From: garyt@lgc.com (Gary Thompson) Subject: Re: Linux or 386BSD? Date: 9 Feb 1993 19:39:21 GMT
dgreen@sti.com (Dan R. Greening) writes:
>One advantage of 386BSD is that it has built in support for three common
>ethernet cards in its "one-floppy OS": NE1000/NE2000 and WD mumble. I have
>an NE2000 (actually I have access to about 30 machines, all of which use
>NE1000 or NE2000). I guess Linux does have support for the NE2000 now, but I
>still have to compile it (the binaries only include support for WD right
>now, as far as I know), which means I still have to download the software
>on floppies instead of through the network. I don't look forward to that.
>When my laptop comes in, I'll probably try Linux again, but I'm still
>going to have to shove in at least 10 floppies as far as I can tell.
One advantage of Linux is that it works on more systems, especially older,
less common ones, etc. I have a several-year old Compaq 386 and have been
running Linux on it for several months and haven't had any problems using
it with regards to the hardware.
I was interested in also installing 386BSD because of its mature SLIP
drivers. Alas, I tried booting up with the latest, greatest images from
the 0.2 patchkit and they locked up as they attempted to mount the root
filesystem from the floppy drive. Judging from the response I got on
the net, no one else has experienced this. If I want to run 386BSD
I guess I'll have to hope that this problem disappears in a later
version or get a new motherboard.
>Commercial software manufacturers have gone through this process: you
>start out giving people stuff that they have to tweak, compile, etc. And
>then you discover that they dislike the software. So all the old hands
>try to "stupidify" the installation process. It is that crucial early
>install period which determines whether someone will follow through with
>using it and liking it. 386BSD has a very good "stupid person" install
>process, especially if you have access to ethernet, except for that one
>ridiculous omission of IRQ 2/9 documentation. My impressions of Linux
>install was that it was harder.
I agree that the ability to install over the net is a big plus for
386BSD but I wouldn't say that the Linux install process is harder,
especially if you want to have more than one OS coexist on the machine.
Using the SLS package for Linux, one merely has to run mkfs on the
partition you want to install on, tell the install package which
one it is, and it does the rest. I had no problems installing Linux
while preserving my existing DOS partition. I got the idea that that
would not be nearly as simple for a novice to do this with 386BSD.
Gary