Installing Open Office / Perl updating
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From: Michel Talon on 9 May 2010 05:30 Indi <indi(a)satcidananda.16x108.merseine.nu> wrote: > > Using it as my primary (usually sole) OS since 2004. Apparently i am beating you, i began using FreeBSD with the 2.2.5 in 1997. This was wonderful, and at that time i found the ports system ways better than what was available for the systems i was using previously, Slackware and Redhat, notably automatic dependency resolution. The softs were relatively small so didn't take ages to compile. The OS was extremely fast, much better than the Linux of the time. Unfortunately i have the impression that since that time, Linux has progressed a lot, while FreeBSD had a bumpy road. Anyways when i discovered that FreeBSD worked very poorly on my laptop while Ubuntu worked perfectly OK, i began using it exclusively on the laptop, and frankly i cannot see a good reason to come back to FreeBSD. The poor hardware support is a total killer, and when you get used to Debian's style binary package management, this is another reason to prefer Ubuntu. As for the speed, i cannot see an ounce of difference between FreeBSD (when it works) and Ubuntu on my laptop. > > I don't know about benchmarks, but my subjective experience has been > that FreeBSD is *way* faster than Ubuntu, definitely faster than > openSuse as well. The little i have seen Suse machines, they appeared awfully slow to me, while Ubuntu is completely normal, on par with Debian stable, FreeBSD, etc. I would say Fedora is perhaps slower, but it may be subjective, after all they run similar Linux kernels. What i like much better in FreeBSD is that the organisation, configuration, etc. of the system is simpler and clearer. With Linux distros each one has complicated quirks, so that managing them in the traditional way of editing files is challenging. Everything is done so that people use the "proprietary" config tools exclusively, with the "advantage" of locking users to the specific distro. A good old tactic. Clearly if one wants to config the machine and the softs in non standard way, then FreeBSD regains considerable advantage. I think however that this is more useful for servers or embedded machines than for the desktop. -- Michel TALON
From: Michel Talon on 9 May 2010 05:37 Fr�d�ric Perrin <fred(a)resel.fr> wrote: > And that's why I'm very happy with FreeBSD for my server. But for a > personal machine, compiling stuff is a PITA. > Exactly my point, which i have argumented in a more extensive way here: http://www.lpthe.jussieu.fr/~talon/freebsdports.html In fact i have observed that several people whose prose i am reading on newsgroups and mailing lists, are quite disenchanted with FreeBSD nowadays, and retreat back to NetBSD or OpenBSD. I must say that the benchmarks i have seen comparing the SMP performance of FreeBSD and NetBSD are quite cruel for an OS which has refined its SMP now since many years. For OpenBSD the argument is of course tight security, a binary package management system that works, and sometimes better hardware support for some specific but widely used machinery. -- Michel TALON
From: Bob Eager on 9 May 2010 06:15 On Sun, 09 May 2010 11:07:44 +0100, Chronos wrote: > Exactly what I do. Granted, I'm an atypical user and I have a fairly > well specified tinderbox system that can build OOo with localisation in > 2 hours or thereabouts, but it's not beyond the realms of possibility to > use NFS to distribute packages built with a single high spec desktop > machine and one of the ports management utilities. That's the beauty of > the ports system: It works in many scenarios where a package manager > would fall flat. That's pretty well what I do, too. I have a high spec machine that manages all of the ports, as well as buildworlds for nanoBSD etc. And I've been using FreeBSD since 2.1.something...and UNIX since 1976... -- Use the BIG mirror service in the UK: http://www.mirrorservice.org
From: Indi on 9 May 2010 12:11 On 2010-05-09, Chronos <me3(a)privacy.net> wrote: > > The problem with package binary installers is that you often end up > with multiple copies of the same library installed. PBIs have every > dependency in the package, so 1) it's a waste of disk space and 2) you > end up playing some very clever but potentially very fragile games > with the linker. For those reasons alone I can't see mainstream > FreeBSD adopting these with any enthusiasm, although for desktop- > specific PC-BSD it's a very clever solution. > Exactly. There's been a lot of pointless complaining by a couple of people here; they should just use PC-BSD (or whatever they want). All the attempts at sowing seeds of discord just because they feel their needs are unmet by FBSD are frankly quite tedious. -- Caveat utilitor, indi
From: Bob Eager on 9 May 2010 12:16
On Sun, 09 May 2010 16:11:41 +0000, Indi wrote: > On 2010-05-09, Chronos <me3(a)privacy.net> wrote: >> >> The problem with package binary installers is that you often end up >> with multiple copies of the same library installed. PBIs have every >> dependency in the package, so 1) it's a waste of disk space and 2) you >> end up playing some very clever but potentially very fragile games with >> the linker. For those reasons alone I can't see mainstream FreeBSD >> adopting these with any enthusiasm, although for desktop- specific >> PC-BSD it's a very clever solution. >> >> > Exactly. There's been a lot of pointless complaining by a couple of > people here; they should just use PC-BSD (or whatever they want). All > the attempts at sowing seeds of discord just because they feel their > needs are unmet by FBSD are frankly quite tedious. Especially when they say they don't actually use FreeBSD any more... -- Using UNIX since v6 (1976)... Use the BIG mirror service in the UK: http://www.mirrorservice.org |