h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

_Most_ apps will port to FreeBSD with some tweaking - I'm working on a cross-platform audio player to run on Linux and FreeBSD at the moment, and so far the problems we've run into are basically the lack of strlcpy() on Linux (which is easily solved as the code for strlcpy() is BSD licensed) and FreeBSD's datatypes which can be different at times.

However, many Linux apps can be ported to FreeBSD without too much modification of the code, and if that won't work FreeBSD is capable of running some precompiled Linux apps in some kind of Linux emulation mode - this is great for things like Acrobat Reader (although why you would use that when you can use ggv or KGhostview I have no idea - not sure about KDE, but FreeBSD is now an official GNOME platform).

For ease of installation - FreeBSD's installer is almost identical to that used in Slackware Linux, which is the most BSD-like Linux distro that I know of.

The main reason I don't use FreeBSD instead of Linux is laziness, but the other reason is that there's less hardware support in some areas I need, and no DRI or anything like that. And with Slackware, I can almost get to that point... if I had a ports tree that is. The ports tree is blissful and heavenly - but only when you have broadband internet access.

What hardware support is it that you need?
I've not had any problems with hardware support and we run it on most of our systems here at work.

One of the nice things about *BSD is that you get it as a complete system and the system is designed to be easily upgradeable (it takes I think 4 commands to do a complete upgrade from source...).

Most of the time I don't use the ports collection, I get source and compile and it works. Sometimes rather than run the port I'll get the patches that are applied and just apply those to my source code.

Oh, I don't know, I'm going by what a friend who runs FreeBSD and knows what I've got inside my computer tells me.

I'm quite happy running Linux really.

I think you'll find that FreeBSD will support pretty much the same stuff as Linux.

One thing I meant to say before was when recompiling the *BSD kernel, the configuration is a plain text file. This can be seen as both an advantage and disadvantage

I think we should move this discussion onto another thread...

Probably...

FreeBSD's major lack is 3D acceleration, but then since I can't get it working in Linux I doubt I'd notice... although I'll make it work one day!

Name: Lord of the Morning
Age: 17
Gender: male
Distribution: Slackware. and LFS. Redhat is a POS and Mandrake is for people w/o opposable thumbs. I'm only running Slackware now (the /current directory autoslack) but LFS is coming along ...
experiance: enough.
GUI's are well... ewwww goooey ... gross... kinda like a raw egg...
but they do have that special thing that you can run 50 million xterms in them the only ones that are useable are BB, WM, IceWM, and AfterStep

VIVE LE OPEN SOURCE!
VIVE LE LINUX!
(death to evil micro$hit)
and stuff
have a nice day
this message courtisy of the Lord of the Morning, The Prince of the Dawn, Chief of Chiefs, The Dragon Reborn

I was under the impression that the literal translation of Car'a'carn was "Chief of the clan chiefs". You missed out a word there, my Lord Dragon.

Well, (better late than never) I've switched from Slack to FreeBSD and personaly, I like it better(though my laptop might disagree)

(now, only if svsup would work nice)

Has anyone here used any commercial flavour of Unix? (Solaris, Irix, HP-UX, ...) (Note: no plugs intended.)

A number of universities I'm considering say they use Solaris. It seems to be the only commercial Unix still selling, now that Linux is just as good in many areas, much cheaper, and with near-instant support.

I've used solaris in some jobs - really only as a user and done some limited admin on it here in my current job. I'll be using at lot more on my next job though as it's a solaris shop.
In many areas yes, Linux is just as good if not better. There are areas where Solaris is better (bigger mp machines, clustering).

Clustering? Phaw! Heard of Beowulf? Lovely stuff, that. Fantastic way to cluster Linux boxes. Getting very popular now too.

I use Solaris at University because the School of Computer Science and IT use it on their servers, but that's it. When using X or a command prompt for normal user-level tasks it's much like using Linux really (wonder why!! We're even running IceWM - not my personal choice, but better than CDE I think). Although a few things sort of feel different.

Cluster of Workstation parallel stuff can be done with sun kit too. By clustering I was thinking more of stuff like sharing resources, failover etc. Something DEC did very well at with the VAXCluster stuff. From reading el reg one of the people who did that work now is with sun doing their new cluster work. There has also been reported in that particular newplace the demise of the Alpha

Yes, that's a shame... but the AMD x86-64 chips look rather exciting

I've used Solaris and Irix (I believe) at university, but haven't noticed any pros/cons in the use compared to Linux. There is, of course, the financial difference.

Personally I prefer to run most commands from command lines, but like the ability to have multiple xterms open at once in GUIs. I also use gvim instead of the command line alternatives and the occasional other graphical app (usually games).

I use gvim mostly for the syntax highlighting. I'd have thought it possible to get it working on the tty, seeing as ls does it (blue directories, green executables, red archives, yellow special files, brown FIFOs, turquoise symlinks, etc.). Anyone know how, or if it's impossible?

The three universities I've just visited use Solaris and Irix alongside Linux, mostly in separate labs, plus Windoze for the lusers (err... and some programming... and writeups...). I'll probably end up using one sometimes, but Linux more often.

I think there was also a Cray running a VR cave on some sort of Unix: there was a terminal window open, in which I spotted the word CRAY in several places.

As long as they run NetHack, I'll be happy

At our university, the Computer Science labs are: 1 windoze NT lab, 1 multimedia lab (I think they run Solaris there) and about half a dozen Linux labs. Irix I have only used on dedicated servers, through Telnet.

Oh, try reading the man page for vim to see about syntax highlighting. (I'm in windoze ATM, so it's a little difficult for me)

All our labs run Windows 2000, but we've got Exceed running to give remote X sessions on the Solaris servers, so it's not so bad... and those who only want an X session can use one of the Linux machines in one corner - hopefully they'll be extending provision of those, but somehow I doubt it as most of the population of the School seem to like Windows.

I know, I know, it's unnatural, but...

You should hear the complaints when they found out that the School only provides the UNIX version of Hugs (the Haskell interpereter/environment we used for the module on Functional Programming). Some people had to learn how to use the command line! And those who wrote their programs with Notepad saving to their home directory via NFS lost out again, because my Emacs (and those of a few other mad people) sprouted the ability to syntax-highlight Haskell. Groovy, what?

What kind of masochist writes programs in Notepad? I hope that just jolted them into realising the existence of something better and more productive. Maybe they could lobby the IT guys to provide the Windoze version of Vim... nah, they're probably too lazy to learn it.

> most of the population of our School seem to like Windows.
Do you mean the School of Computer Science? Blimey O'Reilley! I wouldn't be surprised if you said 'university'... is that what you meant?

What's Haskell like (as a language)?