Chromies wrote:
How's configuring the net on it? and do u think it will run on a p2 266 laptop with 160 megs of ram?
Okay, I guess I never posted my second rant on the subject - in short, it's the 'other' flavor of 'UNIX' - Linux copied the AT&T SVR4? methodologies in a lot of places, modern BSD is a straight descendent of the Berkeley branch of UNIX that was a heavy modification of older AT&T/USL/whoever-the-heck's sources. So yes, it feels a lot like UNIX - it's a very close relative, though the developers respect the Open Group and don't go marketing it under the trademark - while something like BeOS, or even Linux is, well, BeOS and Linux. There's not quite the 'genetic relationship;' Linux does a particularly good job of cloning and extending, which is great... Be was definitely off doing its own thing. If you want to argue how "close" one thing is to anything else. (In particular, you wind up using many of the same shells, same XFree86, same window managers and desktop environments, and same grep/awk/sed/tar... tools on BSD and Linux, though some of the basic stuff might be different from the GNU variants and vice-versa.)
BSD gets a server reputation solely because none of the distros focus much on setting up XFree86 and desktop environments (GNOME/KDE) out of the box. (FreeBSD sysinstall does offer the option; I can't say I've ever trusted it.
) That's really the only difference, and once you know what you're doing, it's trivial to install such packages after the fact. (Though when you look at the bloat, you may not want to.) There's also a little less support for desktop 'esoterics' like video capture cards, but that's mostly a factor of attention, and as more people get annoyed and write code, more support's submitted. With fewer people in general, there are fewer people spending their time tackling braindead hardware or uncooperative manufacturers (and less impetus for manufacturers to get off their butts and stop being braindead in 'our' direction vs. the more popular Linux)...
Meanwhile, OS X is pretty okay, "I guess." They've done a fair-to-middling job, they've done some stuff I like, they've done a number of things I find rather braindead, and from my angle, it's not much fun to use it as a UNIX. (The 'power' is there, few of the conveniences for doing UNIX-type things are; you have to go out of your way to install whatever Fink needs, for instance, and since their kernel (kernel-on-kernel?) is of fairly insane structure and untested, it's not been as stable as an old, boring, monolithic Linux/BSD in my experience... and while the NeXTianisms are cool, it does mean you need a good background in NeXTland to really do 'UNIX-like tasks' - user management, starting network/system services and such - out of the box.) Enjoy it as a Mac, enjoy it for having 'the power of UNIX' on a Mac...
...but there's just no reason to install Darwin on its lonesome unless you *really* have a reason for it. (Poor x86 hardware support, wonky architecture in general, Apple bureaucracy around the whole thing.) Now, if your reason is to do some serious kernel hacking or otherwise help out (maybe you like Apple?), go ahead, but it's not what I'd call a sane introduction to *NIX when there are other distros out there to run. It takes a strong man to make a tender Macintosh.
--
Okay, as to comfort on a P2-266, sure! Your RAM is fine; you'll probably want at least 2gb disk (which you no-doubt have), 4gb for comfort with FreeBSD. Any of the distros should run fine on that hardware, but you should keep in mind that the BSD philosophy tends to revolve around compiling source. You'll find most software in 'Ports' (or 'pkgsrc' on NetBSD) - "we"'re where Gentoo got the idea. When it comes to waiting for XFree86 or KDE, however, a 266 is going to feel a little slow, so pick a distro that has the stuff you want available as precompiled binary 'packages.' (FreeBSD maintains binary packages for nearly everything you could want to run; OpenBSD has a few - but also has a relatively small collection of 'desktop' ware available in general; NetBSD maintains a good many as well -
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/1.6.1/i386 as example - but they may not be updated as often because of the slower release cycle. They do have a -latest directory, which might prove me wrong.)
From there, you'll find that BSDs generally fit *better* on old hardware, since you're not expected to run something like KDE or Gnome by default (which you might find rather pokey and RAM-gobbling on a machine of your spec), let alone XFree86 at all, and you can assemble your installation as you see fit.
On the Linux front, Gentoo, Debian (if you can figure out how to drive it; I found *BSD *easier* in comparison, which is how I ended up here), and Slackware seem to have the same methodologies. RedHat, Mandrake, Lycoris and so on will spoil you with more preconfiguration and shiny management tools on fresh hardware, but if all you're doing is pointing-and-clicking distro-specific tools, you aren't really 'learning' the underlying system anyway.
Think of the friendlier Linux distros as PCs with Win3.x preloads. Convenient, easy, but they can trick you into coasting along with no idea how to handle it when things break. (Or with no realization of how hairy the underlying system is - that goes for both Linux *and* BSD; the more people who notice stupid things, the better chance they get corrected. Meanwhile, to raise a gripe about OS X, there seems to be some rare but heavily destructive bug in the power-management cycle not fixed in any update to 10.1. My cousin's iBook has been out of comission for a few months, since I'm loathe to sit through another reinstall and have the Finder corrupt beyond recovery in another week - it's unclear if 10.2 ever fixed it, and since he doesn't use it beyond a status symbol, might as well wait to pay for 10.3 and have a better chance. Apple, meanwhile, has nothing to say about the problem; out in real open-sourceland, you can at least track your bug report and any developer-list discussion.)
