[NTLUG:Discuss] Linux vs FreeBSD

[Eric Schnoebelen]

{argh! the mis-information!}

steve writes:
- Leroy Tennison wrote:
- > Heard good things about FreeBSD today, don't know anything about it. How 
- > does it compare/contrast with Linux?  Just looking for a high-level 
- > overview.  Thanks.
- 
- FreeBSD is a kernel - it's a an OpenSourced UNIX derivitive just like
- Linux - so it's similar to - and largely compatible with - Linux.

	No, FreeBSD is a complete system.  _Everything_, kernel,
and userland, comes from a single development group, is
maintained in a single source tree, and is released by a single
group.

	contrast with Linux where the kernel is developed by one
group, the filesystems by another group, ls(1) by a third group,
and a distribution by almost anyone with more time than sense..
:)

- Since a vast percentage of end user applications are identical under
- the two OS's, and if they aren't identical, they are at least mostly
- compatible - and because the windowing systems we use under Linux
- also run under FreeBSD, a typical FreeBSD distro can tend to look
- and feel very similar to a Linux distro - almost to the point of
- being indistinguishable to the end user.

	There is no such thing as a FreeBSD distribution.  There
are just FreeBSD releases. (currently, there are three actively
supported releases: 4.11, 5.4, and -current)

- However, there are deep issues where Linux and BSD differ - the 
- architecture of the two systems are very different internally. They also 
- differ in areas of security, system admin and setup.

	This is true.. Although the Linux distributions also
differ radically in how they do security, system administration
and set up. (compare Slackware against Red Hat; Or Debian
against Fedora, or..)

- There are other BSD flavors out there too.  NetBSD being another
- reasonably popular one - aimed more at being lean and slimmed-down,
- OpenBSD being another whose goals are high security, cryptography,
- etc for the ultra-paranoid.

	True as far as the above goes.

	NetBSD is aimed at being highly portable.  It currently
runs on some 15 processor architectures (and on both
endian-nesses of the mips and sh3 architectures).  From those 15
processor architectures are some 47 hardware platforms that were
supported with the most recent release.  More build out of the
source tree, but were not released.

	OpenBSD goes are high security, and lots of crypto research..
They also port/support to multiple processor architectures to make
sure that bad coding/security practices don't creep into their
code.

- Apple's MacOSX uses the FreeBSD kernel - so the Mac is a FreeBSD
- system.  It appears very different from Linux to the end user
- because Apple uses their own windowing system and sells their own
- line of applications software.

	Actually, MacOS uses an (older) FreeBSd userland, a Mach
3.0 microkernel (with NetBSD's PowerPC VM system), and a OS
"Server" that is based on the old NeXT OS kernel (BSD 4.2) with
lots of new features/support picked up from FreeBSD and NetBSD.

	Here's a site comparing/contrasting (of a sort) the
BSD's with Linux.  

	http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/bsd4linux1.php

	In general, grab a CD (there are "Live" CD for *BSD
too!), boot your machine, and play with BSD!  Who knows, you
might like it!

--
Eric Schnoebelen		eric at cirr.com		http://www.cirr.com
	    Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?