Krycheck

Well I did wipe out Windows from my laptop and have RH 9.0 on it now. Couldn't be happier. Had some problems with the wireless pcima card not working after a powerloss. Reinstalled and seemed to fix it.

Spungfo: Try Mandrake but I would also give RH 9.0 a try.

__________________

His pants are tight...but his morals are loose!!

SecretMethod70

Definitely recommend Mandrake Linux. But you must understand some things. I don't feel like typing them, so go here: http://tfproject.org/tfp/showthread....&threadid=4170

oblar, that's cool, I can understand wanting to do things yourself. One thing about Gentoo as a server though: yes, "emerge sync && emerge -U world" is cool, but I wouldn't set it to blindly run it every so often. Just like with anything, maybe you don't want the latest upgrade to that one program because it's known to cause problems, or break compatibility with some other program. I'd always recommend "emerge -Up world" (the p is for pretend) so you can see what will be done first, then you can decide if you want to do it.

__________________
Le temps détruit tout

"Musicians are the carriers and communicators of spirit in the most immediate sense." - Kurt Elling

wg2000

I use FreeBSD on all my servers and on my desktop at work.

I was running it on my desktop at home, but switched to Gentoo linux because the NVidia driver doesn't work very will with -CURRENT (and is quite a bit out of date); and vmware doesn't work quite right under Linux emulation.

I picked Gentoo because it's the most BSD-ish out of all the distros I've tried. However, there are still some Linux-isms that annoy me. I'll definitely be switching back to FreeBSD when they iron a few things out, probably around 5.3 or 5.4.

SecretMethod70

Out of curiosity, what are these "Linux-isms" you don't like?

__________________
Le temps détruit tout

"Musicians are the carriers and communicators of spirit in the most immediate sense." - Kurt Elling

wg2000

Most of them are just personal preference, really.

For example, I like that the each of the BSDs are a full tightly-integrated OS. Linux is simply a bunch of installed packages from many different sources. Now, a lot of the BSD "system" source is imported third-party code, gcc for example, but it's been tweaked by the maintainers to function as expected on a BSD system and fit in to a well-defined scheme of what goes where.

Gentoo actually does a pretty good job of doing this, modifying the installation of various software to follow the Gentoo layout. However, there are some exceptions that get dumped on /opt, or /usr/kde3.1 for example. Gentoo also has a very blurred distinction between "system" and "user-installed". In BSD, all base software is installed in /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, and /usr/sbin. User-installed stuff goes either in /usr/local or /usr/X11R6, depending on if it's X-related or not. Again, personal preferences.

Other things I have are minor gripes, such as the fact that Linux has no kernel sound mixer (the kernel developers are morally opposed to the idea or something). So without artsd or esd I can only play one sound at once. Even if I used ALSA, because my sound card is a cheap integrated AC97, there's no hardware mixing so it has the same problem. I run artsd for KDE, so must stuff works, but mplayer lags really bad when playing through artsd, vmware doesn't work at all (artsdsp doesn't work on setuid binaries), and the mozilla flash plugin skips and lags when running through artsd. In BSD it's no problem because I can run artsd for KDE and each of those programs can have its very own virtual /dev/dsp that gets run through a low-latency mixer in the kernel... The BSD audio abstraction is much more flexible so vchans work with any sound driver. With ALSA, every sound driver has to reinvent the wheel or copy a bunch of code verbatim from another driver.

One minor annoyance to me is the amount of junk that gets printed on bootup of Linux systems. Useless debugging information, advertisements (X driver development was sponsored by Y), and just in general very little consistency to how drivers print out information, or how much information they print. My FreeBSD box's dmesg, with only a couple of excepctions, looks like "device0: at 0xAAA irq 15 on pci0". Just the very basic information about what hardware is detected. If I'm debugging a problem, I can boot -v and see heaps of extra information about what's going on, but it doesn't give it to me unless I ask.

I also like the development model of BSD. In FreeBSD (and NetBSD, and OpenBSD), everything is in CVS. You can pull the current source code from CVS and build the entire OS with a couple commands. Changes to it are approved by a group of committers, a group to which anyone who contributes enough can become. The "core" team, who sets the vision and direction of development, is regularly elected from the committers. It's a very democratic system. I have occassinally contributed code and changes, and despite BSD's reputation having even more arrogant users/developers than Linux, have found that most of the developers are actually quite nice people. There's a few assholes here and there who hang out on the mailing lists, but for the most part that's no worse than in the Linux world.

Contrast with the Linux kernel, which is a dictatorship at which Linus is the head. It's his kernel. And while I respect him and think he's a cool guy, if there was ever a major architectural disagreement, the only solution would be for somebody to fork their own verison of the kernel.

For distributions, many are run by corporate interests. Some, such as Debian and Gentoo, are volunteer-based which is good. But there's a lot of them. It's harder to get a company to distribute what you want, so there's lot of fragmentation. It's hard to pick a distro because there's a lot of overlap as far as which one has which features. The three branches of BSD cooperate and swap code quite often. Each has its niche, but there's little to no overlap for the different purposes. Because the process is very democratic, forks are quite rare and only happen under extreme circumstances (Theo's disagreement with NetBSD for one).

EDIT: Added 5/1. One thing I meant to mention in this post but forgot is library version problems. On a FreeBSD system, version 4.5 of the system uses the C library libc.so.4. 3.x uses libc.so.3. And so on. Newer minor revisions of the system may add more functions, but they NEVER change how existing ones work. This guarantees binary compatibility for an entire major version of the OS. If I'm running 5.1, and I install the compat4x and compat3x packages, I can run any programs that were compiled for any version of FreeBSD between 3.0 and 5.x. In the past, glibc (the C library used by most Linux systems), has changed function semantics and broken binary compatibility across minor point releases, leading to what's known as glibc-hell. Things have been better recently, so hopefully if the glibc maintainers get yelled at enough when they break things it won't be as much of a problem in the future . But, on servers especially, I feel better that I know something will work rather than having to hope that it will work.

I don't really care about the whole BSD-vs-GPL license debate so much, so I won't get into it here.

Really, I don't dislike Linux; I just prefer FreeBSD because IMHO it's a better fit to how I want things to work. I'd much rather use a Linux machine than something like the awful Win9x line, and the fact that I like Gentoo enough to run it on my primary desktop should say something

I'll probably edit this post if I think of more later, but for now I'm pretty much tapped out

wg2000

Okay, re-reading my post I bet I'm going to get jumped on for that statement, so let me qualify it a little

To me, Linux feels like just a bunch of installed packages. I know that each distro usually has something of its own besides just what packages are installed by default, like Gentoo has portage, Debian has apt, and Red Hat has automatic updating stuff, but in the end the difference between "System" and "User-installed" tends to blur and it can make maintainance more difficult.

Having built a couple of Linux-from-scratch systems, I can say that I really appreciate how much work it is to sort through all the dependency problems and create a cohesive distribution.