Re: FreeBSD

["C.Lamb" <nospam [at] sheffield.ac.uk>]

> 
>                 XEmacs rules.

Hah! Look to the power of ed! ed is all, ed is the 'it' editor. ed 
sorts the men from the boys. On my system vi is symlinked to ed and 
emacs runs a script that reduces quota by 50% and then... runs ed!

> 
>     C> dependancies are noted and all is guaranteed to work. No need
>     C> for worries about if your version of make, gcc or foo-lib-2.6
>     C> can handle the latest bar.
> 
> Yup, that's what Mac users have been telling us for ages.

That hurt :).
> 
> And no, all is not guaranteed to work.  Linux 1.0 libc4 systems are
> pretty well guaranteed to work too.  ;-)  But if you want a system

I was refering to dependancy links in packages. Hand on heart, I can 
honestly say that not once in ports or packages has the dependancy 
system screwed up for me.

> that can sorta keep up with your hardware, well, yer in "current"
> country now, where strange and wonderful things happen in between
> crashes (or even failed boots).

As with everything, there are provisos. Though a dyed in 
the wool BSD'er, I'll still recommend a Linux distro if the hardware
is anything younger than about 1 year.
The hardware issue is also in a confined area. XFree86 handles the 
latest and greatest video cards with equality and sound cards in a 
principally server oriented OS is verging on oxymoronic. I suppose 
the attitude is if you need to use BSD - look at the hardware 
supported then buy it. It should be Application->OS->Hardware and not 
Build a box->scratch around for an OS to run on it->find apps that 
run on the OS.

> 
> And God save the Queen, even, if she wants to use software that isn't
> in "ports" yet, or just wants a more modern version.

True. Then again FreeBSD isn't touted as a desktop OS though I do use 
it as such most of the time. I tend not to get bitten by port 
modernity issues as typing 'linux' at the cmd prompt lets me use 
linux binaries. Heck, my home BSD box runs the Linux binary of 
Netscape (in preference to the FreeBSD binary - it has 'issues' as 
Microsoft would say).

> 
> 
> What I like about the *BSD systems is that the kernels and core libs
> tend to work better on more hardware.  Elderly sparcs, for example,
> Linux still sucks air and blows chunks on a regular basis, and
> fsck'ing glibc!  (Literally, using glibc is one way to guarantee a
> fsck in the near future....)

Note for other people - NetBSD and OpenBSD are being referred to here 
- FreeBSD is x86 and fairly beta-ish Alpha support came in recently.

> 
> But then, I'm a member of the ASPCA (American Society for the
> Protection of Computing Anachronisms ;)  There should be an "R-"
> version for you Brits....

Ahh, good man! I'll start to remember the Perkin Elmer and the
good ol' days of 80 users on a mini with the power of a 386 with 8 
meg. And it was doing real maths! And if you tell the kids of today, 
they just don't believe you!

C
 
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