Don't know much about NetBSD. Regarding FreeBSD, please find reply inline. On 15-Jul-2011, at 6:50 PM, Mayuresh wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 06:05:36PM +0530, Mayuresh wrote: >> I happen to have tried out both FreeBSD and NetBSD in the meantime. I will >> post my experiences in a separate mail. > > Following is a short summary of my little exposure to installing and using > FreeBSD, NetBSD along side Fedora - which is (still) my default distro. > > This is not a very scientific comparison - merely some observations > through some day-to-day use-cases. Also I am not familiar with > tricks/quirks of either of them that could have improved certain aspects > of them that otherwise look inferior in observations below. > > Download time: > NetBSD << FreeBSD (full) << Fedora > NetBSD is just about 250MB and way too quicker to get going for the > impatient. > > Installation time: > Both BSDs were much faster to install than Fedora. I have considered a > "minimal" install of Fedora here. NetBSD was a bit more painless I felt. > > Booting time: > Both BSDs were faster than Fedora, though it of course depends on > configuring things. Point is, the defaults on BSD are not bloated i.e. it > starts virtually nothing by default unless you tell it to. > > Hardware support: > My h/w is not very exotic so any good distro is expected to work. > If at all, the difference was with respect to Intel wifi card which worked > out of the box on Fedora and NetBSD (yes!) but not on FreeBSD (of course > there must be a way to get it work). http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/network-wireless.html > > File system support: > I wanted home directory to be same on all 3 distros. It was on ext3 to > start with. Neither of the BSDs had an ext3 driver. ext2 driver worked > fine on FreeBSD, though NetBSD showed very strange errors and could not > identify some of the ext3 partitions. Incidentally, Someone from NetBSD > mailing list advised against using ext2 driver for ext3 system as it may > cause problems. > > Snappiness of X server operation (switch, scroll etc.): > Both Fedora and FreeBSD were nearly same. NetBSD lacked slightly in > this. I read somewhere, their X implementation is slightly tailored, while > FreeBSD uses same xorg like most other Linux distros. > > File system performance (native FS of each): > When unzipping large zips or deleting large directories, felt that > ext3 was much much faster than either of the BSDs. > > Performance with own programs: > The test programs were largely CPU bound. Fedora/Linux fared > marginally better than both BSDs. > > i386 vs i686 and not sure how much it matters: > Have entire Fedora system starting from kernel level tuned for i686, > though BSDs were for i386. Just thought this could be a factor why > Fedora/Linux was fairing better in above tests. Recompiled FULL FreeBSD > grounds up using "native" option to produce it for i686, though the > performance did not change much. > > Installation of s/w: > I liked ports on FreeBSD, though that's way too time consuming and I > felt the returns were not worth the time. On both BSDs binary > installations were quick and smooth. Both BSDs seemed to lack a way to > cache downloaded package just in case if required again - which I get on > Fedora through yum. Instead of using, 'make install clean' for installing, try 'make package'. Should give you binary package which you can re-use. http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports.html Also, you may like to have a look @ http://pointyhat.freebsd.org/errorlogs/ Check http://pointyhat.freebsd.org/errorlogs/i386-8-packages-latest/ 'pkg_add -r' is useful. > Adding s/w from CD that was not chosen during installation: > Way too simple for Fedora. Some tweaks were needed for FreeBSD. On > NetBSD, had to reboot using the CD and making any error when re-choosing > package "sets" may wipe out your configuration options. I tend to use 'pkg_add'. > Compilation of 3rd party s/w from sources: > Painless on Fedora and FreeBSD. NetBSD required its own set of quirks > that suit its personality.. Part of the problems is the autoconf specs did > take FreeBSD into a/c though not NetBSD. > > Administration: > Some how feel /etc/rc.conf to be a good one stop shop on BSDs, though > some Linux flavors may already have adopted this. > > Support: > Did not need much on FreeBSD. On NetBSD, tried mailing lists for ext3 > issue. They are helpful, though did see some elitist smell. E.g. first > question shot back to me was "what do you mean by logical partition", when > in PC world we kind of take its meaning for granted. cd /usr/ports && make search key=ext2 | grep ^P http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook is worth reading. HTH. -- shantanoo _______________________________________ Pune GNU/Linux Users Group Mailing List
