Subj : FreeBSD
To   : WILLIAM HURN
From : Roy J. Tellason
Date : Fri Nov 09 2001 09:13 pm

WILLIAM HURN wrote in a message to ALL:

 WH> In the relatively recent past I've seen some interest here in
 WH> running MINIX, the small academic operating system written by
 WH> Andrew Tanenbaum for University training in Amsterdam.  It's
 WH> available on CD in his book  on operating systems and from other
 WH> places, including the internet.  It's  very small and has limited
 WH> features.  "Out of the box", earlier versions lacked any GUI
 WH> capability or provision for internet operation.  It  does come with
 WH> modem capability and I understand it is not difficult to add ppp
 WH> and a text browser.  I understand it has run X successfully.

The one thing I'd care about if I were going to run that is that it was able to 
network with the rest of what I have here -- which basically needs just TCP/IP 
stuff.

 WH> I much more exciting product, I think, is FreeBSD.  You can get it 
 WH> via ftp on the internet also - - or on CD from CheapBytes, the 
 WH> LinuxMall or  from www.freebsd.com.  The way I recommend (unless 
 WH> you're a super UNIX  guru) is by ordering "FreeBSD - - An 
 WH> Open-Source Operating System for  Your Personal Computer" by 
 WH> Annelise Anderson - The Bit Tree Press. It's around $25 from
 WH> Amazon.com and others, and includes FreeBSD 4.3 on CD. 

 WH> It comes with X (Gnome and a super-slick KDE), provision for 
 WH> Package  & Port updates, ppp and the capability to run Linux 
 WH> binaries.  The  author mentions differences in BSD & Linux 
 WH> operation throughout the  book. These differences are no problem,
 WH> if you know about them but can "eat your lunch" if you don't. 

 WH> The FIDO Linux guys tolerate FreeBSD topics and have helped me a
 WH> lot but this Echo would probably be the place.

Sure.

I have a copy of FreeBSD here on a burned cdrom,  dunno what all is on there 
compared to the one that you refer to,  but there is a book on it that I took 
the time to browse through at one point.  Yeah,  there sure are quite a number 
of differences...   But I plan to install it to my test fixture anyhow,  once I 
get past some of the hassles I'm having with other things that I'm trying to 
install there.

I hear it's a real good product to use for a firewall,  too.

One thing I can say about Minix,  though,  that you can't say about any version 
of Linux or the BSDs -- it'll run on a bunch of the really *old* hardware I 
have kicking around here,  the pre-386 stuff,  if you can give it some ram to 
work with.  I don't expect you'd be able to actually do much useful stuff on 
such a platform,  compared to later hardware,  so this is most of why it's not 
a real high priority with me to get around to doing anything at all with it,  
but it's nice to know it's there,  if I ever find myself with time to get 
around to it.  :-)

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