A couple of quiestions:

As to the Linux binary emulation in BSD: Is this available for all three BSDs, or FreeBSD only?

Is it correct that there are FreeBSD ports for non-i386 platforms available, now?

Regarding heterogeneous networks: When I checked it the last time, SAMBA was only availalbe for Linux, not for BSD. Is this still so?

Thanks

gargamel

thanks everyone for the all the comments. I will defenitely give it a try in one of my old laptops. I would love to install it in my main box where i run Xp and slack but apperantly (if I am right) FreeBSD can be installed only on a primary partition and not on a logical partition. Since i have only one primary partition (XP) and am afraid of using one of those tools that resize your primary partition. How about a LiveCD based on FreeBSD? Have looked around but it seems that there aren't many LiveCDs around. have found only one till now, though that will do.

thanks to everyone

oldi, you are correct iirc about the primary partition. hey great idea....... bye bye xp ;-)

I wish i could do that, delete all the windows partition. But when you have to work a lot with Photoshop, InDesing and Quark its difficult to substitute them with the Linux equivalent. Well one day when all these softwares will work without a problem in Linux or FreeBSD i will be very happy not to use windows at all. Let that day come soon....

As for linux emu on other BSD flavors I am not sure... I would assume Open does as it came be used on almost any computer of any age...

Free has been ported to several diff plats for some time. alpha, amd64, arm, sparc, powerpc, etc etc

Samba not available for FreeBSD??? Strange I have been using the Samba suite for nearly 4 years on BSD http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/ports.cgi...amba&stype=all

SEE http://www.freebsd.org/

Thanks for your answer --- seems my knowledge was rather outdated. For some reason I don't know I feel attracted by NetBSD... Maybe I'll give it try some day...

Regarding SAMBA: Less than a year ago the SAMBA home page said that SAMBA was a file system for Linux and only Linux. Not anything else. And not on arbitrary architectures. So do your really run a SAMBA *server*?

Alex

Yes to Samba
The first original BSD CDs I bought from the FreeBSD mall was Free 4.4. Samba was included in the ports collection then and prior to the 4.4 stable release. If memory serves me samba was a beta to Free at about distro 3.8-3.9. I am not sure of the samba tree so I don't know which flavor of unix it birthed on and to wince it went in what order.
But samba has been ported to BSD for some time now. Samba smb.conf is almost universal across the flavors of unix. This kind of portability is why I like unix flavors, that and the ability to hack the raw code to my will...

YES and GOOD on all you say. Portability sometimes ends, however, when kernel features are regarded. That and the fact that the SAMBA homepage claimed there was no port to anything else made me believe that SAMBA wasn't available for FreeBSD. All the better, if it is!

But this strong support for BSD, especially for FreeBSD brings up a question:

What do BSD users think about Linux distributions like Gentoo, ROCK and Source Mage? And why do you use Slackware instead of them?
I'd really like to hear your reasons.

gargamel

For me Slack started out just as a test.... I had download SuSe iso's, debian iso's and had been toying with "live" linux cd's. I ran across the slack 9.1 distro disk at Microcenter and bought them. Throw together one of my many boxes and installed it, blindly I will add to that.
I had read that slack was BSDish and it indeed is. However it is far more forgiving than BSD. I cannot count the times I have been tweaking BSD and "broke" something finding it nearly impossible to "fix" without takin' several backsteps and starting over. IMO upgrading a <5.# FreeBSD distro is a unholy nightmare as each time I did I ended up "hand" building and installing dozens of broken arrows.
I purchased a Free 5.1 distro and have hopes that it will be better in terms of upgrading and a little bit more forgivin'.
Slack on the other hand upgrades well, usually fixes breaks readily and is more forgivin' to misconfigures till you fix them... Then there is the "canned-vanilla-default" install of slack. Right out of the wrapper and onto a box and away you go. The first BSD distro I have been able to do this with is the 5.1 distro. Slack 9.1 required nothing right out of the box from console - x11 - gnome. This is a good thing as you can fire up all the way to a GUI then top down configure the system and sub-systems at will.
BSD gets you to the console and of course several "vanillas" of certain services then you must build up your system. (note: FreeBSD 5.1 is more like the slack install)
I like the top down approach much better.

Now as far as other Linux GNU OSes I have not sampled any, but Debian is planned for install on the second drive of this box for testing. If I like I will pull the drive and replace it with a clean one then build Debian its' own box and plug him into my PVM cluster. It is my understanding fron reads that Debian is also very unixish and is more inline to server works than workstation. I favor server level OSs as everything I use is a server and is a client to one another.
I looked hard at RedHat as I was planning a move from a BSD "cow" to a PVM/MPI cluster. Reading indicated that any Linux OS was fine for clustering as it is a kernel level thing and cluster wares are not OS specific. So instead of paying high $$$ for a distro of a "open" OS thus I ended with slack.
I ended at this point with a cluster hitting the high 6000 BogoMips (6Gigaflop) speed level and I have not yet even brought all my "naked" boxes into it yet nor have a finished the Dragon main frontend. I have no idea where I will end up as I am seeking a "geek" status on the supercomputer cluster list (fastest, home-based, unique, self-built, private sector supercomputer cluster)
I feel the need, the need for speed...

Thanks! (For your detailed reply, which I find very instructive and fascinating).

Regarding Debian: I'm not a fan of Debian itself, but I like one of its derivatives: Knoppix.
Most of the time I use SuSE or Slackware, which I like both pretty much. In a way it's pure logic: Early SuSE versions were based on Slackware. Therefor I call my installations "S class Linux", although I don't own a car made in Stuttgart/Germany. 8-)
I came to Slackware when I found that recent SuSEs could not be installed on my old laptop (P120 classic). I found no way to install Debian/Knoppix on it, either, as it didn't have a CD-ROM. Slackware solved that problem nicely, and I have learned to love this oldie (which is in fact absolutely up-to-date) and use it now on a second machine. Of all the distros I looked at I still like SuSE and Slackware best. The first one gets you much faster into a productive state thanks to a sophisticated installation and setup mechanism backed by YaST, while the latter has you learn Unix. Both are consequent in what they do and how, both follow their own philosophy in a clean and proper way. While SuSE is far less hassle, Slackware runs on old hardware and has no (potentially buggy) in-house patches of standard software packages. And there are a few most interesting derivatives that can be installed on even older hardware than Slackware itself or offer clone install mechanisms. Examples: VectorLinux, Amigo and SLAX).

But as a result of this thread I want to give one of the BSDs a try, some day (low on time right now).

Thanks for sharing your experience!

gargamel

Moved: This thread is more suitable in *BSD Forums and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

Cool

Routing: Yes, all the BSDs have routing. In fact, the original BSD TCP/IP stack was used as the reference for most modern operating systems, and it was so popular that it swayed the Internet standard from the then slightly preferred OSI to the now completely dominate standard TCP/IP. Most of the original Internet routers were 4.2, 4.3, and 4.4BSD machines (note that's 4.4BSD [as in, from UCBerkeley], not FreeBSD 4.4--FreeBSD came later)

Also, some of the OpenBSD developers have written an outstanding BGP routing daemon that many people consider direct competition to Cisco IOS, and it is much more stable and conformant to RFC standards than any of the Linux-developed routing software.

bgpd is actively being ported to FreeBSD and I believe NetBSD.

Samba: Absolutely, all three major BSDs have it SFAIK. Certainly Free does, a
nd I'm using it on Open as we speak.

Linux binary emulation: Yep. I can't remember if it's built into the FreeBSD default kernel (I *think* it is), but I know for a fact it's built in the GENERIC OpenBSD kernel. All you have to do is change one sysctl variable. It's well documented on the OpenBSD website.

I ran the Linux version of Mozilla on my FreeBSD workstation for about a year and it worked fine. I also ran a Counter-Strike server (Linux binary) on FreeBSD and that worked great. I've heard some people even got hlds (the server software) to run on OpenBSD, too.

One thing I have noticed about the two different communities, is the fact that many Linux communities are warm and welcoming, while the BSD is not as much so. But I actually like it a lot better, people actually read the handbook before asking questions, they read all the faqs, manpages etc. Much less agrivating. When I was browsing the OpenBSD mailing list I got the hint that if you say, "hey guys this is a bug." They respond with, "okay, why didn't you write a patch?" And I've also noted that Theo is a buttwad. What a meanie. Gotta love him though.

i found this:
http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd...bsd4linux1.php
it seemed well written to me
what do you think?

I definitely got the feeling that most openbsd users are expected to be actual coders, fromt the time I tried it. They all are constantly discussing code in programs regarding security.