)
> >From what I've read, it's probably the distro closest to the
> "roll-your-own" type of thing. Correct?
Yes. You know very well what's going on on the system (not that you don't
on Debian, just that slack is a smaller system, takes less into account,
etc. It's a great system, but I wouldn't use it today. Others are welcome
(and expected) to disagree.
> Slack's package format is ".tgz"; correct? Is that a plain tar file, like
> the ending suggests or what?
Not quite. I believe it has some metadata. I could just be attributing the
OpenBSD packaging to Slackware, though... haven't used Slack in a long time.
> Now, whilst we're at it; I'd also like to hear what's special about
> (Net|Free|Open)BSD.
Oh, here's a big topic.
NetBSD focuses on being portable to every 32-bit or better archatecture ever
dreamed of. It pretty much succeeds too. My uVAX][ runs NetBSD, but that's
my only experience with it, so I'll stop now on this one.
FreeBSD tries very hard to be blindingly fast on Intel hardware. It succeeds
in almost every respect. Its disk I/O is absolutely incredible. I use it
on every webserver I set up. As of late, they're also taking security to be
a big concern.
OpenBSD is without a doubt the most securable/secure-by-default UNIX (and
arguably operating system) available. I use it for almost every other
machine I set up (I don't for the machines that have a user sit at them,
though, for that, I use Debian). I love that it emails me with diffs on all
files in /etc every night... that its default firewall is stateful (yeah, no
ip_masq_icq module!) It affords the control you had with Slackware, but
gives you a ports tree (the three mentioned BSDs have a ports tree) which
allows you to install packages with almost as much ease as apt.
> Firstly, what are the differences between them all?
> And, how do they compare to (Debian GNU /) Linux ... and to each other?
>
> Which are free? (Suppose OpenBSD sounds pretty free :)
All three. BSDI makes a BSD-derived UNIX too. Once upon a time, it wasn't
free. I don't know about now. I really haven't paid any attention too it.
> I've never used anything but {Debian GNU,SuSE} / Linux
I haven't used SuSE. Don't think I will as Debian seems to meet all my
needs.
> and AIX.
I'm sorry. :)
-Dan
--
"... the most serious problems in the Internet have been caused by
unenvisaged mechanisms triggered by low-probability events; mere human
malice would never have taken so devious a course!" - RFC 1122 section 1.2.2
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