Return to BSD News archive
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!EU.net!sunic!mimuw.edu.pl!news
From: <wgalazka@chem.uw.edu.pl>
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: What is BSDi- summary
Date: Mon, 5 Sep 94 14:03:27 +0100
Organization: Department of Maths and Computer Science, Warsaw University
Lines: 72
Message-ID: <62737.wgalazka@chem.uw.edu.pl>
Reply-To: <wgalazka@chem.uw.edu.pl>
NNTP-Posting-Host: caesar.chem.uw.edu.pl
X-Minuet-Version: Minuet1.0_Beta_16
X-POPMail-Charset: English
Hi all,
One nice day in comp.os.386bsd.questions I asked:
>Hi all,
>What is BSDi? Is it just BSD386 that costs over $1000? But I heard BSDi is a
>freely available Unix system for 386/486? So what?
j@bonnie.tcd-dresden.de (J Wunsch) wrote:
Just in case nobody answered this yet: yes, BSDi is the company selling
BSD/386, and they sell it for ~ $1000.
Though i do not know it myself, every guy speaking up in Usenet about
BSDi liked it. They are said to have a very excellent support, the
average bug fixing is less than one day (if you have email, of
course). I guess it's the only commercial system that comes with
source, for the benefit they can provide source patches, and the
customer simply recompiles the part in question.
Btw., FreeBSDs binaries run on BSDi, even shared executables:-)
(As long as the shared libs have been exported, too - BSDi does not
yet support shared libs.)
I'm not sure how many people would be out there not knowing about BSDi...
(You should know that BSDionce got rather famous since they -- a very
small company -- have been sued by USL, and the legal hassles about a
commercial BSD have been settled some months ago.)
| >(As long as the shared libs have been exported, too - BSDi does not
| >yet support shared libs.)
| You say lack of shared libraries? Hmm, it doesn't sound pretty :(
| But maybe someone fix this in near future ..:)
Hmm, the legal fight might have costed them valuable time which would
have better spent into improving the system. Another reason: they're
trying to make the system rock solid instead of putting every new
feature into it.
Since now both, NetBSD and FreeBSD have shared libs (using the Sun
model), with a from-scratch re-implementation done by Paul Kranenburg,
i assume BSDi would adopt this feature in the near future. But due
to the terms of their settlement with USL, they are urged to complete
their port of a 4.4BSD-Lite based system, so this is certainly the
#1 of their todo list now.
If you need more info, try asking info@bsdi.com, i'm sure they'll
answer your questions.
----
And thrasher@mcs.com (Brendan J. F. Scallon) added that BDSi
has been available by ftp at wcarchive.cdrom.com (Note: because of the lawsuit by
Novell against Berkeley, it will be most of the time busy)
Unfortumately I was unable to connect to this ftp site never but only once
I've seen 43 MB tar & gzipped source code of 4.4 BSD Lite and the connection
hanged :(
Other people (mainly from Polish group PC UN**X) said they found the system
worth interesting as it has nice support and the manuals are well and
clearly written. It is the the only commercial operating UNIX system for
Intels that comes with full source code.
BTW There are 3 discussion groups related to BDSi
alt.os.bsd info.bsdi.users alt.suit.att-bsdi
>> Wojciech Galazka <<
| Wojciech Galazka <wgalazka@chem.uw.edu.pl>
| Computer Center, Chemistry Department, University of Warsaw
| Pasteura 1, 02-093 Warsaw, Poland
->> A happy FreeBSD user <<-