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

...

" Linux distros for the most part offer 5GB of stuff and expect you to

minimize the software installed, somehow they want to be Windows?"

BSD is a fine choice, but just for clarity Linux is offered in many, many forms (http://www.linux.org/dist/index.html), some minimalist, some comprehensive, and most tailored to particular ranges of purposes.

Gary

----- Original Message ----- From: "John M McIntosh" johnmci@smalltalkconsulting.com To: "The general-purpose Squeak developers list" squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2005 12:27 AM Subject: Re: squeak on bsd (was: team laptop reports failure)

On May 30, 2005, at 2:40 PM, Jimmie Houchin wrote:

John Pfersich wrote:

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.

I look forward to hearing from Jecel on what he learns

I would think OpenBSD is more secure, after all that is it's mandate. NetBSD has a mandate to be available on *all* platforms, so different objectives. At a casual glance BSD systems (I've OpenBSD and FreeBSD) tend to offer a small core allowing you to boot a machine then apply ports of applications to build out the desired machine. Linux distros for the most part offer 5GB of stuff and expect you to minimize the software installed, somehow they want to be Windows?

I'll note all these BSD will allow you to install via floppy and the internet.

For OpenBSD Squeak ports & packages see http://www.monkey.org/openbsd/archive2/ports/200407/msg00069.html & http://www.openbsd.org/3.7_packages/i386.html squeak-vm-3.6.3p0.tgz Or for FreeBSD http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/ports.cgi?query=squeak&stype=all&release=... STABLE%2Fi386

Although these are older I've compiled the Squeak VM on my OpenBSD systems with a little bit of fiddling via our source tree.

PS Technically the largest BSD distribution is OS-X. Some of the key maintainers of FreeBSD now work at Apple after WindRiver wound down (ie Jordan Hubbard)

-- ======================================================================== === John M. McIntosh johnmci@smalltalkconsulting.com 1-800-477-2659 Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd. http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com ======================================================================== ===

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