FreeBSD vs. RedHat

Ion-Mihai Tetcu itetcu at apropo.ro
Thu Oct 2 00:14:31 PDT 2003


On Wed, 1 Oct 2003 22:02:20 -0600 (MDT)
SoloCDM <deedsmis at aculink.net> wrote:

> On Wed, 1 Oct 2003, Todd Stephens wrote:
> 
> > On Wednesday 01 October 2003 10:42 pm, SoloCDM wrote:
> > 
> > >  Why do the ISOs seem to be three CDs of 600Mb each for RedHat
> > > compared to 1.5 CDs for FreeBSD?  I thought the files were
> > > larger with FreeBSD and its tarballs.
> > 
> > Not sure what you mean by that "its tarballs".  Linux
> > distributions come with an immense amount of software that
> > generally gets installed with the OS.  FreeBSD comes with quite a
> > bit as well (enough to get your system up and running for just
> > about any purpose you desire), but one of the intents of FreeBSD
> > is to give the user a little more choice in what is installed. 
> > Read about the ports collection at www.freebsd.org.
> > 
> > >  Does FreeBSD offer all the packages from A to Z in their CDs?
> > 
> > Not that I am aware of.  "All" the packages available to FreeBSD
> > amount to some 9000+ programs.

cm># du -sh /usr/ports/distfiles/
 11G    /usr/ports/distfiles/

The above is ~ for what you call tarballs for the entire port collection (the sources). (Note to self: I should do a make clean some day :))

cm>/usr/ports/distfiles# find . -type f | wc -l
   10962
cm>/usr/ports/distfiles# find . -type f -name '*.bz2' | wc -l
     934
cm>/usr/ports/distfiles# find . -type f -name '*.gz' | wc -l
    7415

Generally we're moving to bzip2.

> > >  Does FreeBSD come with an installation package?
> > 
> > It comes with a very good installation utility.
> > 
> > >  Is FreeBSD Linux or UNIX?
> > 
> > FreeBSD is not Linux, it is based on the 4.4 BSD Lite developed by
> > UC Berkeley.  Due to copyright restrictions, one can not really
> > call it Unix either, though (IMO) the BSD family is as close as
> > you will come in a modern OS to the original AT&T 'Unix'.  <Flame
> > retardant suit now on>
> 
> Is there FreeBSD ISOs with all the packages included.

11G nop. I don't know how much it will take for the packages (== binaries) .

> I'm tired of waiting for RPMs, when they are usually first made into
> tarballs.

So the egg is first :)

>  Would a person prefer Slackware, RedHat (good
> installation package, but they complicate matters with RPMS and
> don't conform to the same directories as tarballs), or FreeBSD?
>
> Does FreeBSD conform to the directories that tarballs prefer?
>
> The thing I don't like is the different in the directory structures
> for RPMs vs. tarballs.  They simple don't match.  Tarballs seem to
> have the real and original directory structures.

read :
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=hier&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+5.1-current&format=html

That is one of the things we like most. We can always find things where they're supposed to be, not where someone chose to put them for some particular reason. And that on each and every machine we have.

buh>/home/itetcu# pkg_info -La | wc -l
  116069

I really don't want to remember where to find each and every  one of the 116069 files I've installed from the
buh>/home/itetcu# pkg_info | wc -l
  469
ports on my desktop. So I'm very glad we don't
" have the real and original directory structures."

BTW what means "real and original" ?

> I noticed a lot of ISPs use FreeBSD.  Is it more widely accepted as
> the best up-to-date in packages?

Newest != better. There are much important reasons for that.

-- 
IOnut
FreeBSD unregistered ;) user


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