Subject: The impending death of Unix

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 31 Dec 1998 03:31:51 -0800 (PST)

I just got a new workstation at one of my jobs. It probably cost 
all of $1500, with its Sony 21" monitor, SCSI hard drive and 
128MB. What OS to run? Well, someone had a FreeBSD boot floppy, 
so we decided to give it a try because our experience was mainly 
with Linux, NetBSD, and some commercial Unixes. 

So we put the FreeBSD floppy in the drive, turned on the machine, 
and watched it probe and detect the hardware installed (CD, floppy, 
hard drive, ethernet) as it came up.

After booting, we gave it its net id, formatted the hard drive, & 
started up the FreeBSD install procedure, which downloaded the
basic stuff (from ftp.freebsd.org I believe). After the basic OS
was installed, we configured Xwindows with the neat new XFree86
config tool (e.g. it shows pictures of the different graphics
cards). Then I created accounts & copied over my environment from
my old sparc2. That was that. 

Since then, if I want something that didn't load as default, I 
use 'locate' to find the dir to go to, and do a 'make install': 
all the needed packages are automatically ftp'd from their default 
sites (or secondary if the default fails), patches for my OS/version 
are applied, and everything is compiled and installed. So far I've
done this for Netscape, ssh, xvnews, and xv (xv required about 5
other packages, e.g. a jpeg library).

This was on an AMD/K6/300MHz cpu. I know linux and NetBSD support
DEC alphas and linux at least runs on sparcs.

I believe linux is the same installation-wise (it's been a while 
since I installed it on my laptop), and CD's are available cheaply 
for both, in case one doesn't want to do it over the net.

Bottom line: these free OS's seem better than the commercial ones.
There seems to be both trading and competition between Linux, NetBSD 
and FreeBSD teams (and I imagine there is participation by OS people 
working for vendors). When I was configging things, some window asked 
me if I wanted to get freebsd mailings (yes). A couple of weeks later, 
I got a mail from freebsd.org about a denial-of-service security hole, 
and applied the indicated 1-line patch to the OS source file in 
question, rebuilt the OS, & rebooted ok.

Some may remember the CCL discussions that went on as people were
first discovering the web. The free OS phenomenon seems comparable
in its potential to change the computer business landscape, now that
the installation and upkeep are becoming so streamlined.

Bill Ross