BSD User's group?

[Jason Stephenson]

Tom Buskey wrote:

> SMP and journaling file systems.  BSD belives in FFS and doesn't think
> journaling is the way to go.

Yes, but with UFS2 and soft updates one does not need a journaling 
filesystem. Don't ask me for the details right now, I'd have to look it 
up again. :) NOTE: I am NOT a kernel hacker, but I've read Marshall 
McKusick's books on the internals.

FreeBSD does SMP. The implementation used to be better than what Linux 
had at the time, then Linux improved with help from IBM and others. The 
FreeBSD SMP implementation was changed, I believe, for 5.x and possibly 
again for 6.0. I'm not sure on the SMP details, since I haven't touched 
a MP machine with FreeBSD or Linux in about 3 years. It ran FreeBSD 
4.something and Debian GNU/Linux (Sarge? Slink? Potato?) just fine. (We 
built two of them for testing purposes. They had Tyan Tiger motherboards 
and two Athlon processors. IIRC, the Athlons ran at 1.7 GHz each.)

Right now, I'd wager that Linux does SMP better than FreeBSD.

> 
> If you're running on non x386 hardware, OpenBSD and NetBSD will work as well
> on them as on 386en.  Linux tends to focus on the PC with the possible
> exception of PPC.  Yes, they run on other archs, but things will be missing
> or not available.  The 386 vs the sparc vs the alpha vs the PPC version of
> NetBSD/OpenBSD will work mosly the same.

Yes, NetBSD is perhaps the most ported and most portable software on the 
planet. I forget how many architectures they claim to run on at the 
moment, but it is more than any other OS/kernel. I have not used NetBSD 
much except for trying to repair an old Sparc box that had it installed 
at a previous job. The problem ended up being a dying hard disk. (What's 
new, right?)

Currently, I use OpenBSD on my firewall/router, FreeBSD on this 
workstation, my web and email server,  and on my laptop, and I have 1 PC 
that I built for gaming that has Windows XP installed.

It's not too hard to explain why I like the BSDs. I like their 
philosophy of design, and the fact that it is "real" UNIX. I really like 
the ports collection, and if installing from source isn't your thing, 
then packages are also available and usually as easy to install as 
typing "pkg_add -r package_name."

With FreeBSD, I feel that I have more control over what is installed on 
my workstation and how it is configured than I do with most GNU/Linux 
distros.

I have used several GNU/Linux distros, btw. I first started with MkLinux 
on an old Power Mac in 1996. This was based on RedHat 4.2, IIRC. Then, 
in 1999, I built my current workstation and installed the then current 
Slackware 4.0 on it. I upgraded that over the 'Net to Slackware 7.

In 2000, I started working at the University of Kentucky's Engineering 
Computing Services. There, I got some more experience with Red Hat on 
some of the Mechanical Engineering workstations and Debian GNU/Linux on 
some of the application servers in the computing center. I also got my 
first exposure to FreeBSD there as it was used on the file servers and 
mail servers. My immediate "boss," the Senior UNIX Admin., also used 
FreeBSD on his workstation. When I built my workstation for work there, 
I installed FreeBSD, too.

(I should add that we had HP-UX, Solaris, and IRIX workstations as well 
as servers that we also had to look after. It was a very heterogenous 
environment and I learned a lot while there.--My first experience with 
UNIX was on an AIX server while an undergraduate at B.U.)

I came to like FreeBSD, and after just a couple of months, I converted 
my workstation at home to FreeBSD and haven't used any other OS on it since.

I originally installed Red Hat 7.something on my laptop, and upgraded it 
to Red Hat 9 before switching it to FreeBSD last summer.

At my current job with the Merrimack Valley Library Consortium, we have 
a mix of Windows, Solaris, and Red Hat Fedora Core servers that I'm 
responsible for keeping up and running. I actually chose Fedora for this 
environment because 1 server was already running an older Red Hat 
release when I got there, and so the other two guys in computer 
operations were somewhat familiar with it.

(On a side note, has anyone noticed that a system running Fedora Core 4 
feels slower than it did when it was running Red Hat 7.3? I blame 
changes in the kernel options, but haven't delved too deeply into it. 
Namely, it seems to take longer when grepping through files. The 
performance is acceptable for email, though I'm thinking of writing a 
program to convert the password database to the FreeBSD format so I can 
switch the server to FreeBSD.)

Anyway, I see I've not really given much insight into what is so great 
about FreeBSD. This has mostly been a rambling biographry of my 
experience with UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems. I'm sorry for that 
and perhaps I could come and give a talk on the virtues of FreeBSD.--I 
mean to get to many of the meetings at Martha's but somehow never manage 
to get there. I think I've made it to one or two in 2002 and/or 2003, 
but have been remiss in making any recent meetings.

I could (and do) still use GNU/Linux. If I had to pick a distro for my 
personal use, it would likely be Slackware since it comes closest to the 
BSD philosophy of all the distros. Debian would be my second choice, 
since it also features a relatively tight core installation and then 
allows the user to pick and choose what other packages to install from 
an amazingly large set of packages.

Oh, and I recall Martin Ekendahl asking about problems that anyone has 
had with the BSDs. The only thing that comes readily to mind right now 
is that the FreeBSD software for burning CD-Rs on IDE drives, burncd, 
didn't seem to work properly on my workstation after I started using the 
5.x series kernels and core. This seems really odd to me because burncd 
is recompiled when you make world, so I'd expect that it would work 
properly with the 5.x kernels, but it doesn't. So, to use my burner, I 
had to setup ATAPICAM (which is like SCSI emulation in the Linux kernel) 
and use cdrecord for burning. I'm glad that I switched from burncd to 
cdrecord, since cdrecord has more features and works on FreeBSD just as 
it does on GNU/Linux.

Guess I've rambled enough for tonight. If anyone wants more detail on 
what I like about FreeBSD, feel free to ask.