[ale] Notes from FreeBSD 7, Solaris 10

[GLA]

Slightly off topic, but I figured it's occassionally worthwhile to check out the competition.
Since I've got an extra hard drive slated for next-week's Ubuntu install I thought I'd play in the mean time.

Aside from the /dev/c0d0t0s1 type disk madness... everything seemed pretty straight forward as far as unixness and I was rolling pretty much on instinct through the installs.

Install:
Solaris:
boots off the CD, prompted for locale, which partition, and maybe one or two other things and proceded to spend an hour grinding away at the DVD. Nothing but advertisements for feedback. No way to drop into a shell and watch what's going on.

FreeBSD:
Reminded me of when I was installing Slackware off of a Stack of 20 floppy disks.
It boots, auto detects the hardware fairly well, then drops you into the ncurses (expect?) menu tree for an install much like slackware. Partitioning was fairly straight forward, although not with the ease of cfdisk. It provided pregrouped sets of packages for install - ie 'developer, x-developer, user, x-user' etc.

I selected x-developer and proceded, but then found that I ended up with a nice basic gnome desktop, but... lacking basic things like firefox...

The REALLY annoying thing about FreeBSD, was that although it has very good man pages - they didn't include catman by default... so although 'apropos' was there, I couldn't run it. And couldn't After I finally got apropos working I was pretty much home free between the 'handbook' and manpages for getting started.

I also found that although the primary ports system for install requires gentoo style compile of everything - they do have a sane binary package system that allows you to do 'pkg-add -r foo' and it will pull full off a server and install it.

I ran gentoo for a while, and liked the global flags - where you could enable options and librarys for every package you install^H^H^H^H^H^H compile... but I've always loved debian, then later ubntu and deb's. Aptitude is by far my favorite interface of all time for package management. I tried hopping on #FreeBSD and tried extolling the virtues of Aptitude and it's quick categorical/hierarical/searchable interface with drill-down into dependencies, etc etc... and they couldn't get beyond 'we've got an ncurses tool (sysinstall) ... it's the slackware looking thing'

Last note on BSD - I crashed it twice in the first day. The first time, I unplugged a USB harddrive right after I'd plugged it in, before it had settled - and got a kernel segfault. Second time I forget what happened but it froze. Not what I'd expected since I'd always heard it was rock solid.

I only briefly played with ZFS and did not touch Jails yet.


Solaris:

Not as strange as VMS. But working on it. Actually - It was much cleaner install and less problems than the last time I tried with Solaris 7 x86. After I got it up and running, it rebooted into a gnome desktop, and even popped up a window telling me I wasn't plugged into a lan, but the following wifi nets are available, which I thought was a nice touch. Except that since I had WPA2 ... wireless didn't work until I spent and hour learning about 'svcs' and 'svcadm.'

Although the learning curve was much steeper (couldn't just run on instinct and apropos as I could with FreeBSD) I wasn't put off until I hit the package system, of course.

There are Sun packages, then several other unofficial package respositories (like Blastwave). Sun packages put themselves under various parts of /usr. Other repositories create a whole /usr/{lib,bin,share,...} tree under /opt and you control what get searched when by setting $PATH.

The end result, was that although the default system includes a full gnome install... when I did a 'pkg-get pidgin' on the blastwave repository, it proceeded to install 50 different gnome dependencies into /opt/ that were already installed in the system under /usr.

I did not get far enough to play with Zones and ZFS before I pulled the drive and threw my linux image back in.