*BSD News Article 88891


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From: les@MCS.COM (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.linux.advocacy,comp.os.linux.setup,comp.unix.bsd.misc
Subject: Re: Linux vs BSD
Date: 4 Feb 1997 18:01:27 -0600
Organization: /usr/lib/news/organi[sz]ation
Lines: 46
Message-ID: <5d8ikn$801$1@Venus.mcs.net>
References: <32DFFEAB.7704@usa.net> <32F73973.167EB0E7@freebsd.org> <slrn5fejrn.353.bet@onyx.interactive.net> <5d7spf$8n6@web.nmti.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: venus.mcs.com
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.misc:157565 comp.os.linux.advocacy:83362 comp.os.linux.setup:96606 comp.unix.bsd.misc:2446

In article <5d7spf$8n6@web.nmti.com>, Peter da Silva <peter@nmti.com> wrote:
>In article <slrn5fejrn.353.bet@onyx.interactive.net>,
>Bennett Todd <bet@nospam.interactive.net> wrote:
>> >One reason that we have the Linux emulator (and EXT2FS) is to ease the
>> >upgrade to FreeBSD from Linux.
>
>> I've never heard of anybody going that way. Why would they want to?
>
>FreeBSD is a lot more stable and reliable than Linux.

What does 'a lot more stable' mean?  I put Linux on a box last
April or so because I couldn't get the FreeBSD available then
to run the on-board adaptec controller.  The Linux distributions
available then wouldn't either, but I had no trouble finding
boot disk images that worked and the kernel soon included the
driver.  The machine has been running ever since, most of the
time with apache, postgres95 and several custom programs
collecting data from various sources on serial ports. 
Does 'more stable' mean you can't find the updates you need?
What's 'more reliable' than never crashing? 

Something that turned out to be a nice side effect of running
Linux is that my programs that used sysV semantics to control
the serial ports (termio, not termios) compiled with almost
no changes.

>I've been evaluating Red Hat 4.0, so I could run Linux programs on my
>FreeBSD box, but it's been flakey as hell (they REALLY broke the SCSI
>subsystem on the install disk) and I think I'll just use the Linux
>emulator.

I've had trouble with debian on a couple of machines too - they
hang during the probe for the cm206 CDROM.  But you can't condemn
Linux because a particular distribution screws up the install
procedure.  It's not quite the same with freeBSD, since there
wasn't a different package to try when the install failed...

>And I know quite a few people who switched from Linux to FreeBSD. You're
>about the first example of anyone going the other way that I'm aware
>of.

I suspect that anyone switching from a year-old version of either to
the current version of the other would see an improvement.  Either way.

Les Mikesell
  les@mcs.com