[arachne] Re: Off Topic - LINUX/UNIX

Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!

On Thu, 30 Nov 2006, L.D. Best wrote:
After reviewing what M$ plans to do to Vista, it has become evident that when XP is no longer supported (or sooner if I'm able), I will be forced into running a LINUX system just to get the tools I'll need to still use the internet fully(Open Office, Sea Monkey, etc plus tools like GIMP). As much as
You might also want to consider one of the BSD flavors. I've been using FreeBSD as my desktop OS for the last 18 months or so. There are some advantages over Linux: 
1)  A more unified development philosophy.
2)  Over 14,000 ports (applications with source code ported to FBSD)
3)  Compatibility layer for Linux... you can run any Linux app on FBSD.
4)  The Handbook.  FreeBSD has probably the best documentation of any of
    the free OSs.  No need to waste half a day googling for answers when
    they're already on your machine... or you can view the handbook at
    http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/index.html
    None of the Linux distributions has anything close to that kind of
    documentation.
I love Arachne, and as loyal as I shall ever remain, I fear it will be awhile before Flash, ActiveX and a few other (no longer) bells and whistles will be fully supported by Arachne.
I hate gratuitous use of Flash, (which is about 99% of it)... so I have the FreeBSD Firefox set up with Java, and the Linux Firefox set up with Flash (both have JavaScript enabled). In general, I run the FreeBSD Firefox, and on those rare occasions when the flash content is something I actually want to see, I just fire up the other Firefox.
Although I have absolutely nothing I *must* do each day (other than downloading the spam and searching therein for meaningful messages -- much like stirring up the entrails of a chicken to see the future) I'm getting little I want to do done. Thus I have much spare time to learn about Linux, and Linux itself (if you know what I mean, cuz I'm not sure I do).
Procmail, spamassassin, mailfilter, filtermail, etc., are pretty much available for any 'nix. You can drastically cut down on the size of your haystack.
Therefore I come here to the forum of the adventurous and anti-doze computer geeks, wizards (wink), and workers ... believing that at least a few of you have experimented with Linux and some of those few may actually be running it somewhere. <G>
I still run Red Hat 6.2 on my news and database server, Vector Linux 5.8 on my wife's machine (one of the few distributions that recognized the oddball onboard Gateway LAN chip), but for the last 18 months, only FreeBSD on my desktop... which is also where http://wizard.dyndns.org/ lives.
I do want something a little less complex than Red Hat Server ... for now. But I don't necessarily want something which hides everything like 'doze does ... i.e. I want to be able to exercise some control, without having to *maintain* control constantly. Much like life in general, eh?
FreeBSD enables portaudit by default I think. Every night it checks in to see if there are any new security exploits, and on those rare occasions when one pops up, your root e-mail is notified. Other than that... you can pretty much coast along without any maintenance at all. 

  Installing new software is about as easy as it gets:
  Say I want to install SeaMonkey:
1)  cd /usr/ports/www/seamonkey
2)  make install
That's it. (yeah, there are GUI apps to make it pointy-clicky, but who wants that?)
Please do not get into any arguments about which is best/worse/worthless in/about Linux here in this forum ... wouldn't be fair, would be impolite. 

  They all have their advantages and disadvantages.
Howsomever I would delight in private e's sent my way at the e-dress above ... if I did it right, there may actually be a "Reply To" working on this message (Arachne is much easier!!). 

May you never ever run out of chocolate ...
Damn! I'm out of chocolate at this very moment. At least I have a good supply of Jelly Bellies though. :-)
A LOT of distributions are available on LiveCDs now. Download, burn, reboot, and you get to try a wide variety without ever touching your hard drive (i.e., take a chance on messing something up). Once you find THE ONE, it's a simple matter to install it... either by itself, or in coexistence with Windoze. 
  Check out http://distrowatch.com/
(I've tried about 19 of the top 25, and about 10 of the remaining top 100... the live ones only take a blank CD and a little time...) 

--
Steve Ackman
http://twoloonscoffee.com
http://twovoyagers.com
Arachne at FreeLists -- Arachne, The Premier GPL Web Browser/Suite for DOS --

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