Subj : Re: FreeBSD
To   : William Hurn
From : Neal Robles
Date : Tue Nov 20 2001 04:52 pm

Hello again, William,

 NR> Minix reminds me of the circa-late 70's personal computers.  The
 NR> computers were simple enough and well documented enough to let you get
 NR> in and learn everything and possibly modify the design or come up with
 NR> your own.

 WH> No doubt about it, if you're after "smarts" heavy-weight equipment
 WH> is really the last thing you need when running a Nix.  The fewer
 WH> resources you have the more know-how you need. MINIX is good and
 WH> easy to run on a 386 or better.

Strangely enough, I've never run Minix-386.  I only got to use version
1.2, which was for the 8086/8088.  If you have even a 386sx and want
to run a flavor of unix to get some real work done, it might be better
to just get one of the older and/or more compact Linux distributions
(MuLinux, older Debian & Slack, LRP, Tom's RootBoot, etc.).

 WH> lot tougher - - or at least it used to be.  I have MINIX and
 WH> Tanenbaum's book but haven't done anything with it for about
 WH> three years.

If you're so inclined, you can learn a lot about Unix internals from
Minix. It's not as unwieldy as Linux.

 WH> FreeBSD is more usable since found mtools and zip/unzip in the
 WH> packages on the CD.  Has a great KDE 2.1.1 and PPP is super
 WH> SOLID, both at the command line and in X.

Yes, KDE is probably the slickest GUI/Desktop around. A bit too big
(and slow) for my old computer, but I wouldn't hesitate to recommend
it to any user, even a Linux first-timer.

Regards,
  Neal
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