Re: NEWBIE: guidence for MS-Windows replacement.

From: Daniel Rudy (dcrudy_at_invalid.pacbell.nospam.net.0123456789)
Date: 10/06/03 

Date: Sun, 05 Oct 2003 22:42:11 GMT

Somewhere around the time of 10/05/2003 11:09, the world stopped and
listened as DG contributed this to humanity:
> I'm evaluating *nix as a replacement for MS-Windows. My criteria is (in
> order of importance):
> 1) Stability
> 2) fewest bugs
> 3) largest set of applications
> 4) ease of maintence
> I've started with FreeBSD (UNIX based) and SuSE (Linux based).
> I'd appreciate any guidence that could save me some time.
>
> thanks for the help,
> DG
>
>

Well, I've used both FreeBSD and Linux, and I made my choice a long time
ago. As a FreeBSD advocate, my argument is biased, so just keep that in
mind. :-)

1. Stability. FreeBSD is highly stable. Most system crashes that I've
had were hardware related, or something stupid that I did. Even when
the power goes out and the systems were running, on the reboot, most
disk errors are recovered automaticly. I have soft updates turned on,
so that's probably why. But, for what it's worth, there are FreeBSD
machines out there that have uptimes measured in *YEARS*. Uptime is the
time between reboots. A reboot can happen for any reason. The current
production release of FreeBSD is 4.8, and 4.9 is comming out soon. Stay
away from the 5.x until around 5.2 or 5.3 as the 5.x is currently in
development. The current 5.x release is 5.1.

2. Fewest Bugs. It is very rare that I run into bugs or problems in
FreeBSD. Most of my questions have to do with how to do something.
I've used Linux, and I've had some issues with it. Seems most of the
Linux community hack their software together, so there may be a number
of bugs and security holes in not only the the base system, but many of
the applications as well. All Linux really is is just a kernel. The
userland is GNU which is controlled by the Free Software Foundation.
Linux is piecemail in which you have to go to different sources to get
all of the software that you need. There are distributions that come
with everything that you need though. But, they are not all that
compatibile with each other.

2.5. Another aspect of Linux is that there are over 200 plus
distributions of Linux, each one with their own philosiphy on how to do
things, which supports the piecemail argument above. Some of the more
popular ones are SuSE, Redhat, Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, Caldera (SCO),
Mandrake, and others. One very recent one was put together by the
Chinese government is called Red Dragon Linux. The problem with this is
that the Liunx base is becoming fractured, with different distro vendors
doing things differently. So software that was compiled under one
distro, may not work correctly on a different distro. There are
movements withing the Linux community to rectify this, one of which is
called UnitedLinux.

As for *BSD, there are currently only 5 flavors, depending on what you
want to do. MacOS X for the Apple Macintosh is based on FreeBSD.
There is OpenBSD which is the most secure OS that you can get. (It
probably has an NSA certification by now.) There is NetBSD which has
been ported to anything with a CPU. It supports over 50 platforms.
Then there is BSD/OS which is the commercial version of BSD.
Unfortunately, Wind River Systems, who currently owns it, has announced
that they will be discontinuing it. Finally, there is FreeBSD which is
optimized for performance on IA32, IA64, Alpha, PC98, and UltraSPARC
architectures.

3. Applications. FreeBSD has over 9000 ported applications that can be
loaded onto the machine by either binary packages or download the
sourcecode and compiling. Furthermore, using ABI (Alternate Binary
Interface), you can run most Linux native binaries directly, as well as
SVR4 (Sun X86) and IBNSC2 (SCO) binaries. There is also WINE, which is
a Windows Emulator for running MS Windows apps. The one thing, that I'm
aware of, that Linux can do that FreeBSD cannot do is V86 mode. This
doesn't matter too much unless you are going to run MS-DOS applications.
 Different Linux distros add software in different ways. Redhat has
something called an RPM. SuSE has something similar. The one that uses
something akin to FreeBSD's ports collection is Gentoo.

4. Maintenance. Any OS that you use is going to require maintenance of
some sort. Some more than others. Most *nix style OSs require very
little maintenance while the stuff from "The M Corporation" requires a
full IT staff to properly maintain it, given all the bug fixes and
security holes that they have. I didn't run Linux long enough to know
about its maintenance characteristics, but running FreeBSD, you set it
and forget it. You will need to log in as root from time to time to
checkup on the system and to read the system generated emails from the
nightly runs, but for the most part it is pretty maintenance free. You
do need to keep up on security updates though, which are, usually, few
and far between. Although FreeBSD has had a number of recent issues in
the 4.8 release.

5. Legal. Yes, I added a 5 for you because you may not be aware of the
current legal issues surrounding Linux. According to SCO (Formerly
Caldera Linux), IBM and SGI contributed SCO's propriatary UNIX code to
Linux without authorization. SCO has filed a 3 billion dollar lawsuit
against IBM for breach of contract. SCO has threatened to pull SGI's
UNIX license while they DID pull IBM's UNIX license. SGI distributes
Irix and IBM distributes AIX. In IBM's case, the code that was
contributed was IBM's own code, but apparently there is a clause in the
contract dating back from the AT&T era that states that AT&T owns the
UNIX code, and has full control over all 'dirivitive' works, but the
code writer retains the copyright. That means that if I take their
code, and improve it in some way or add to it, then that code is under
the full control of AT&T, yet I still own the copyright.

Aparently, IBM contributed their own code in which they own the
copyright, to Linux. But the code was originally an improvement to
UNIX, and then IBM contributed it to Linux, so SCO claims IBM has
breached their contract. Needless to say, this is going to take years
to resolve. And in the meantime, SCO has said that they are going to
start invoicing (charging) commercial users of Linux because Linux
contains SCO's UNIX Intellectual Property. They want $199 per seat for
a workstation and $699 per server processor. Will they get it, probably
not until a judge says that Linux does contain SCO's IP. The problem
with this is that SCO will not reveil anything about what Linux code
they think is infringing unless the person seeking the information signs
a Non-Disclosure Agreement. Everyone says "Show me the code!" and SCO
says "Sign this NDA!" This is a mess that will probably take *YEARS* to
resolve. If you want more info on this, this link will fill you in:
http://news.search.com/search?version=x&tag=ex.ne.fd.srch.ne&q=SCO

Us in the *BSD camp already had our legal fight back in the early-mid
1990's when AT&T used UC Berkeley over 6 files in the source tree. UC
Berkeley filed a counter suit. It was found that AT&T stipped the
copyright notices from the UCB source files and incorporated them into
UNIX. During the time of the legal battle, AT&T's USL sold UNIX to
Novell and Novell settled. The terms of the settlement have been sealed.

Granted that much of my opinion between FreeBSD and Linux is *very*
personal, But I do have my reasons for it. Both *are* good systems,
depending one what you want to do. But if you do take the plunge, then
I suggest that you get a good book or few on unix systems because they
are really different from the windows systems that you are used to. If
you decide to go with FreeBSD, then I would suggest both the FreeBSD
handbook (Which is located on the harddisk of every FreeBSD install, on
the FreeBSD website, and in print), and Absolute BSD. If you decide to
go with Linux, then I would suggest that you go with Linux Unleashed.

Which ever way that you choose, good luck. 

-- 
Daniel Rudy
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