[Tfug] BSD flavors

[christopher floess]

Not much of a technical opinion here. I only use FreeBSD for my desktop, but
I'm very satisfied with it. It does support just about any hardware that
is supported under linux, and I like the fact that it has
linux binary compatibility. For the most part this helps me with flash
stuff. I just use linux-opera, instead of native freebsd opera, and have no
probs. I've actually grown to hate flash, but what I hate more is going to a
website that insists on telling me I don't have it. That's why I use
linux-opera. As far as Dragon-fly goes, I believe they decided to stick with
the 4.x development branch of freebsd when freebsd decided to go on
to 5.x(they are now on to
6.x). I don't know what that says about dragonfly bsd, but I think it just
means they decided to take a different development route.

I think another thing that bsd advocates see as an advantage, is that
freebsd is a centrally developed os while linux is just
the kernel with an environment built around it, if someone can
elaborate on this better, please do
so, but I think I read somewhere that that translates into a more
dependable environment, though some times it also means freebsd is slower to
add support for new stuff. That's my two cents, hopefully I'm not way off :)

On 3/6/07, Jeremy C. Reed <reed at reedmedia.net> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 6 Mar 2007, Stephen Hooper wrote:
>
> > On 3/6/07, Matthew T. Eskes <meskes at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > From what I've seen, fBSD runs just about on par with what you see in
> > > linux and the nice thing about it, is that it's actually a UNIX. Other
> > > than that, there's a lot of drivers from what I've seen that have been
> > > borrowed from the linux kernel.
>
> Very little should be borrowed from the Linux kernel. FreeBSD has
> different licensing goals and rules which prevent this re-use (in addition
> to that in most cases the code has to be rewritten anyways due to
> different kernel technologies).
>
> > Last time I used it had less support from commercial companies: like
> > NVidia, Dell, RAID manufacturers, etc.
>
> Depends. A lot of my customers use FreeBSD with Dell and various RAID.
>
> It's not in the news yet, but Intel is allowing FreeBSD to distribute some
> firmwares for many Centrino-branded Intel PRO/Wireless devices. (This is
> in the development branch of the FreeBSD source.)
>
> As for Matthew P.'s question about DragonFly: DragonFly has significantly
> fewer developers and due to huge changes in FreeBSD 4.x and FreeBSD 5/6/7,
> some code can't be immediately reused.
>
> DragonFly is an amazing project -- and very leading edge. It does several
> things that FreeBSD doesn't have, such as its Process Checkpointing and
> virtual kernels. One of DragonFly's main goals is to cluster CPU, memory,
> disk and other resources efficiently over a WAN. This work is in progress.
> I can't wait :)
>
>   Jeremy C. Reed
>
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