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BSD vs. Linux (2005)

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Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#61

Post by mjg59 »

teacup50 wrote: post #45
icebraining wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need the portability of Linux coupled with a license that lets you freely redistribute in order to sell an appliance you will be hard pressed to get around NetBSD. It's perfectly legal to sell an appliance with Linux, people do it all the time.

You can't "freely redistribute" it though. You have to comply with the viral decidedly non-freeing provisions.

You can redistribute it as much as you want, providing you permit recipients to do the same thing. Entire industries have found this to be completely reasonable.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#62

Post by lucaspiller »

nixos wrote: post #27
cperciva wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm inclined to agree that there probably aren't any great reasons why you would benefit from FreeBSD rather than Debian, but just to correct one misconception: I don't have GBs of free memory for ZFS In the early days of ZFS it required many GB of memory -- it was developed for Solaris, and designed for servers with lots of memory. But it has improved dramatically since it first came to FreeBSD, and people run it wi…

How much RAM is required these days?

A big user of RAM in ZFS is dedup and compression - which can both be disabled.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#63

Post by 746F7475 »

int_19h wrote: post #58
746F7475 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I hear "BSD" I always think: "if you want to use BSD you have to build a machine for it". This isn't really based on any real world experience, but whenever BSD comes up as a topic only thing that sticks with me is: "it only likes very specific hardware" which makes me very hesitant to ever consider trying it. I've had so many hardware incompatibility problems with Ubuntu, which is suppose to support almost…

Hardware can actually be a mixed bag between BSD and Linux. In my experience (which is several years dated by now), BSDs seemed to do better with various less popular WiFi chipsets.

I remember having trouble with wifi chipsets ~5-6 years ago when smaller netbooks started to hit the scene. I had one of thous, like 8" laptops with brand new ARM chip and 4 hour battery life, for it getting wifi working was hard, but after that I haven't had much trouble with wifi, but maybe I've just been lucky.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#66

Post by rbanffy »

teacup50 wrote: post #45
icebraining wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need the portability of Linux coupled with a license that lets you freely redistribute in order to sell an appliance you will be hard pressed to get around NetBSD. It's perfectly legal to sell an appliance with Linux, people do it all the time.

You can't "freely redistribute" it though. You have to comply with the viral decidedly non-freeing provisions.

The only freedom you give up by using the GPL is the freedom to screw your users over by denying them access to the source code. All you are demanded is to let others enjoy the freedom you enjoy. That, surely, isn't too much to ask.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#67

Post by comex »

teacup50 wrote: post #46
dkarapetyan wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want that separation in a consistent and coherent system. User vs base is artificial. What I care about is the end result the overall system accomplishes and base vs non-base doesn't really factor into that. What does it matter to me if nginx is part of the base system or not? I need a web server. Arbitrarily choosing apache/httpd vs nginx to include as part of the base system is incidental complexity where I…

> User vs base is artificial. No. It's not. If nginx releases an update, do you also need to update your OS? No, because the user dependency graph isn't shared with the base OS. If you update your OS, do you also need to update nginx? No, because there's backwards ABI compatibility. The split is not artificial.

> If you update your OS, do you also need to update nginx? No, because there's backwards ABI compatibility.

Only for minor versions. How is that different from any other package that promises ABI compatibility?

Why are FreeBSD OS components split up at a low granularity, so you can't install the stuff you want without the stuff you don't?

Why are there two separate sets of tools to update them and other packages?

edit: Why separate non-base packages from base packages on the filesystem, but not from each other? If the advantage of separating /usr/local is the ability to copy the non-base configuration/apps without the base stuff, wouldn't it be more useful to be able to copy any given individual package or set of packages? Or if that is possible already (by asking the package manager for a list of files or whatnot), wouldn't that obviate the need to separate base from non-base?

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#68

Post by nixos »

ktRolster wrote: post #60
nixos wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too much. I've got a 700-800 MB system. It's unfortunate, as I'd love to have a versioned FS

Wow, with RAM costing something like $5 a gigabyte these days....do you want us to take up a collection to help you out? I'm not above a little charity, I'll send you a fiver to help you get a real computer!

$5 _a month_ on a VPS. If it's a project that doesn't make money...

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#69

Post by aceperry »

siddhant wrote: post #56
vivin wrote: post #5

I was a long-time FreeBSD user. Started using it in college and continued for a long time. I started using Linux because I had bought myself a new laptop and BSD didn't recognize the wifi card. I continued using FreeBSD at home for a few more years on my webserver before ultimately moving to dreamhost (I just didn't have the time to keep maintaining my own server). I like using Linux, but I still miss the predictabil…

> you know where things are, and where they are supposed to be Does this not depend on the distro you're using?

In Linux, it does.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#70

Post by rbanffy »

PeCaN wrote: post #42
nixos wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too much. I've got a 700-800 MB system. It's unfortunate, as I'd love to have a versioned FS

VMS could run a versioned FS in <128MB of RAM, so there's really nothing conceptually in the way. I bet with dedup off and some tweaking you can get ZFS to run in very little memory.

That's not really an apples to apples comparison. VMS versioning is a completely different thing than ZFS snapshots and copy on write.
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