Re: FreeBSD --> Debain: any good reason?
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far way, someone said...
> I'm trying to figure out if there is a good reason to move from
> FreeBSD to Debian Linux, or run both.
I'll make it easy: try both. Use whichever you like the best.
> I have FreeBSD 3.1 installed and I've done some perl web programming,
> running only X-windows, emacs, apache and netscape. I was fine and
> happy.
>
> A Slackware Linux fan at work told me FreeBSD is behind the curve, too
> conservative. Linux has all the latest drivers, etc, -- go with
> Linux.
Debian is _very_ conservative.
> So, I thought I would give Linux a try. First I got lost in which
> distro to go with. I spent a whole bunch of time before I decided on
> Debian. Debian seems to be the most conservative of the bunch, kind
> of the freebsd camp of the Linux world.
>
> As far as graphic card drivers go every one depends on Xfree86 so end
> of story there.
Isn't it nice when the same basic driver can be used on many operating
systems? :)
> As for drivers for my soundblaster live, they are in the experimental
> stage in FreeBSD and in Linux you need a special version of the
> kernel.
You'll need the current 'frozen' (aka potato) distribution of Debian to
make that sound card work. You might need to recompile your kernel,
though. I don't remember if the potato install system installs the sound
drivers.
There are three states to Debian Linux: stable, frozen, unstable. Debian
stable (aka slink) is like sticking with FreeBSD 3.1: you can depend on it
to work 100% (or nearly so). Debian frozen (aka potato) is the beta
release. In many cases you can depend on it nearly as much as stable
:). At work the web server run Debian potato, and it's had 100% uptime
thus far
Debian unstable (aka woody) is the current development branch - it's kinda
like tracking the 5.0-CURRENT FreeBSD tree. Depending on what's happening
to the distribution it's about as stable as the release RedHat 6.2 (from
what I've heard).
> which leads me to ease of installation. FreeBSD is a snap to install.
> I got lost in the Debian installation guide. There's 4 different
> versions of the kernel you can choose from, there's files to pull from
> several different directories, etc.
> I wanted to do a multi-boot system, win98 and Debian. I used partition
> magic to set up these little slivers of partions, 500 MB for /root,
> 100 MB for /tmp, 2 gigs for /var, etc. Partition magic took forever,
> created half of them and gave up.
That's not a fault of Linux - if you were trying to re-partition the disk
for FreeBSD (or NetBSD or OpenBSD) you would have run into the same
problem.
IMO it's much easier to dual-boot when you have more than two hard disks.
> Maybe FreeBSD was easier to install because I gave it its own disk.
> Just make 2 boot floppies, do a network install, and off and running.
Linux _can_ be a 2-floppy install as well. You just need to consider that
there are more disks since there are more drivers available at install
time.
Many times I've wanted to install FreeBSD, but the ethernet card is
unsupported by the install floppies, and there's no CD drive.
Oops, here comes Linux...
> So now I see no really good reason to leave FreeBSD for Linux. Am I
> missing something, besides the license issue?
Nope. You're not missing anything.
PS: I use Linux and FreeBSD (4.1-STABLE), so I feel I'm qualified to
comment kinda authoritatively...
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Phil Brutsche pbrutsch@tux.creighton.edu
"There are two things that are infinite; Human stupidity and the
universe. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstien
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