I'm trying to figure out if there is a good reason to move from FreeBSD to Debian Linux, or run both.
I have FreeBSD 3.1 installed and I've done some perl web programming, running only X-windows, emacs, apache and netscape. I was fine and happy. A Slackware Linux fan at work told me FreeBSD is behind the curve, too conservative. Linux has all the latest drivers, etc, -- go with Linux. So, I thought I would give Linux a try. First I got lost in which distro to go with. I spent a whole bunch of time before I decided on Debian. Debian seems to be the most conservative of the bunch, kind of the freebsd camp of the Linux world. As far as graphic card drivers go every one depends on Xfree86 so end of story there. As for drivers for my soundblaster live, they are in the experimental stage in FreeBSD and in Linux you need a special version of the kernel. which leads me to ease of installation. FreeBSD is a snap to install. I got lost in the Debian installation guide. There's 4 different versions of the kernel you can choose from, there's files to pull from several different directories, etc. I wanted to do a multi-boot system, win98 and Debian. I used partition magic to set up these little slivers of partions, 500 MB for /root, 100 MB for /tmp, 2 gigs for /var, etc. Partition magic took forever, created half of them and gave up. Maybe FreeBSD was easier to install because I gave it its own disk. Just make 2 boot floppies, do a network install, and off and running. So now I see no really good reason to leave FreeBSD for Linux. Am I missing something, besides the license issue? greg strockbine
