[H-GEN] Unix Flavours
Nikolai Lusan
nikolai at lusan.id.au
Mon Jan 21 21:49:01 EST 2008
On Fri, 2008-01-18 at 08:23 +1000, Sarah Walters wrote:
> I have to agree with Greg, FreeBSD would be a good way to go. Each BSD
> has its own focus. NetBSD, for example, is known for running on just
> about anything. OpenBSD is known for being a very secure distribution
> (and is the parent of OpenSSL/OpenSSH). Both target the server space
> and as far as I know are not really desktop distributions.
"Distribution" is the wrong word. The BSD's are not distributions of the
same operating system, the long ago forked into completely separate
operating systems. The OpenBSD kernel is not the same as the FreeBSD
kernel. And they all have X, Gnome, KDE and many of the applications a
Linux user will be familiar with, both as pre-compiled binary packages
and in the ports tree. If it's not in those places you can always
compile apps by hand.
> FreeBSD, like Linux, targets a broader spectrum of the market. It is
> functional as a desktop machine, though without the extensive
> application support that Linux can boast, and I have also used it as
> an excellent gateway and server. I was very happy with it, and in
> recent years quite a few of OpenBSD's strong points (such as its pf
> firewall) have been incorporated.
FreeBSD also has Linux compatibility libraries allowing you to run Linux
binaries on the FreeBSD kernel. In fact one of the early HUMBUG VP's
used to run FreeBSD on SUN hardware with Linux binaries and mlvwm (Mac
Like Virtual Window Manager - making X look like old MacOS) ... but he
was[/is] into the perverse ;)
There are people on this list who made the choice between Linux and
FreeBSD based on the number of floppies that were required to do the
initial install. And as I like to say *nix is *nix is *nix, I'll just
install the gnus and it's all pretty much the same.
The argument "I don't have unlimited time to waste" is just a cop out.
The only way to tell if something is the right thing for you is to
actually try it out. Virtualisation is a good way of trying things, and
you don't have to do it in a single sitting (infact that is probably the
best way to make a bad decision). I recommend installing some VM's and
playing with the various OS's over a couple of months to decide what you
want to do. Personally I use OpenBSD for firewall/router boxen, pf is a
great tool and makes it easy to do QoS too. I tend to use Debian
GNU/Linux for my server environments - package management is more
advanced on most linux distributions and I find the Debian package
system the best of the lot (and it's a lot easier to build an maintain
custom packages for Debian based systems). Having said that these days I
tend to put in central configuration control with puppet, so the amount
of time spent logged into boxen is minimal.
--
Nikolai Lusan <nikolai at lusan.id.au>
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