Return to BSD News archive
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.uwa.edu.au!classic.iinet.com.au!news.uoregon.edu!news.sprintlink.net!news.oz.net!news.alt.net!news.u.washington.edu!tzs From: tzs@u.washington.edu (Tim Smith) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Linux or FreeBSD Date: 17 Sep 1995 18:44:23 GMT Organization: University of Washington School of Law, Class of ~'95 Lines: 36 Message-ID: <43hqa7$3rk@nntp5.u.washington.edu> References: <409iah$inf@galaxy.ucr.edu> <41ogs7$jui@park.uvsc.edu> <1995Sep7.221221.28091@state.systems.sa.gov.au> <43dm5r$638@park.uvsc.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: saul5.u.washington.edu NNTP-Posting-User: tzs Terry Lambert <terry@cs.weber.edu> wrote: >I mean I find it hard to believe that Linux has "10 times as many >people" I don't. First, consider non-net sources. Linux seems to be much more widely available. Walk into any reasonable bookstore, and there are Linux books that include Linux on CD-ROM. The closest thing you'll find in most of those stores to any flavor of Berkeley Unix is the 4.4 BSD CD-ROM. Second, what does get out to stores is too out of date to run on many people's systems. I've not been able to find a store that caries anything later than FreeBSD 2.0. Since then, IDE CD-ROM has become the norm on PC hardware, and is not supported in FreeBSD 2.0. Third, Linux used to get along better with DOS. You could try it out using the UMSDOS file system if you had no unpartitioned space on your hard disk. If you did have unpartitioned space, you could add a real Linux partition, but use LOADLIN or BOOTLIN to start Linux, so you didn't have to worry that Linux would mess up your other operating systems. FreeBSD, on the other hand, appeared to want to take over the boot process, and there was no obvious way to load it some other way (e.g., nothing like LOADLIN). I understand that some or all of these issues have been addressed, but given the lag between the latest FreeBSD and what is available in stores, they are probably still real issues for a lot of potential FreeBSD users. Combining all of the above, I'd expect Linux to be overwhelmingly more common among those who are buying CD-ROMs in bookstores or computer stores. I have no idea what the numbers are like for people who obtain their first system from the net rather than from stores. --Tim Smith