Re: [TCLUG:9416] BSD and Linux (was MediaOne Roadrunner and Linux)

["Thomas T. Veldhouse" <veldy@visi.com>]

Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote:

>         how difficult is it to port software to *BSD? I suppose in many
> cases it's a bit more than simply recompiling it; but Open Source at least
> gives you that option.

The SCSI system under FreeBSD is totally different.  They have no easy way to
support SCSI over ATAPI emulation.  So, porting those bits is not easy.
cdrecord works fine under FreeBSD, but only for a true SCSI drive.

>         I've heard of people complaining about NFS under Linux; I hear 2.3
> is getting better at it, tho.
>         NFS works just fine for me; but i only have one NFS mount on my
> network. it's about 100 times more reliable than the SMB mount I have to
> deal with. :)

Linux NFS is supposed to be better when the kernel support gets finished (versus
the userland version now used with most distributions).  The original author of
knfsd and the corresponding kernel code was looking for help and not developing
much last I looked.  Coda is supposed to be far superior to NFS anyway.  I have
not tried it though.  It appears to be in pre-release still.

>         what exactly is the ports system?

The port system they have is a nice way to compile your own software without
using your brain.  If I wanted to compile emacs (latest version), I would go to
the directoy (cd /usr/ports/editors/emacs20) and then type "make all install
clean".  This will fetch the source code and any required patches, compile,
install and then clean up after itself.  Really cool.  Excellent tool for
building a system fast (without relying on packages).  It is entirely based upon
various makefiles that include yet more makefiles.  It is all maintained in a
cvs tree, so you can always compile the latest prots.  I have always wanted to
make such a thing for Slackware, but I do not have the time and I don't know
enough about writing makefiles.

>
>         I noticed that there's a nearly-current release of Enlightenment for
> OpenBSD; is that part of the ports system?

OpenBSD has nothing much to do with FreeBSD - certainly not the ports - which
are FreeBSD specific.

>         I really want to learn more about OpenBSD; it looks pretty
> interesting, but I haven't had time to do anything with it.

I would - the BSD systems are where TCP/IP networking was defined.  However, if
you are using a x86 computer, then I would highly recommend FreeBSD, as it is
highly optimized for it - and until this year, was the only platform they
supported.

Tom Veldhouse