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Xref: sserve comp.os.linux.misc:599 comp.os.386bsd.misc:752 Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!spool.mu.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!ai-lab!life.ai.mit.edu!mycroft From: mycroft@trinity.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Charles Hannum) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.386bsd.misc Subject: Re: Why use linux was Re: Why would I want LINUX? Date: 24 Aug 1993 03:09:42 GMT Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab Lines: 76 Message-ID: <MYCROFT.93Aug23230942@trinity.gnu.ai.mit.edu> 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> <258gu6INNlef@bonnie.tcd-dresden.de> <1993Aug23.124406.856@finbol.toppoint.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: trinity.gnu.ai.mit.edu In-reply-to: jschief@finbol.toppoint.de's message of Mon, 23 Aug 1993 12:44:06 GMT Some serious comments on your comparison; no flames intended. In article <1993Aug23.124406.856@finbol.toppoint.de> jschief@finbol.toppoint.de writes: BSD is quite good, but you need more knowledge of unix/bsd I don't really believe this. Linux also requires a fair amount of Unix-specific knowledge to configure. For the most part, the default installation works (as it does in NetBSD also), but it is not enough to actually run a system well. You need to configure the network, sendmail, getty (for serial ports at least), maybe SLIP and/or PPP, etc., etc. for many people Linux is easier to install, The NetBSD installation process is pretty simple, though it's not what I ultimately want. I rather like the SunOS and Ultrix installations, and a similar installation system is being developed for NetBSD. easier in setup, See above. easier in building new kernels, Meaning it's interactive? BSD in general is much easier to configure after you learn how to read and write config files. And it's pretty straightforward. I config'd a SunOS kernel for the first time without consulting any man pages; I just looked at the existing config files and did the obvious thing. easier to get drivers for exotic hardware and ... It is true that there are some pieces of hardware which Linux drivers but not NetBSD drivers exist for. Fortunately most of them aren't very popular (or perhaps that's why we don't have drivers for them yet), so this is not a major drawback. If I had any of them, I would endeavour to rectify the situation. (Consider that a hint to anyone with more money than me.) faster in development (this includes : find & produce bugs) That's not clear. There is a fundamental difference between Linux and NetBSD in this, however; while Linus and others involved in Linux (Peter MacDonald, the authors of various packages, etc.) are willing to make new releases very frequently, there is little organization. In my experience, very few users actually want to update their systems a few times a month (or for that matter, possibly a new version of some program or other every single day). We (the NetBSD group) endeavour to organize more coherent releases. In particular, we like to make sure everything at least minimally works; SLS releases have often contained non-functional programs. For people who want frequent updates, we have our current source tree available by FTP and SUP. The publicly available sources are updated nightly from our working CVS tree, and usually work a bit better than the releases. (The work doesn't ever stop; we've made many changes even since the 0.9 sources were pretty much frozen.) and easier to get (SLS, MCC, SLA....) NetBSD is not as many FTP sites, but it is certainly not hard to get, for anybody on the net, at least. By the time 1.0 is released, there will be a CD-ROM distribution. One serious advantage of NetBSD for me is that it runs on multiple platforms. I now have a HP 370 (68030-based machine) happily running a complete NetBSD system, and it's actually significantly faster than my 386. There are several other ports in progress, some of which are running. Hopefully we will have a few of them in our common source tree for the 1.0 release.