Why a *BSD?
It's interesting that on many of the net discussions about Linux, mention is often made about Unix Sysadmins and their take on this newest Unix-like OS.  Many of them have commented that they can install it and basically find their way around it with little or no difficulty.

I, on the other hand, have had very little exposure to Unix other than occassionally putzing around with my Banyan Vines servers, which run on a Unix kernel.   What I have found, after running 4 different distributions of Linux over a period of about 7 months, is that when I decided to try one of the *BSDs, the directory structures and "concepts" were already familar to me from having learned Linux (so familar that within a couple days of getting it installed and running, I recompiled the kernel!   Yeah...   Compile queen couldn't help herself - I just had to do it...   hee hee).   In fact, in my opinion, Linux would make a good "teaching OS" for those who wish to go further with the commercial Unises, and in fact, Computer Departments in colleges nationwide are using Linux as such a teaching OS, which not only teaches the concepts behind PC hardware but application programming and kernel hacking.

My decision to try a *BSD was primarily due to the fact that roughly 50 - 60% of the internet runs on a Unix or Unix-like product such as the *BSDs.   Most ISPs (particularly the smaller ones) run either FreeBSD (the largest share), NetBSD, or Open BSD.   The largest and busiest internet search engine, YAHOO!, runs on FreeBSD.   Many others run the commercial products like Solaris, OpenVMS, and BSDI and in fact, in an interesting development this past week (2nd week of March, 2000), BSDI has decided to merge with Walnut Creek (a big supplier of *nix-based CDs) to form what should be an interesting partnership.

The declared "monopoly" status of Microsoft has rallied many of the commercial and non-commercial Unix and Unix-like OSs to "come out of the back closets and back server rooms", so to speak, and publicly identify themselves as having always been the backbone of the internet, with the ability to provide a fairly stable, robust, and inexpensive (in the case of the *BSDs) platform for day to day, corporate and enterprise use.   It is unfortunate that most in the non-technical, end-user community, believe that because Microsoft has cornered the desktop market, that somehow their upstart and relatively new NT product, must have always been in the backend as well.   As we all know, it has not and cannot possibly do what the *nixes and VMSs have done for over 3 decades.   Microsoft's recent release of Windows 2000 as the be-all, end-all "enterprise" NOS, has yet to prove itself and it will certainly take some time before it can do so.

Why NetBSD?
Once I made the decision to try a *BSD and found a newly refurbished machine (a Compaq Presario 5360, AMD K6-2/450) to put it on, I decided to do some reading and research to select which one I wanted like to try.   Most of the "free" BSD sites run FreeBSD, and so I looked there first.   One thing that I had to keep in mind was the hardware that this Presario has and the support required for that hardware.   Interestingly enough, although USB support for Linux is only now being added with the newest 2.3x and 2.4x kernels, the *BSDs have already had that support built in.   In addition, both the *BSDs and Linux can use XFree86 as an X server and I noted that the latest 3.3.x version (3.3.5) offered full support for this Presario's SiS 530 video chip (note too that this past month, XFree released the 4.0 version!).   In addition, the motherboard has an ESS Solo-1 sound chip and that was an issue on my multimedia machine, Falcon, whereby I had to get an ALSA driver for it (and later tried 4Front's OSS driver - to be described in an update for Falcon).   The *BSDs offered native support for that chip (yay!).   In a nutshell, as I read more and more info on FreeBSD, I found that they are probably the most supported of the *BSDs, application-wise, mainly due to the proliferation of it.

Regardless, I read on, checking out OpenBSD's site and found myself impressed with the security focus of OpenBSD, critical in these times of continuous site defacing, DDoSing, and other cracking going on out there on the net.   I was very close to choosing it, as I had intended (and may still do it) to give this machine my 2nd, paid-for IP, putting it outside my firewall, but then I found that a number of applications that I thought I might like to try hadn't been ported to it.   I expect that this will change as more use it, but again, as a newbie, I wanted to be able to make some kind of "smooth" transition from Linux, so I read on and checked out NetBSD's site.

What I saw there was fascinating in that they presented themselves in a very low key, humble, and unassuming light.   Some have commented that NetBSD "is the Debian of the *BSD world" and it really is.   The Debian/GNU Linux project has often billed itself as NetBSD has - "no code released before it's time", focussing on getting as much non-buggy code out in a release, even if it means that they ship "later than expected" or find themselves several kernel versions behind.   NetBSD also boasts the greatest number of ports of it to other platforms such as the PPC, MIPS, Alpha, SPARC, etc.

There are times when I MUST go for the bleeding-edge (particularly to get the multimedia stuff going), and I by no means have even attempted installing Debian at home, but NetBSD's site and philosophy were appealing to me and gave me some hope that as a truly green newbie to this, I could at least count on not having too many unpleasant surprises from an install of NetBSD.

It's sometimes deadly to not market yourself, as the Banyan Corporation discovered, especially when you have such a good, stable product.   However, I wish NetBSD all the best for going for results and not hype.   NetBSD is fortunate (and perhaps not really comparable to something like Banyan or other corporate-produced products) in that the project was not created as a commercial, for-profit entity.   Thus, although funding might be tight, profits and bottom-lines, and stockholders are not their game.   Therefore they don't have that constant pressure to have to compete by putting out a product that's not quite ready for prime time just to grab market share, and then risk the loss of credibility if the product fails to deliver as promised.

I'm hoping for this to be a good learning experience and also hoping that should I ever end up running into a "commercial" Unix, like Solaris 8 (which, by the way, is now shipping for "free as in beer" but not as a GPL), I'll have enough background to be able to move around it!
 
 

NOTICE:   "Linux" is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.   "Microsoft","Compaq Presario", "Solaris", and any other product/company mentioned on this page or at this site, are trademarks and/or copyrights of their respective companies.