All right. I'm giving FreeBSD a try. If it sucks, I can always get Slackware again.

Thats not entirely true. There are differences between various flavors of Linux and Unix that go far beyond the package manager.

For example; where I work, we needed an x-terminal to handle the graphical output of several big-iron unix servers, servers who's only physical control input is a serial console. The problem was, the only box we had avaliable was a 100mhz 486. I had win2k running on it a few weeks before (just for kicks), but it ran so bleeding slow it was useless. (The XP installer wont even boot, it complains that the CPU is too old...)

At first, we put OS/2 on it. (my coworker is big on OS2) It ran OK, but we had some trouble getting the x-server to run correctly. Next, we tried Debian Sarge. Even after I removed all but the bare minimum of packages to run X, it still ran like molasses.

So we put FreeBSD on it. It runs like a bat out of hell. Booting and shutdown are faster than anything Ive ever seen, and its as solid as a rock.
I would never use it as a workstation, Lord no, but for servers or thin-clients, its perfect.


Of course, we could have recompiled the kernel on Debian to better handle the 486, but that would have been too much work. :p

It's good, trust me.

Though some may argue that it doesn't make a good workstation, I feel that it makes a fine workstation.




Yeah, you really can't beat the speed and stability of a FreeBSD. That's why they make for very popular servers, some with uptimes lasting months, even years.

What makes you dislike it as a workstation? You can run all the same software as any other *nix box and it happens to be pretty easy to administer as well. I suppose there is some other difference that really bothers you?

I think the general consensus is that BSD is harder to configure than GNU / Linux. (at least in most cases)

as far as I'm concerned, both BSD and linux are hard.

Well, for starters, I dont like the way traditional Unixes label their devices... :\

I've been researching FreeBSD for the last few days. Today I discovered that they use something similar to OSS and 5.1 sound is not fully supported. What a piece of junk! Lame. I'm going back to Gentoo GNU / Linux. (Hopefully someday Gentoo GNU / HURD.)

Your insulting the OS because they chose stability and reliability over the freaking audio subsystem? Geeze!!

You sir, have just lost any and all crediblity in my book.

So what about Ubuntu? I had the Live CD and it was fantastic (It just didn't boot on my father's laptop ) I read about it's philosophy and I think it is great. But I am a linux noob and will start in the next days with gentoo (I am a linux noob but a computer freak, so it shouldn't be that hard, right now I am using Windows without a shell cause it's somehow destroyed and I don't want to reinstall it).

I didn't understand all that package management stuff yet, but the rest of your RTF sounds quite ubuntuish

gbk

Okay, perhaps I was a bit harsh. The don't have to support anything, and I understand and respect that. But as the end user, it ultimately comes down to what works and what doesn't. I lose all credibility after saying one thing? Now I think that is a bit harsh.

NAS_Matyy

Yes, Ubuntu is nice, but I found in it what I found with pretty much every OS: it has no where near the amount of extensibility that Gentoo or FreeBSD has. Sure, it has apt-get, but the package tree is nowhere near as complete as those of Gentoo and FreeBSD. I have found myself coming back to Gentoo every time, without exceptions, after trying new OS's and GNU / Linux distros. It simply comes down to how deeply you can customize and extend your system, and Gentoo excels at that.

You still need to try debian.

No offence to Deb, but it's just not my style. I'd rather enter commands manually then go through an install script. I know, this argument is becoming less and less valid as Debian advances in that category. I guess it's a personal preference.

Gentoo just impresses me so much with it's polished documentation and centralised community.

out of curiousity, how long does that take? Why do you care so much about doing everything manually?

Stage 3 takes but a couple hours. Stage 1 takes about 36 hours, but most of it is automated. Besides, it's so routine to me that configuring things is cake... and I get to make it just the way I like it.

Actually, I prefer the traditional way to the Linux way. The Linux way just makes it more confusing than it has to be.



What? That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. I understand if the feature is important to you, but I find it sad that something as trivial as sound affected your decision so greatly. Not to mention that most 5.1 multimedia speakers are terrible in relation a a set of stereo speakers hooked up to a nice receiver/amp.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was a USB soundcard that worked completely under FreeBSD. It would just be a matter of sending the sound information over USB to the card, which doesn't require a specific driver.



Considering you are just following printed instructions and running other people's scripts (like emerge and makefiles), I don't see how that is a valid argument. In FreeBSD, I can compile my whole system as well, except that it is automated for me. Even though I know how it works, I don't really have to, it just does. Scripts are there to make your life easy, so use them.

I'm sorry, one look at a long, bulleted list and you lost it.

You were just moaning about gentoo and now you're saying that debian isn't your "style" - as if style has anything to do with which distro you use. How can it not be your style if you've never even TRIED it? Anyway, I'm out of this discussion, it's a bit silly.

What I find funny is that he has a problem with Gentoo. It's like the most customizable distro out there. If you don't like how it is out of the box, change it! For crying out loud, their own website has tons of tutorials on this kind of stuff.

The apt tree may be incomplete, but correct if I'm wrong, you can download apt packages from many project's sites, and at worst download the rpm and convert it to a deb package.

I only used Debian for two days (I decided to try out ReiserFS at the same time and my HDD corrupted, I went back to Gentoo after that), but I seem to remember being able to do that. In fact, I believe the program to convert rpm to deb is called alien or something of the sort.

Alright... listen here.

In a perfect world, the OS is user-friendly and powerful. However, this perfect situation does not seem to exist. I considered leaving Gentoo because it has problems, primarily being long compile times. I thought that there would be something that struck a balance between power and ease of use.

So, I thought that something Debian based would be the solution. I haven't mentioned it yet, but I have tried the Debian installer. Basically, it bombarded me with question after question after question. I find this approach to be relentless and tiring, and the questions sometimes did not have an obvious answer. Gentoo, on the other hand, allows you to do anything, in any order, granted you know what you are doing. Yes, the typical Gentoo newbie is just going through the motions.

However, I feel insulted that you take me for that. I have been using Gentoo since last February, and in that time I have done about 10 installs, set up an unstable ~x86 box, nptl, udev, reiser4, various kernel patchsets all compiled manually, manual frame-buffer and gensplash configuration, Xorg 6.8 with render and composite with shadows and transparencies, and a whole lot more stuff with ebuild overlays and portage. I know what the **** I am doing. I'm not just an idiot following the manual verbosely. When I install Gentoo these days, I barley look at the manual, because i know exactly what I want and how to do it. And I do it in considerably less steps because I actually know what I am doing.

So why did I even consider switching from Gentoo? Simply put, I don't have time to dedicate my life to my operating system. I need to get good grades in school. I thought there was an OS that I could trust to make decisions for me, but I guess I was wrong. Each one has at least one irreversible flaw that prevents me from using it. As for Debian, lets just say that some of those flaws are lack of polish, a scattered community, a cryptic installer (yes, even the new one), conservative decisions, and a lagging package tree. As for freeBSD, I have a large collection of music on my hard-drive, all in lossless FLAC format. I bought a whole disk just for music. I love music, and if my music won't play out of all my speakers (which I spent good money on), then I simply won't even consider it.

Yeah... that is not my problem with Gentoo. My problem is that I don't always have time for that.

Mystic, click here. Download. Use. Love.

The new Debian Sarge installer fixes most of the issues of the old one.l If you havent tried it yet, do so. You wont regret it.

Alright. I'll give Debian a fair shot. But i'm in over my head this week, so it will have to wait for the weekend.

that ammounts to a day and a half, and then some.

I simply don't have the time or patience to do that.

Nowadays, i can reimage my drive in 15 minutes with norton ghost and have everything installed at once, winxp, all my apps, everything. beat that.

Where I work, we have a number of PA-RISC machines that we boot via NFS over the network. Whenever we need to add a new one, or fix one thats screwed up (happens occasionally, Im human, after all... :p), I simply unpack a clean copy of the OS (Debian Sid) from a tar file and run a script on it that fixes the hostname, host file, etc.

The whole proccess takes about 5 minutes.

I love Debian for what it is, but I've always, always had problems with X in Debian. I got Debian Woody working after a lot of trouble with my laptop. But it's running an old kernel, and I've had problems recompiling. Though I haven't touched the Debian partition in a while, so I may have to try again.

I tried Debian Sarge on my desktop, and I had endless problems with X. Most of them came from the sync rates of my monitor. I re-installed Debian many, many times to try and get it right, but it never worked out. I finally gave up after doing a bare-bones install and trying to compile the kernel and X from scratch, and failing at that.

I switched to Fedora Core 2, and the install ran flawlessly. I'm still not perfectly satisfied, but the system works very well. I also had no trouble updating the kernel. But I'm still not completely satisfied, so I may have to try Gentoo sometime just to see what happens.

Ric, there is no need to reinstall Debian to fix X, merely tweak the X config file....

Tried that too.

I'll try again later, after I've cooled off.

If you're having problems CONFIGURING Debian, you need to do an hd-install of KNOPPIX which will detect and properly configure all your hardware, then leave you with a nice Debian installation.