July Issue Of Daemon News Now On-Line

questionlp writes: "A new month, a new issue of Daemon News is now available on-line here. The July issue of the e-zine covers happenings at USENIX 2001, a very thorough overview of NetBSD 1.5.1, the horrors of script generated drivers, and the usual mix of BSD articles." It's a good read -- and if you primarily use some other OS, it's interesting to see how the others are doing once in a while. The various BSDs aren't really complaining at the moment;)

Re:linux that different?

[Arandir]

They're not that different. He just managed to "get it" for Unix while using FreeBSD. Come on now, we all know of Redhat users who think Debian is lame, and vice versa. It usually boils down to which the distro this grokked first.

In this case, he grokked BSD first.

Re:linux that different?

[Arandir]

Another drawback to Redhat (and many other linuces) is that once you learn Redhat, they only thing you know is Redhat. Knowing Linuxconf inside and out won't help you on SuSE.

The trouble with shallow learning curves is that you end up with shallow knowledge. If a newbie came to me and wanted to know which Unix to start with, I would direct them to Slackware or FreeBSD. That way they will really learn Unix.

Re:linux that different?

[Baki]

Yes, it may feel that different. This depends on the Linux distribution. When using Slackware, the overall look and feel won't be very different between Linux and FreeBSD. But when using Redhat, it is a different world.

I'm a long time UNIX user myself, and know many variants and usually feel "at home" quickly when I encounter a new one. But this weekend I installed Redhat (standard install with Gnome) and for the first time I really felt lost and didn't know where to start.

You really have to wade through layers of specific, non-standard GUI tools, modified directory structures (compared to most Unices), weird and very indirect /etc/rc.d startup files; finding out what the standard way is to to disable/enable some service at boot time is trivial on any Unix, but on Redhat you have to either 'just know' what GUI tool to use (there are scores and scores of tools), or you have to read through shell scripts calling shell scripts calling shell scripts to find out where to add settings/symlinks. Ugh...

Of course, below the surface of specific non-standard tools, config-files and paths all Linuxes are almost the same, and are quite similar to any UNIX. But the feel can, alas, be drastically different depending on the distribution that you use.

linux that different?

[gagganator]

I had started to experiment with Linux, a Unix-like system but felt very little enthusiasm for it. Because of an earlier experience with HP-UX, I was under the impression that Unix only represented an extremely complicated way of doing things, and therefor, Unix was ruled out.
At this time, there were executables for FreeBSD available, and not knowing much about FreeBSD, I made an FTP install of 2.1.7-STABLE. The DES-client ran as expected. I figured out nice commands; 'kill -STOP', 'kill -CONT' and that putting an ampersand (&) after the command line ran a job in the background. Cool! I could manage every aspect of the program. A taste of a new world! This was very enticing.

linux: little enthusiasm
bsd: a taste of a new world!

come on, are the two that different?

this guy would probably blow his mind if he tried os x or palm os