Re: Primary Differences: FreeBSD/Linux

From: Andrew Reilly (andrew_at_gurney.reilly.home)
Date: 03/01/04 

Date: Mon, 01 Mar 2004 22:15:33 GMT

On Mon, 01 Mar 2004 20:13:04 +0000, Tom Ryerson wrote:

>
>
> David King wrote:
>>
>>
>> netcat has its own port in /usr/ports/net/netcat, so yes, it works
>
> Great news.
>
> Thanks to Vlad and Pete for the same info.
>
>
> I've been reading the Handbook and run across some vaquely troubling things.
>
> 1. Csh seems to be the default shell, and I have been taught to avoid that
> shell for scripts, which I use a lot.
>
> But I can simply use ash or bash, so that's not a real problem. I'm
> just a little worried about understanding the docs...

Not a problem, IMO. Give yourself whatever shell you like (I use bash2,
mostly due to inertia) and don't log in as root. I don't think that the
docs will be a problem: even csh users hardly ever write scripts in it,
they just like the command-line interface features. So you won't see
funny for loop syntax. The most you're likely to encounter is setenv for
environment variables, and it's pretty self-evident what they do.

> 2. Sendmail seems to be the default MTA. (dripping with tar from the
> pits
> at La Brea :-) I'm scared to death of sendmail. Don't even use an
> MTA, just simple scripts to send mail to my ISP's smarthost and to
> accept mail directly on non-standard ports from associates.

You can (a) ignore it, or (b) remove it from your system, the next time
you rebuild/update. (a) is accomplished by setting the rc.conf
flag sendmail_enable="NONE". (b) is accomplished by setting the
make.conf flag NO_SENDMAIL=TRUE, and then manually removing the dregs.
There's a file /etc/mail/mailer.conf that can be used to re-route various
mail functionality to other mailers, but I'm not sure exactly what uses
this config file.

> Do any of you use Exim?

Some do, it's in ports. I use qmail, myself.

> 3. Am I reading correctly? Default graphical install? I don't even know
> if my mouse works!

Just a curses-style menu-based thing. No mouse needed. And as soon as
the bare minimum install is done, you can leave it all behind and use the
ports tree or package tools from a console command line. About the only
thing that I find the installer useful for is initial disk geometry
sensing and partitioning. I think that the command line tools have become
more adaptive and useful of late, but they always used to require a
calculator to get the sizes and offsets right---something that I always
thought stupid, given that you're sitting in front of a computer that
already knows all of the important numbers...

Cheers, 

-- 
Andrew

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