Re: Which distro for workstations?
On Tue, May 06, 2008 at 02:31:24PM +0200, Michelle Konzack wrote:
> Hello Douglas,
> I am using NetBSD since ages (longer then Debian) and I can confirm, if
> someone need only a BASIC Workstation, she/he could go with ANY BSD
> derivates but there is only a problem with hardware support which work
> heavyly better in Linux as on any BSD derivates...
>
> And of course, you can get a nice X workstation (including Mozilla) on
> NetBSD for less then 256 MByte CF-Card... which is definitivly not
> possibel in Debian/Ubuntu GNU/Linux.
OpenBSD apparantly has better i386 hardware support than NetBSD.
OpenBSD -current, unlike debian-sid, is never supposed to break (Theo
says that anybody who breaks -current gets beaten severely). -current
is where all the development happens. Devs work on their own boxes
runing -current and when their test procedures are finished, committ it
to -current. -current is a constantly moving target so its very hard
for a non-dev to follow it exactly, and the only reason to is for the
latest-greatest hardware support, e.g. a wireless NIC that came out last
week. For more normal users, there are snapshots made of -current (so
that it doesn't change while you are downloading it) to allow an
install. For mere mortals, or those who don't need the latest hardware,
there's a release made every 6 months.
NetBSD base is very basic but then there's not much difference between
what's in base and what's in pkgsrc from a security perspective. So a
base NetBSD install plus a wm and Mozilla is certainly lean.
OpenBSD provides a fairly complete OS + apps in base, all to the same
high standard of security audit and includes most common server apps
(e.g. apache, ftp, ssh, npt, lpd, sendmail, etc), so the base is a bit
bigger. You could probably take OpenBSD base, add a nicer wm and
Mozilla and fit in 512 MB. The downside at the moment is that they
don't have the human resources to keep all the packages up-to-date re
security updates from upstrem for the -stable release. I think they
have the source ports updated but you have to run the build script on
your own machine. If you want binary fixes, you have to run -current or
a recent -snapshot.
Anyway, I've got debian on my big box, and for the moment its
shoe-horned onto my P-II. Lenny may change this depending on how
resourse-piggish it gets.
Doug.
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