Chris Laverdure said:

>The only NetBSD thread I saw recently on Slashdot involved people from
>the Linux camp ranting about how Linux is more portable, how NetBSD is
>irrelevant, etc, etc. Plus there were a bunch of BSD enthusiasts that
>were either saying NetBSD sucked compared to whateverBSD or that
>whateverBSD sucked compared to NetBSD.

I have a box here that I've been tossing different operating systems on
just to see how they do.

Pentium 166 MMX
128 megs memory
9 gig IBM SCSI drive
Plextor SCSI cdwriter
Adaptec 2940 SCSI controller
ATI vga - 4 megs memory
3COM 3C900 network card
Soundblaster 16 ISA sound card

Originally, I was running NetBSD 1.5.4 on the box with a cut-down custom
kernel. It worked pretty well considering the processor. X11 with fvwm 1.24r
worked okay. I mostly used it remotely running SIMH and UNIX V7. It was in use
for about a year or so.

About 4 months ago I decided to throw Linux on the box and picked
Slackware 10. It installed fine, but running without X11 it used up all of
the memory except for about 3 megs. ( remember, box has 128 megs ) I installed
X11 and fvwm 1.24r, but found that the box constantly swapped like crazy while
running any web browser. ( mozilla, firefox, opera, etc ) I could get 
openoffice to come up and run, but I didn't do anything non-trivial with it.
I compiled and installed nvi on the box and found it to be a lot more 
responsive than elvis, the default vi clone. In general, I found that the box
was too anemic to be useful, although it could probably  be used as a light
webserver or mailserver. I found iptables to be quite arcane, and had to do
a lot of testing to be confident that it was doing what I expected.

Now I have wiped out Linux, and installed FreeBSD 5.3 on the box. Out of the
box, without a gui running, there is 20+ megs of free memory. With X11 and
fvwm 1.24r it is responsive enough to use firefox for browsing. I still need
to try some other stuff on the box. I'm using ipfilter and it works as
expected.

I'm going to load NetBSD 2.x in a month or so.

>Whatever, you know. I hate all the fighting and so I ignore SlashDot as
>much as I can. GNU zealots saying that BSD will never be popular because
>it's Free software and not "Free" software. Heaven forbid you make a
>contribution to society. Then you have general Linux zealots who say
>that Linux would beat NetBSD on 32-processor machines, but you know,
>NetBSD probably doesn't even run on those machines (they mock). AS if,
>you know, as IF the community made them run on 32-processor machines.
>No, it was the big corporations who did that, and if those very same big
>corporations made an OS that wasn't GPL software that ran on
>32-processor machines, it suddenly sucks. They're all retards.

If it wasn't for Sun and IBM, Linux would probably not be running on big
boxes yet. They supplied hardware and software, and paid Linux developers.

>I'm sorry, maybe I just get pissed off too easily, but I can't even read
>groklaw anymore. The attitude there seems to be if it's not GPL, then
>the authors "don't get it" (whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean.)
>Even regarding OpenSolaris... Linux people want it GPLed, why? Not so
>they can USE it and say, hey, this is great, another GPLed OS! No, they
>want to take all the things they like from it and use it to prop up
>Linux. I'm sure that made sun feel all fuzzy and warm about the
>prospects of joining this community in that big of a way.

There seems to be a lot of Linux zealots who just want Linux to be the next
Microsoft Windoze.
-- 
Rick Kelly	rmk@rmkhome.com
		http://www.rmkhome.com/
		http://rkba.rmkhome.com/