BSD Talk

[poofyhairguy]

Before I say anything I want to state that I hope no one gets the temptation to troll in this thread. I want to read the opinions of the knowledgeable Ubuntu Community without challenging any egos.

Now that Debian is going to take on a BSD branch, I have began to wonder about BSD. I once tried the FreeBSD live CD in late 2004- FreeSBIE- but it worked about as well as dirt works in a car engine on my computer. Because the Live CD didn't work, and I have not touched BSD again. Didn't have the hard disk to do more.

But soon I'll get a bigger hard disk which I plan to partition in many ways. I want to give BSD another shot.

My questions are: What are the unique things about BSD? Are the different forms of BSD like distros in Linux? Is there a BSD you like more than others?

Again, please no anti-BSD trolls. If you dislike BSD, you can say why but please do in a mature manner. Thanks in advance.

[TravisNewman]

There are a few BSD flavors, but nowhere near as many as Linux. FreeBSD is my favorite because of the ports system (what Gentoo's portage is based on). NetBSD and OpenBSD are good too from what I've seen. I haven't had as much experience with BSD as I have with Linux, so some things still don't make sense.

I'd also suggest trying out Solaris while you're at it. Solaris and BSD are similar in the way things work, but not identical.

[poofyhairguy]

There are a few BSD flavors, but nowhere near as many as Linux. FreeBSD is my favorite because of the ports system (what Gentoo's portage is based on). NetBSD and OpenBSD are good too from what I've seen. I haven't had as much experience with BSD as I have with Linux, so some things still don't make sense.

So, this FreeBSD has something liek apt-get for software. That is needed by me.

I'd also suggest trying out Solaris while you're at it. Solaris and BSD are similar in the way things work, but not identical.

I will, but it won't get a spot forever.

[TravisNewman]

Basically, from what I remember, you download the ports tree. Say you want to install gaim. You would do something like this.

cd /path/to/ports/tree/internet/gaim
make install

and it would check dependencies and install it.

[poofyhairguy]

Basically, from what I remember, you download the ports tree. Say you want to install gaim. You would do something like this.

cd /path/to/ports/tree/internet/gaim
make install

and it would check dependencies and install it.

Are there binary packages?

[TravisNewman]

that I'm not sure of. Never tried to find out, just used the sources. I can only assume that there are, lots of people won't have the time or patience to use it if there aren't.

[defkewl]

BSD are nice. Each flavor has a focus.

Open focused on security
Free focused on stability
Net focused on multi-platform

I think each BSD has their own kernel none-like Linux.

[kahping]

that I'm not sure of. Never tried to find out, just used the sources. I can only assume that there are, lots of people won't have the time or patience to use it if there aren't.

i can confirm that they do.

instead of 'make install', you just 'pkgsrc <package_name>' and it will check and download dependancies, then install precompiled binaries instead of compile from source.

kahping

[Nob]

nope, in bsd there are no binaries. only source files.
portage tree is same as debian, and you get them from server with pkg_add if i recall...
in that way, you download source file, configure it, compile and install it automatically.

bsd is better than linux coz it has the most stable kernel of them all. supports allmost all hardware [as 2.6 kernel in linux], and has much better stability even of 2.4 kernels on linux
what is complicated is installation.
on first you install base system of about 300mb... fter that you have to compile everything.

so you have to be linux master to get over bsd, i tried it, but i realised that its not the time yet...

so good luck!

[kahping]

really!? from the documentation it sure sounded like there are binaries available to me. of course, if you want the latest versions af packages, most likely binaries aren't available(yet).

o yea, thanks for the correction. i mistakenly said 'pkgsrc <package_name>' when it's supposed to be 'pkg_add <package_name>'. my mistake

kahping