Re: Which BSD?

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Date: 7 Nov 2003 20:35:10 GMT

Scripsit ille »David Douthitt« <ssrat@mailbag.com>:
> On 6 Nov 2003 17:51:44 GMT, Rudolf Polzer <denshimeiru-sapmctacher@durchnull.de> wrote:
>
> >BTW, is there a Gentoo-like (Any)BSD install process?
>
> >Gentoo's installer is /bin/sh - it at least does
> >what I want it to do.
>
> Well, there's always the emergency holographic shell :-)

I tried it, but I haven't even found a mount executable. Where have I
forgotten to look? All I have found was mount_nfs, none else.

And how to install a system without having a mount command?

> I'm not sure about NetBSD, but installing OpenBSD/mac68k was certainly
> much similar to the described Gentoo install: format the drives
> yourself, mkfs them, copy and undo the tarballs into the right
> directories, then start the system up to finish configuring....

(and probably installing a boot loader in between)

> > Just because the mirror I chose was missing the package index
> >file, it tried over twenty times to download that index file: five times
> >for each package it wanted to install. If I had pressed ^C, I'd probably
> >have had to start over.
> >
> >After a long long time, I was finally able to choose another mirror.
>
> I found this to be a complete pain also. Not only that, but the ports
> tree itself will try multiple mirrors.
>
> Red Hat and SUSE installations will come back immediately if there is
> no connectivity with the chosen mirror and ask for a new one.

Well, there WAS connectivity with the mirror. It successfully downloaded
the base system from it and then failed downloading the INDEX file for
the packages.

> Why not the BSD sysinstall? And why not let skip the network
> configuration if its already configured? And why "unconfigure" the
> network if its already configured and functioning?

Well, I don't even criticise this superfluous dialog. It only comes once
and doesn't cost much time.

> I might add that the 2.2 kernel hasn't been used for years. Even so,
> trying to run a floppy-based Linux 2.0 (even smaller) system on a 8M
> 486 I have was mostly impossible (I tried several). PicoBSD fired up
> just fine in 8M and ran well.

Hm... the Debian installation floppies boot and install nicely, even if
the Debian website said they require 16MB RAM. But compiling a customized
kernel reduced its in-memory size from almost 2 megabytes to 800k. One
*does* notice this difference.

> >But I noticed that a BSD kernel is built much faster than a Linux kernel
> >and does more seldomly fail to compile because of undocumented
> >dependcies of kernel options; [...]
>
> The whole BSD system is put together much better that way - Linux is
> more of a hodge-podge. Nothing against Linux - just in BSD the entire
> system (whether FreeBSD or NetBSD) is overseen by a group of people,
> including all of the utilities and the libraries and the kernel and so
> on.

This *should* be even more true for OpenBSD...

> In Linux, the only thing overseen by Linus is the kernel. Even the
> major distributions: none oversee any bit a very little bit of the
> code - it comes from many more sources and isn't subjected to strong
> internal review such as FreeBSD or NetBSD.

Right, especially glibc and the kernel should be better synchronized at
some times. But I've never had a problem with that.

But, BSD's "world and sys in one tree" system helps to make sure to have
the right userland for your kernel.

-- 
Menschen fürchteten die Dunkelheit, vertrieben sie mit Feuer...
                                                      [Rei in NGE, #11]

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