*BSD News Article 91055


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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!newsmaster
From: Nathan Hand <Nathan.Hand@anu.edu.au>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy,comp.unix.bsd.misc
Subject: Re: Linux vs BSD
Date: Sat, 15 Mar 1997 09:50:31 +1100
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J Wunsch wrote:
> 
> Nathan Hand <Nathan.Hand@anu.edu.au> wrote:
> 
> > When I was dumping ISC I was looking at FreeBSD (maybe NetBSD?) and
> > Linux. The FreeBSD installation was 40 x 3.5" floppies and I didn't
> > even have a 3.5" drive!
> 
> But it was available on 5.25" as well.  We have just dropped the
> support for 1.2 MB floppy installations, since almost nobody was still
> using it, and the additional space on the boot floppy was required now
> (remember, FreeBSD uses a single boot floppy for everything).  1.2 MB
> floppy installations have been supported for more than three years.

Whoops. Well, at that time internet access was difficult to get, so I
was getting this stuff off a local archive (at a government sponsored
science organisation: CSIRO). They had local copies of the FreeBSD in
1.44MB files, and local copies of Linux in 1.2MB. I guess I should've
realised the local admin hadn't dl'd all of FreeBSD.

Oh well, it's all pretty much for muchness. They're both UNIX.

> >  The Linux distribution was only 10 x 5.25"
> > floppies, and that included X. My choice was instantaneous.
> 
> You forget to mention that the major part of these 40 floppies were
> for the (optional) source distribution.  The bindist was probably
> about the same size as Linux by that time.  So it seems you didn't
> look very closely before you made your decision.

Not very. I had limited access to the site (dl to a PC via PCNFS, and
no tar or gunzip or uncompress access on the PC). I was going off the
filenames, and they didn't make much sense, so I based my decision on
how easy it was going to be to get it all on floppies. A very trivial
concern, but still an immutable constraint.

At the time both were just free unices and so I was expecting another
half-arsed attempt like minix. So I wasn't bothering to research both
products: I wasnt expecting either would be worth it. How wrong could
I have been! Instead of just toying with a minix-like kernel over the
weekend, I ended up wiping my commercial UNIX off the hard disk.

Anyway, the point of my post wasn't to put down FreeBSD (which I have
now played with, and it's on par with Linux in all the most important
areas, or would you say Linux is on par with FreeBSD :-). I am trying
to show how often a major decision is based on irrelevant information
like disk sizes. Packaging makes a helluva lot of difference.

--
Open mind for a different view, and nothing else matters.