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From: mmcg@heraclitus.cs.monash.edu.au (Mike McGaughey)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Some questions about FreeBSD
Date: 11 Jul 1997 01:18:23 GMT
Organization: Monash Uni
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To: destey@sover.net
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[Posted and mailed]
Last Wed, Derek <destey@sover.net> wrote:
> Currently, I am a win95 user. I am also a student. I am thinking of
> installing FreeBSD onto my computer. I have a few questions:
>
> Will it interfere with win95?
Yeah - you'll never want to use win95 again (except for games and such).
> How does it deal with existing msdos/win95 partitions?
Not terribly well, though *everyone* who still has a dos partition
is interested in fixing this (but noone who could do it has enough time).
Small dos partitions are fine - you can use them from FreeBSD (less than
half a gig or so) almost as if they were unix filesystems (modulo short
file names, no permissions, etc).
Larger partitions don't work at all as file systems; bugs in the file system
code mean that your disks can get scribbled on. To transfer files between
large dos partitions and FreeBSD, you can use mtools, which has been ported
from Linux.
> Can I uninstall it?
Yes - just use the partition for something else (you can leave the
FreeBSD boot manager installed, it'll work fine with any other OS's
you put there).
> Is there any way this can mess up my computer?
You might mess up your computer if, eg, you accidentally install FreeBSD
on top of win95. The only remedy for this sort of thing is keeping good
backups.
Assuming you don't do this, and you don't get too adventurous with
mounting your windows partition as a file system, you'll find that
FreeBSD is remarkably well behaved.
> What about linux?
Linux has far better support for msdos file systems; there's also
support for win95 file systems in the latest releases (I have a couple
of red hat 4.2 systems here on my desk which give me win95 long file
names, etc). Also, lilo, procfs, and a bunch of other linux things
are pretty damn cool.
But - I much prefer to administer and use FreeBSD, because the things
that matter to *me* are far better in FreeBSD.
Examples: (45 lines of examples deleted - when I realised I'd written
this many, I realised that I was ranting :)
Try linux. Then try FreeBSD. That way, you won't have to uninstall
linux when you decide to put FreeBSD back :)
Cheers,
Mike.
ps: I like linux - it has lots of nice stuff, lots of really nifty, useful
ideas. But I do all my work, number crunching (language modelling), NFS
serving, etc, on FreeBSD - it works better for those things.
--
Mike McGaughey AARNET: mmcg@cs.monash.edu.au
"Thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest" - Milton.