Re: [SLUG] FreeBSD vs. Linux

From: Rusty (irisinc@tbi.net)
Date: Thu Nov 22 2001 - 20:10:12 EST


I have run OpenBSD for two years now, primarily for the best firewall I can
find. If you know of who these people are who are forming a BSD usrs group I
would be very interested in knowing where to join.

If you get a chance to check out the man pages on openBSD I think you will be
suprised at the quality of the documentation. Imagine, a man page that you can
understand and that has examples.

Rusty

Greg Schmidt wrote:

> I think he has a point. The most important thing to take away from his
> comments probably come at the end of that page where he says to look at BOTH.
> Both Linux and BSD are good. I'm running both.
>
> As background, the OSes currently powered up and runing on my home hobby LAN
> are:
>
> Win95
> Win98
> WinME
> Win2K Server
> Linux (Mandrake 8.1) - two of these. One was Caldera until a week or so ago.
> Linux (Slackware)
> FreeBSD 4.1-STABLE
>
> I spend most of my time on this Mandrake box. The Slackware box and one of
> the Mandrake boxes are currently headless for a lack of cables for my KVM
> switch. (It's actually just a KV, very old, mice litter my desk, but Xmas is
> coming.) One of the projects I'm considering is to build a NetBSD box and
> run iptables to make a third firewall. (I get three IP addys from
> RoadRunner.)
>
> Though I like BSD and I intend to look into it more, as well as learning more
> about Linux, there are some things to keep in mind. People coming from
> Windows to Linux are usually facing a steep learning curve. Recent
> distributions just keep getting easier, so this is less of an issue than it
> used to be, but it's still there. To me, it seems BSD has a steeper learning
> curve than Linux. Also, Linux seems to be better "supported" than BSD. It's
> not that BSD is not well-documented, it is, but there are more and more
> varied places to get help with and learn about Linux. If there was a BSD
> users group in this area I would go to their meetings and read their local
> mailing list the same as I do for our beloved SLUG, but I haven't found one.
> One is supposed to be forming, but it's not here yet. The BSD documentation
> project does not have the breadth of information that the Linux documentation
> project does. It has a lot of stuff, and it is good stuff, but you can get
> help from more different places with Linux.
>
> Also, in his comparison below he's comparing 4.1-STABLE to the 2.2.16 kernel.
> I wonder if it is much different in the 2.4.x kernels.
>
> On Thursday 22 November 2001 12:06 pm, you wrote:
> > Can anyone comment on this or verify or dispute this? (from:
> > http://movingparts.thelinuxcommunity.org/systems.shtml )
> >
> > <snipped from page>
> > First, FreeBSD does a MUCH better job of handling memory-management than
> > does Linux. What does this mean? I've been running FreeBSD with
> > apache/X/php4/netscape/etc. on my work machine for a month now and I still
> > have half of my RAM
> > free--and my swap partition is only 3% full. Now, on almost
> > exactly the same machine, I have had the same services running on
> > a Linux machine, and my RAM is 75% used up--but I also show having 50% of
> > my swap partition used up.
> >
> > Second, FreeBSD seems to do a much better job of hard drive
> > I/O handling. There is a noticeable difference between my laptop and my
> > friend's laptop (IDENTICAL laptops, mind you) with me running FreeBSD
> > 4.1-STABLE and him running Linux 2.2.16, when it comes to reading/writing
> > large files, or large amounts of small files. </snipped from page>
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> >
> > =====
> > ________________
> >
> > Justin Keyes
> > m9u35@yahoo.com
> > ________________
> >
> > __________________________________________________
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