Gentoo vs FreeBSD

pjj · Posted: Tue Feb 08, 2005 4:47 pm Post subject:

I have installed freebsd the ports are very cool (but I like emerge more btw). Also I couldn't get X and my Nvidia drivers working (that was 2 weeks ago). I think I am going to try it again and read how to install the freebsd kernel sources (they were required for the nvidia drivers).
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Jefklak · l33t Joined: 26 Oct 2003 Posts: 818 Location: Belgium

Has anyone ever tried FreeBSD on a laptop?
Hoes does ACPI management work? And the events?
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SJR3t2 · Posted: Thu Feb 10, 2005 4:35 pm Post subject:

I am currently have my spare Laptop HD with FreeBSD. I use it here and there. I have not tried to do anything with ACPI thou.

Steven

hotplainrice · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 25 Apr 2004 Posts: 92

Sfynx · n00b Joined: 01 Jun 2002 Posts: 50

I started with Gentoo, then started to experiment with FreeBSD. Now I'm using FreeBSD on my home desktop and server, and Gentoo on a remote server at university. I already thought of switching that one to FreeBSD several times, but both systems have their advantages and disadvantages...

A pro of Gentoo are the features of Portage... I especially love the world file/depclean feature not present in FreeBSD, and the USE-flags. In FreeBSD I have to babysit a big install with a lot of dependencies (like X or KDE) because a new configuration window may pop up. With the USE flags, all configuration can be done in advance. Then you can go to sleep when the thing is working, without it stopping half an hour later with a configuration question. Recently a patch has been made for FreeBSD Ports to somewhat overcome this (make config-recursive), but it hasn't made it into the official Ports tree yet.

Another advantage of Gentoo (and Linux in general) are of course the grsecurity/PaX kernel patches. FreeBSD does not have those security enhancing things AFAIK (except for their own ACL's that are no match to the advanced role based ACL's of the grsecurity patch IMO).

Now something I don't like about Gentoo (and Linux in general): to get it to be as fast as FreeBSD, I'd have to use kernel 2.6.. which honestly is still a development kernel until it gets stabilized by branching off a 2.7 tree. I have the feeling that, compared to Linux 2.6, developers don't mess a lot with the FreeBSD 5 kernel since it became the new production/stable release. Linux also had quite some serious kernel holes (just look at isec.pl), where I can't remember many similar things in FreeBSD during the same period. All reasons I think FreeBSD is better for servers that also need to have some speed/responsivity.

The only thing that really keeps me from switching to FreeBSD as a remote server right away, is the way the base system gets updated. If I want to do it the most safe way (the way it is described in the Handbook), I have to switch to single user mode. I never had to do that in Linux. There is no official way to do it over an SSH connection. So you try to do it in multi-user mode by shutting down as many services as you can without getting your SSH connection killed, and then perform the entire mergemaster -p/make installworld/mergemaster sequence on your production server and hope it comes back online after the reboot...
Now, I did this a lot of times already without a glitch, but as a 'server' operating system it surprises me that you have to go to your server physically (or have to use some serial console) to perform a base system upgrade the official way and have more downtime than during a Gentoo upgrade (I never have to shut down services there during an upgrade).

So I haven't made up my mind yet... The Gentoo box is running quite nicely though for almost 2 years, so I'll give it some thought whether a switch is worth it or not.
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spb · Posted: Tue Feb 15, 2005 1:16 am Post subject:

titan100 · n00b Joined: 06 Sep 2004 Posts: 61

I personally prefer freeBSD over any brand of linux. I do think that gentoo is great and use it at my workstation @ home, but I run freebsd on everyhing else, including my centrino aptop and 3 servers. No problems encountered and had much less trouble getting freeBSD to work on my nx7010 than gentoo.

I still love gentoo just freeBSD more

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Boinky · Apprentice Joined: 03 Dec 2004 Posts: 256 Location: Almere

Hello there,

I found this:

The numbers you see on uptime.netcraft.com for FreeBSD systems
are *all* FreeBSD 2.x machines. This is because Netcraft
calculates uptime based on the tcp packets it gets in responses,
and those tcp packets have an uptime counter in them. These
counters get reset every XXX days (where 100 > XXX > 1000 IIRC).

On Linux, it's never been able to go past so many days, so you'll
probably never see Linux in that list. On FreeBSD 3.x and later,
the tcp uptime counter was changed and it now runs out sooner. I
forgot the exact details on all these things, but that's how I
understand it, and because of a thread which brought this
information to me, I no longer try to pimp FreeBSD based on the
results of uptime.netcraft.com, because FreeBSD 2.x sucked.

~

Anyway, if someone cares to fill in the gaps here, that'd be
nice. But this is all just trivia anyway.

A more accurate uptime tracking system would be one that consists
of a client running on a machine and obtaining the uptime
directly from the kernel. Probably something like uptimes.net?

Cheers,

Robert
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float- · Apprentice Joined: 31 Aug 2003 Posts: 174

I have as many else tried FreeBSD, and would say if you are going for a OS on a desktop, go with Linux.
Well portage is now ported, but Linux has more cutting-edge support.
BSD-license is not GNU GPL :!:

codergeek42 · Posted: Tue Mar 01, 2005 7:34 pm Post subject:

One thing I like a lot about FreeBSD is the way you can intermingle packages from source and precompiled tarballs. But since everything that takes a long time to compile on my box (OpenOffice.org, Firefox and Thunderbird, etc.) has a -bin package available, I'm happy

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dasalvagg · Apprentice Joined: 26 Jun 2002 Posts: 183 Location: NY

I just posted a topic asking if there should be a Gentoo Free BSD group in this forum, then I found this thread. What do you think?

Original post:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-302297.html

petrjanda · Posted: Tue Mar 01, 2005 10:59 pm Post subject:

Im running gentoo at home, gentoo server at school, and freebsd in the DMZ.
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ag_x · Posted: Wed Mar 02, 2005 5:38 pm Post subject:

I found my freebsd machine pretty stable and almost as fast as my linux optimized installation.
One problem i have with it,is that i cant have a decent output for my mother language.I found an outdated one-liner localization guide for netbsd,so i had to do a lot of testing,to be able to write and read in my language,but with an awfull output that makes it rather unusable to work in daily basis.

Apart from that detail,ports are comparable with portage,freebsd kernel looks much more stable,documentation is quite rich and all the gnu software works pretty much the same way as in linux.
I found freebsd installation excellent,i could say much more easier even than a debian one(i had a full working systen in a less than a hour).
The only problem i see is the small user base,and the luck of support.As many in this forum,i believe the thing that really makes gentoo superior in the open source world,is the gentoo community.
Therefore i support dasalvagg's idea of a gentoo-freebsd group in our forum.

djdunn · l33t Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 810

Antimatter · Guru Joined: 11 Aug 2003 Posts: 463

so to get this straigh to get the best and most secure system it would be better to stay with something that i'm the most familar with, aka gentoo, or should i check out some varration of BSD such as openBSD i'm trying to figure out the most secure system to use as an firewall for my mini network, also an system that will have minimal downtime/upgrades and other issues?

now regarding downtime i probably could always end up having several distcc compiler all over the network to minimalize downtime via upgrading, and from what i know of portage the program still runs untill it get replaced upon restarting of the service so that would help the downtime greatly in upgrading.

so i'm sort of mixed between my familarity of gentoo and its possiable security flaw of having an compiler on the system as oposited to something alikin to openBSD

[edit]

one possiability that i didn't consder is that consdering i got 475 gig on my working/gaming machine i could always keep an chroot environment of the firewall, for whenever i upgrade anything i would just chroot into that environment and upgrade it and fix stuff up then copy only the binary, for the needed utilies such as iptables and so forth but don't copy over any sort of compiler binaries or so forth, i'm guessing its doable using a sort of a portage mirror of my own and building binary packadges for the system. but that would still give me the issue of bootstrapping and actualy geting the system up and running on that firewall machine.

spb · Posted: Thu Mar 03, 2005 3:19 pm Post subject:

The most secure system is the one you're most competent administrating. Nothing more, nothing less.

SJR3t2 · Posted: Thu Mar 03, 2005 5:41 pm Post subject:

Sticking with what you know is a very good, point. I just wanted to know peoples opinion, before I got real involved with one or the other. But it looks like I will be doing FreeBSD, and hoping that they adopt the Portage style of packages.

Steven

codergeek42 · Posted: Thu Mar 03, 2005 7:15 pm Post subject:

spb · Posted: Thu Mar 03, 2005 10:08 pm Post subject:

Antimatter · Guru Joined: 11 Aug 2003 Posts: 463

deprave · Posted: Sat Mar 05, 2005 1:18 am Post subject:

Portage is superior , come on mang what would u do with out portage? type more most likely and layzyness is key
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titan100 · n00b Joined: 06 Sep 2004 Posts: 61

rhill · Posted: Sat Mar 05, 2005 6:25 am Post subject:

groovy little installation guide here:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~citizen428/doc/gentoo-freebsd.html

i've never really looked into BSD before, but that handbook blows me away.

how far along is the G-BSD project actually? the default-bsd profile looks a little sparse, though that could be intentional.
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plbe · l33t Joined: 01 May 2004 Posts: 661

Boinky · Apprentice Joined: 03 Dec 2004 Posts: 256 Location: Almere

Hello there,

so, I decided to give it a try.

Installing a base FreeBSD system is very easy and quick. The central sysinstall utility is very nice to work with. FreeBSD MUST be installed in a primary partition. Don't expect all the eye candy you might be used to when installing or working with Gentoo. The FreeBSD Handbook is very good as is Gentoo documentation. However there is no forum such as this one. Chances are that you will get much more unpleasant (RTFM-like) reactions when asking something as a n00b ... and there is A LOT to read regarding FreeBSD ... ;-)

FreeBSD is very similar to Gentoo in several ways, yet it is also very different. It doesn't know ReiserFS for example but uses UFS2 instead. Devices also have totally different names. Mounting a USB stick for example in Gentoo goes like this:

# mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/flash

FreeBSD:

# mount -t msdos /dev/da5s1 /mnt/flash

I noticed that it takes a long time for a large USB drive to be mounted on FreeBSD. I don't know why that is. I needed to get used to using "scroll lock-arrow up/down" instead of "shift-page up/down" to scroll through text output.

The layout and syntax of /etc/make.conf is different and less flexible compared to its Gentoo cousin. I noticed however that whatever I did, the system load was allways very low. I can see why FreeBSD makes a great server OS. The TCP/IP stack is FAST too.

FreeBSD has two systems to install software: ports and packages. Ports is comparable to Portage, although Portage is much more sofisticated. Pkg_add is used to install precompiled packages (like apt-get). Precompiled FreeBSD packages are much more responsive than precompiled Gentoo binaries (which I rarely used). FreeBSD in general is faster and more responsive so there is less (or no) need to compile everything yourself using all kinds of optimizations. I noticed that compilation runs finish much faster on FreeBSD.

The disappointments started when compiling the FreeBSD nVidia drivers. It uses a Linux compatibility layer and starting X just froze the whole system. I have never seen this before: I couldn't do anything anymore. Switching to another console was impossible. I had to reset my PC ...

I managed to get X (Gnome) running on another PC on FreeBSD (without 3D hardware acceleration though). It was fast.

However, updating the system takes a lot more editing than I was used to on Gentoo. Something like a stage 1 installation on FreeBSD is possible but involves a lot of work.

To be honest: FreeBSD as it looks to me right now is much more of a server OS. I noticed for example that the GNU/Linux nVidia driver has evolved much more than its FreeBSD counterpart.

These were my first impressions of FreeBSD 5.3 ...

Cheers,

Robert
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"RTFM!", the Gentoo Guru said, "although you shouldn't pay too much attention to the guides because they're all extremely outdated..." -- I like that kind of absurd humour!