On Sun, 3 May 2009, Neal Hogan wrote:
On Sat, May 2, 2009 at 1:19 PM, Bret Busby <b...@busby.net> wrote:
On Sat, 2 May 2009, Neal Hogan wrote:
On Sat, May 2, 2009 at 9:30 AM, Douglas A. Tutty <dtu...@vianet.ca> wrote:
On Sat, May 02, 2009 at 06:27:44AM -0500, Neal Hogan wrote:
FYI - While many of the fBSD folks will tout there ports/package
system, I found it to be a pain (especially the upgrade), as did many
others. There has recently been some chatter on their general mailing
list to overhaul how they handle packages. Again, I found oBSD's
package handling system to be superior.
Last I looked (last week), OBSD doesn't have security updates (patches)
for their packages; they only provide patches for the base release. ?If
you want to run -current, then the packages get security patches. ?Since
I'm on dialup, that would mean a lot of bandwidth time; basically, every
time firefox or some third-party app required a security fix, I'd have
to download the source for _everything_ and recompile _everything_.
I don't want to labor this point here, but just one more thing. If you
are going to follow current, the recommended way to go about it is to
do binary upgrades of the kernel (i.e, snapshots). You don't have to
compile src every time. The same goes for packages, binary snapshots
of which are updated every few months or so (probably not that often).
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/current.html
Ah.
Maybe it's too complicated for me.
I was only ever a user on someone else's (educational instritution's) BSD
system, and did not do, or learn, sysadmin on BSD.
As a Linux user since around Red Hat 4 or 5, I have never compiled anything
in Linux, and have relied on package management, and have had problems with
software that involved using.tar.gz files to install, to the extent that I
gave up on any package that involved using .tar.gz files to install.
So, if BSD is more complicated than using package management like RPM in Red
Hat and .deb in Debian/Ubuntu, then it is probably too complicated for me.
It's not . . . http://www.openbsd.org/ports.html
--
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..............
One more thing, regarding the above; multiple booting.
On a (relatively) new laptop, that has 160GB of HDD space, thus leading
to the potential for multiple booting (at 20GB per OS, plus about 40GB
for data, that is many OS's), I was thinking (as it supposedly comes
with both Windows Vista, and Windows XP preinstalled) that it could be
possible to have multiple booting with Win Vista, Win XP, Debian Linux,
Ubuntu Linux, and one or more BSD's (OpenBSD and FreeBSD, possibly), and
thus, six OS's to play with (and learn).
However, on the web page at
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#Multibooting , under the heading
"4.8 - Multibooting OpenBSD/i386"
is
"Only one of the four primary MBR partitions can be used for booting
OpenBSD (i.e., extended partitions will not work)."
Whilst it would be a 64 bit version that would be intended to be
installed, to be able to use the full 4GB of RAM, I am concerned at the
reference to "the four primary MBR partitions".
Does this mean that only four OS's can be installed, for multiple
booting?
Whilst this may be digressing, a bit, into BSD stuff, I think that it is
still relevant here, as it relates to multiple booting, involving
Debian, and, to what extent it can be done, without having to resort to
virtual machines like VMWare.
Thank you in anticipation.
--
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..............
"So once you do know what the question actually is,
you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
Chapter 28 of Book 1 of
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
A Trilogy In Four Parts",
written by Douglas Adams,
published by Pan Books, 1992
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