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Xref: sserve comp.os.linux.misc:517 comp.os.386bsd.misc:732 Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!constellation!osuunx.ucc.okstate.edu!moe.ksu.ksu.edu!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!xlink.net!math.fu-berlin.de!irz401!uriah!not-for-mail From: j@bonnie.tcd-dresden.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.386bsd.misc Subject: Re: Why would I want LINUX? Date: 22 Aug 1993 21:20:38 +0200 Organization: Textil Computer Design GmbH Dresden, Germany Lines: 35 Message-ID: <258gu6INNlef@bonnie.tcd-dresden.de> References: <55270001@hplvec.LVLD.HP.COM> <24gnu4$skm@nz12.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de> <24m779$b0h@isolar.Tujunga.CA.US> <BDC.93Aug15214130@transit.ai.mit.edu> <24rbb5$t51@hrd769.brooks.af.mil> <24vd7h$frk@horus.mch.sni.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: bonnie.tcd-dresden.de In <24vd7h$frk@horus.mch.sni.de> Martin.Kraemer@mch.sni.de (Martin Kraemer) writes: [for Linux] >Plus there is much more support for "cheap" hardware and for two-or- >more-OS's-on-one-harddisk. Yep, the Linux support for two-or-more-OS's ain't the best. Not that i hate Linux, but i'm still curious why they decided to have this silly off-the-standard booting scheme (LILO). With *BSD using a normal dozz boot scheme (load MBR, and then load the active partition's boot sector), along with one of the fancy boot managers (i'm using os-bs), it works like a charm. You could also boot those silly unices requiring their own partition being marked active. (Another problem of Linux is, they occupy a full dozz partition for swap instead of sub-partitioning their primary one.) Btw., i've been working with my old cheep PC from older dozz times. A 386SX/16 w/ 6 MB of RAM and a bloody old Trident VGA, i even compiled the whole XFree86 under 386BSD (approx. time: 24 hours:-). The really disadvantage of BSD is it's lack of shared libs, thus consu- ming much more disk space. But the original shared libs from Linux didn't convince me either: i saw it at a friend, he quickly felt that his Linux got binary-incompatible to itself. (Since the binaries had to match exactly the shared libs.) Last not least: take out all the `unnecessary' things from the BSD kernel (IP, various file systems, SCSI, Ethernet, SLIP etc. etc.), you'll get a (IMHO much useless) very tiny kernel:-) -- in real life: J"org Wunsch | ) o o | primary: joerg_wunsch@tcd-dresden.de above 1.8 MHz: DL 8 DTL | ) | | private: joerg_wunsch@uriah.sax.de | . * ) == | ``An elephant is a mouse with an operating system.''