Re: Boot Easy

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

>>>>> "Jim" == Jim Schweizer <schweiz@example.com> writes:

    Jim> Hi all, I just picked up a copy of FreeBSD 2.1.5 so I could
    Jim> compare it to Linux (and hopefully understand Linux better by

You should find that you don't really see any difference.  All of the
user-level programs are the same (GCC, bash, etc, et al.)  You may
find that some things work better and others worse because of
different bugs in the kernel (eg, your image-maps might suddenly start 
working, although I still think that was a configuration bug, not a
problem with the servers).

I used 386BSD for a while back in its v0.1 days; it was amusing but
DESQview/X over DOS (there was no working X for 386/BSD then) was a
more productive environment.  I think csh was the standard shell then;
other than that it looked a lot like Linux or SunOS or Ultrix at the
user level.

System administration will be a little different, but many of the
system administration tasks on Linux are done via BSD utilities ported 
to the Linux environment, so I suspect even that will be familiar.

Back when I started with Linux, there was a big debate, even flamewar, 
over the relative advantages.  The BSD crowd pointed to better (more
stable) networking and a more unified development process; Linux had
better console user interfaces and more applications.  I never did get 
around to installing FreeBSD though, because about that time there
were *big* improvements in Linux networking, and I found that Linux
was far more stable than my ISP's system (by which I mean the
University of Tsukuba's Scientific Information Processing Center and
SINET).  :-P

I've talked to a few BSD fans, and basically what it comes down to is
that BSD is a "man's" OS with good thread support and robust
networking; some prefer the programming interface although Linux is
quite BSD-ish there.  However, free software being what it is, Linux
has borrowed a lot of the code from the FreeBSD project, and
capabilities have converged.

If I were you, I'd see if I could find a BSD user group to talk to and
see if you really are going to see benefits from fooling around with a
new system.  Not being a user myself, the above impressions are not
very reliable; but I can say that it's not out of the realm of
possibility that you'll find yourself making a fair investment only to
find that the only difference you can see is in uname's output!

    Jim> doing so) and I wondered if any of you have tried to use Boot
    Jim> Easy (the default boot manager for BSD) to boot LILO?

If BSD is going to be your alternative system, I'd do it the other way
around, arrange for BSD's boot record to be stored in a partition, and 
have LILO boot that partition.  If you screw up the Boot Easy -> LILO
-> Linux configuration, consequences will be *dire*.

I'm sure Boot Easy is much more accomodating than MicroShaft's
Windowze95 bootdozer or OS/2's bootmangler, but those two examples
should give you fair warning of the headaches that mixing boot
managers can be.

    Jim> Also, the FreeBSD docs say that it should work on almost any
    Jim> file system but didn't mention ext2 by name. Anyone tried to
    Jim> install BSD on a Linux partition?

The kernel needs to understand the file system's structure.  So unless
support for an ext2 fs is compiled in to the FreeBSD kernel, it won't
work.  You're asking for trouble IMHO if you install FreeBSD into an
existing Linux partition; each OS should have its own.  You won't be
able to use your Linux programs; the system calls are different.
POSIX, to the extent that it's followed, makes C programs portable at
the *source* level; binary compatibility is not assured (ie, library,
calling sequence, types of arguments and return values---these are
typedef'd in the /usr/include/sys/*.h files and in GCC configuration,
so you can use standard typedefs to match library types to user
program types, but this does not guarantee that the underlying
implementation type is the same, they might be 16-bit vs 32-bit ints,
for example).  Certainly implementation of ioctls will be different.
大変や。

Bottom line (AFAIK): if you don't have a 100MB partition lying around
to install the system into, and let it use its native FS there, it's
not going to work well.

Oh, by the way, did I mention that your Linux XFree86 binaries almost
certainly won't work?  Make that at least a 200MB partition, my
/usr/X11R6 du's to 76.7MB all by its lonesome.

    Jim> Oopps sorry, that leads to yet more questions. Anyone using
    Jim> Linux in a classroom full of 6-10 year olds? Any suggestions
    Jim> for education related software on Linux?

Most games CDs have educational sections.  I would suggest browsing
around the archives at SimTel and UUNet in the DOS/Windows sections to 
see what's around.  If it's console-oriented, you can probably build
it out of the box.  If it's GUI, porting might be a big task, but
maybe somebody's already done it and you can find it on AltaVista or
with archie.

These 6-10 year olds are Japanese kids doing eikaiwa, no?  There are
lots of Hangman-type games that don't require all that much beyond a
console.  Many support full-screen (character) interfaces; you aren't
going to compete with Sony's PlayStation for realism, but you knew
that anyway....

I have done some computer work with kids ("Where in the ... is Carmen
SanDiego" goes well with 9-12 year-old returnees from English-speaking
countries---we see lots of them in Tsukuba; I believe it ran in an
XDOS window, but not very well), but kid-teaching is not my main line.
I do strongly advise that if you've got a classroom "full" (ie, more
than four) of 6-10 year olds that you prepare very well to have the
remainder kept very busy (or have *lots* of workstations); two or
three kids per workstation is optimal IMO.  More than four leads to
fights very quickly, even with close supervision, less than two is
anti-social at that age.

Steve

-- 
                           Stephen John Turnbull
University of Tsukuba                                        Yaseppochi-Gumi
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences  http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba, 305 JAPAN                 turnbull@example.com
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