Yesterday I installed Free BSD 5.4 into a QEMU virtual machine on my Debian Etch system at home. It was an interesting experience, much quicker than Ubuntu which was the last thing I installed with QEMU.
It boots quite happily, even x.org works perfectly. I'm not sure what to do with it at the moment. BSD feels like Linux and tastes like Linux, but obviously it's not Linux, lots of things are slightly different. Stills it's a lot better than anything from Microsoft.
Re:
ajt on 2005-09-08T19:19:47
You may have a point. Compared with Red Hat Linux/Enterprise, where you do feel that everything is sort of thrown together, I can see the more integrated nature of BSD. Compared with Debian though it's less noticable, Debian's deb/apt technology is pretty good, and a lot of things at the core are also integrated. Even though just about everything else is available as a deb somewhere, much like eveything is available somewhere is ports.
Some aspects seem more secure and sensible, things you would do on a Linux box are already configured the correct way. At the same time it also feels a little antique, more like an AIX or Solaris box. I suppose, BSD is Unix, whereas Linux is a clone - even if it's the "Unix reference" for many big ISVs.
Re:
Aristotle on 2005-09-08T20:16:49
Yep.
BSD is what you get when a bunch of Unix hackers sit down to try to port a Unix system to the PC. Linux is what you get when a bunch of PC hackers sit down and try to write a Unix system for the PC.
An area where the coherence of the codebase is very apparent is man pages. There is no mess on BSD like with typical Linux distributions, with man pages written and maintained by loads of different people with wildly varying comprehensiveness and quality, some missing, many of them referring to GNU Info pages, etc. pp. On BSD systems everything is consistently documented: system calls, library functions, device drivers, device nodes, configuration files – if you thought man pages were a revelation on Linux, wait till you get to BSD.
It’s hard to describe this in full effect, but the BSDs feel much smoother to me than any Linux distro ever did.
Even Debian can’t overcome this, though it does get some of the way there. What I really don’t like is how Debian layers lots of its own special-purpose management mechanisms on top of everything. Finding out about them and then using them consistently is a task unto itself.
Re:
ajt on 2005-09-10T14:21:27
I can see your point regarding man pages.
However comparing the programs that I use of a day to day basis, I must confess a liking to the integration you get with Debian. Things are done the Debian way, which can catch you off guard at first, but once you go with the flow it's very easy to use and get on with.
Once I installed the right userland bits to FreeBSD, I found it very quick for QEUM, and perfectly usable. The ports technology is quite fun, and seems to work quite well.
In the big picture I still prefer Debian - I know it best, but I think I could prefer FreeBSD to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
