FreeBSD or NetBSD on older hardware (MMX)

[Joel]

On Tue, 17 May 2005 01:02:42 +0800
FreeBSD MailingLists <freebsd.ml at gmail.com> wrote

> I fished out an old laptop out of my closet.
> It is a Pentium 233 MMX w/ 64MB Ram and 12G HD
> I am thinking about setting up a small station for browsing the web.
> Which would perform better on such a system?  FreeBSD or NetBSD?
> 
> I know that this is a mailing list for FreeBSD users, but I am hoping
> that you will be objective and give me a suggestion based purely on
> performance.

Performance? Which OS may be the wrong question.

If you want it to browse the web, add RAM. If possible, add 512MB.

I'd ask how much experience you have with the command line. netBSD (and
openBSD) will require much more work on the command line than freeBSD.

I'd also ask whether you need multibyte text. If so, freeBSD's support
of locales is better than netBSD's or openBSD's.

I understand that it is possible to get a window manager working with
only 64 MB of RAM, but you would want to use one of the bare bones, dead
simple ones, _not_ Gnome or KDE. Even if you can raise the RAM to 512 MB,
you'll still probably prefer to use a simpler window manager.

If you really know what you are doing, you can get better performance on
small systems with netBSD. But if you knew that much, you wouldn't be
asking.

Pick one, go for it, expect to learn a lot. As much as possible, avoid
compiling on a box that slow. Use binary packages when you can.

Expect compiles to take days, not hours. With only 64MB, don't be
surprised if a moderately large source package takes more than a week to
compile.

--
Joel Rees   <rees at ddcom.co.jp>
digitcom, inc.   株式会社デジコム
Kobe, Japan   +81-78-672-8800
** <http://www.ddcom.co.jp> **