From: htoaster@yabbs
To: phragger@yabbs
Subject: re: Which pub *nix to run...
Date: Sun Dec  5 10:26:24 1993

In message re: Which pub *nix to run..., phragger said:
> there is netbsd and freebsd  on the bsd side. netbsd is still very much in 
> its infancy, with yet no shared libs (kiss x goodbye) and even a machine 
> dependet kmem thingimajig (almost, called it an api, tsiisus), but they're 
> supposed to fix that "later".  netbsd is gonna be on very many platforms,
> amiga, apple, ipm, sun3, hp300. the amiga version  can do sun3 binaries, 
> etc. but as far as i know, everything except the ipm version are 
> betabetabeta. about freebsd i don't know much at all. somebody else prob 
> talk about that.  but the newse version is 1.1alpha (as far as i know) and 
> the only thing i know about it that it isn't "stable"....

netbsd 1.0 will have shared libraries, and you can already get support for 
them by compiling netbsd-current (which is pretty painless, I did it on a
friends machine).  Also, X runs fine in 8 megs, I have two computers in here
setup with NetBSD 0.9 (no shared libs), each of which has 8 megs (one is a
386/33 and one is a 486slc2/66 (sorta of a wierd system)).  Phred has 18 megs,
which is nice, but isn't totally necessary.

Also, amiga support is about as stable as the pc stuff from what I understand.
The mac system works pretty well on some systems, but neither the mac or amiga
versions have X running (from what I last heard).  And yes, both will run
sun3 binaries.

Linux really isn't a whole lot smaller than netbsd anymore, esp if you compile
netbsd with the shared libs.  Linux has so much extra kernel bloat (like drivers
for everything under the sun compiled into the distribution kernel) that their
kernel is actually bigger than the bsd kernel (with both kernels uncompressed).

In the future you might want to be a little more careful not to spread info 
that you don't know that much about.  NetBSD is very much a stable system to 
run under (much more so than Linux IMHO) and really is not missing any features 
that linux has, with the exception of a few drivers here and there.

alex