Re: Primary Differences: FreeBSD/Linux

From: Lowell Gilbert (lgusenet_at_be-well.ilk.org)
Date: 02/28/04 

Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2004 04:41:32 GMT

Tom Ryerson <dont@like.spam> writes:

> Kirk Job-Sluder wrote:
> >
> >
> > Tom Ryerson <dont@like.spam> wrote:
> >> What will be my biggest surprise?
> >>
> >> Am running Debian/Bash now.
> >
> > A depressing ammount of really useful software is written with linuxisms
> > rather than portability in mind. Some key examples being CRM114 (lots
> > of scripts that assume everything gets dumped into /usr/bin), Firefox
> > (bad DNS resolving code) and OpenOffice (have not successfully gotten
> > the Linux binaries to work.)
>
> I can live without those apps, long as screen and mc and nc will work.

screen, check.
mc, assuming that's "Midnight Commander," check.
nc, I don't know.

> But that is not good news.

It's really not that bad. Take these specific examples; crm114 hasn't
been ported to FreeBSD, but I started working on it this evening, and
it doesn't seem to be a big deal. In fact, it takes a prefix
argument, just the same way that FreeBSD's ports system does, that
indicates where the executables should go. Firefox looks up DNS names
with IPv6 first if available, which is often, um, unhelpful; but I'm
not sure that's FreeBSD's fault. And OpenOffice has FreeBSD-native
versions that run fine.

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