Jimmie Houchin wrote on Mon, 30 May 2005 16:40:28 -0500
> I've am (been) exploring my OS options.
> I've looked somewhat into OpenBSD in the last couple of days as I read a 
>   review mentioned on LWN (Linux Weekly News)  http://www.lwn.net at
> NewsForge http://os.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/05/20/1426216&from=rss
> 
> In the article it mentioned things you won't get with OpenBSD like 
> proprietary or more restricted licensed software, such as Apache 2...
> Yuck. Seems to be quite political.

Well, Bruce warned about this in his original BSD suggestion. There is
also FreeBSD, which seems very popular among ISPs.

> I think too many of the Linux distros are too political.
> That's why most of them won't include Squeak.

Does any other than Debian have objections? It might just be a matter
for nobody doing the required work for it to be included. Like Göran did
for Lunar Linux, for example.

> However, NetBSD seems interesting. It even includes the Squeak vm.
> Cool!
> ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/pkgsrc/lang/squeak/README.html
> How many linux distros from the distro source contain such?
> Are there any?
> 
> I don't know that NetBSD is going to be any significantly or inherantly 
> less secure than OpenBSD.

They certainly look equivalent in this regard at first glance.

> I look forward to hearing from Jecel on what he learns.

I was very impressed with the PDF documentation. And the 170MB install
ISO was certainly refreshing in these days of DVD distributions. Sadly
the CD hangs while booting on the intended machine, though it seems to
work on others I have. The problem is probably the (unused) SCSI
interface - this is a rather odd Intel server board. So I have already
moved on to the next attempt. Too bad, because I am sure I would have
liked the NetBSD option most of all. I didn't find out if I would have
been able to run Squeak on the framebuffer or if that is only a Linux
thing.
 
> I would also be very interested in hearing what Jecel has to say about 
> his view of negative features with some Linux distros and also FreeBSD.
> What are the negative features spoken of?

Size and lack of control. Some distributions aren't very usable if you
don't install X and either KDE or Gnome, for example. And a lot do
things in fancy and automatic ways which when they don't work for my non
standard requirements it becomes ten times more complicated to get
things running than when I manually edited configuration files.

Linux has been my main desktop OS since 1994 and I don't have any
problems with its variations either technically or politically. But for
such a simple system starting with a popular distribution and getting
where I want is like stripping Squeak  to get a tiny image plus some
application. It isn't hard, but can waste more time than I would like.

> I've never used a BSD and currently not knowledgable about the 
> difficulty of install. I guess I need to go learn. :)

See chapters 4 through 7 in http://www.netbsd.org/guide/en/ (or the PDF
version, like I did). It is closer to Slackware than Mandrake (ooops...
Mandriva) but seems easy enough to me, specially if you can allow it to
take over the whole disk.

I also looked into the OSKit option and think I have a good idea of how
long that would take. So I added it to my list of things to do, a few
items away from the top, unfortunately.

-- Jecel