Hi, John Hasler wrote: > You are free to choose FreeBSD.
That will become an adventure. Common roots are more than 20 years in the past. FreeBSD is not too bad. But you will notice that it has a much smaller tester community than GNU/Linux. The focus is on big iron, not on personal computers. There is a project named PC-BSD which tries to make it more desktoply: http://wiki.pcbsd.org http://wiki.pcbsd.org/index.php/Turn_FreeBSD_into_PC-BSD%C2%AE For myself it would not be a good choice, because ISO 9660 mounting cannot handle files >= 4 GiB or multi-session added above 4 GiB. Further FreeBSD 8 crashes reliably when i switch off an idle, not mounted eSATA DVD drive and less reliably when i do this with a USB DVD drive. (No admin of a 128 core machine would do that, of course. It could bring bad luck to the 1 TiB of RAM.) The hardware driver problem might be fixed in FreeBSD 11, but the ISO 9660 problems are deeply rooted in the code for inode number generation and inode addressing. Doug wrote: > is there a way to install FreeBSD > on an ext4 or NTFS file system, or some other fs that > Linux can read? They seem to be heading towards ZFS, due to lack of license allergic reactions. That will be another culture shock for a migrant from Linux. https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/zfs.html I know it from Solaris and its administration is very different from other filesystems. (My favorite command on Solaris is: pfexec poweroff) > I'd like to try it out, but not at the expense of having a > disk that nothing else can read, including GParted. It's that they put several of their "slices" into what we call "partition". You typically need one MBR partition to host all slices of a FreeBSD. That's actually better contained than a Linux installation. (Dunno how they deal with GPT partitions.) How about a virtual machine for a start, or Debian/kFreeBSD, the not so official Debian port to the FreeBSD kernel ? https://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/kfreebsd-amd64/ https://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/kfreebsd-amd64/ch03s01.html.en Glenn English wrote: > But *surely* they can read an old PC-DOS file. Everybody can do that. Everybody should be able to read ISO 9660. But your mileage varies from operating system to operating system. I understand the goal was to install FreeBSD so that one can read (and write ?) its system disk from Linux. The basic filesystem of FreeBSD is UFS. Seems to be supported on Linux. http://askubuntu.com/questions/85154/mount-ufs-filesystem I guess it depends aminly on Linux' ability to map slices to partition devices (e.g. /dev/sdb4). > No mention that can find of FAT anything. But *surely*... Yes, it can. (At least with mainstream use cases.) > I don't know for sure that their tar/dump write tapes like > Linux does tar or cpio should be compatible. Not to speak of third party things like "bru" or "dar". But where to find tape hardware, anyway ? I can confirm that DVD with ISO 9660 below the 4 GiB limitations is exchangeable with Linux. (Unless you hit more bugs of any of both OSes.) A DVD with a tape archive on it will work too, of course. Device addresses are easy: /dev/cd0 , /dev/cd1 , ... For those who want to develop their own OS entrails: NetBSD has the nicest kernel developer community i ever met. Have a nice day :) Thomas
