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FreeBSD 4.0 Code Freeze
FreeBSD has now entered code freeze for the up and coming 4.0
release. In the words of Jordan Hubbard, the release engineer; The code freeze will last for 15 days, during which time the 4.0
snapshot server (current.freebsd.org) will be cranking out its daily
snapshots (and, in the last half of the release cycle, ISO images as
well). 4.0 is the first release from the latest FreeBSD -current development branch. Work also continues on the 3.x -stable branch.
Taking your example:
;-) the Unix philosophy of daisy-chaining tools, but why would any sane person use tar (a tape archival program) to copy files around on the hard drive, especially given the existance of a copy program (cleverly named cp to confuse the non-elite)?
cp -Rv
there is no direct BSD equivalent, but I'd tend to use something like:
tar cf - src | (cd dst;tar xvf -)
in any case. cp has entirely too many options as it is. It's easier for me to remember the tar pipeline than the two dozen options that GNU cp supports.
Except that that is NOT the equivalent command. cp -R preserves all permissions. tar -cf doesn't. To use your method, I'd have to remember a ton of obscure tar options (something like tar --preserve-permissions -cf).
Furthermore, I'm well-aware of (and use and abuse
Doing a "make config" (or its curses or X11 equivalent) in Linux is a tremendous leap of faith compared to configuring a BSD kernel. There are over a hundred questions to be answered, and a wrong answer to any one of them can torpedo your chances at a working kernel. You're no more vulnerable editing a BSD config file, and in fact if you have a listing of the LINT config you usually know just what you need to know to enable/disable any given option or driver.
I have no idea what makes you say that. The linux compilation system has online help. Wondering if you should pick High Memory? Look at the built-in help and see that no, you probably shouldn't. The equivalent for FreeBSD is scanning LINT, seeing
# POSIX P1003.1B
# Real time extensions added int the 1993 Posix
# P1003_1B: Infrastructure
# _KPOSIX_PRIORITY_SCHEDULING: Build in _POSIX_PRIORITY_SCHEDULING
# _KPOSIX_VERSION: Version kernel is built for
options "P1003_1B"
options "_KPOSIX_PRIORITY_SCHEDULING"
options "_KPOSIX_VERSION=199309L"
and still not having a clue whether you need it or not, because LINT doesn't tell you what it does (and yes, I know what that particular example is for; it's just an example).
Furthermore, though, I'm still not sure why you think saying yes to an option you should have said no to in a GUI (the Linux kernel compilation error model) of some sort is qualitatively more error-prone than not typing in an option you should have typed in in a text editor (the *BSD compilation error model). Your argument is specious.
I agree (as would a fair amount of the BSD community) that Linux is getting an edge in SMP. The fact is that this is often of limited importance for well-designed server installations.
That's nice, but not all the world is needing single-cpu server installations. I'm in the sciences. We use SMP workstations. Our servers are computing servers (eg, number-crunching, not data-slinging a la Yahoo!), and you can bet that they're seriously SMP. The Linux model of supporting both styles of computing is why we use it both places. Your poor SMP performance is relegating you to two places:
(a) extremely small / focused servers [which is where I use FreeBSD: departmental print server, various routers, etc.]
(b) rather unusual large-server farms [like Yahoo! and Hotmail]
And note that Linux fits into those niches quite nicely as well. We have an SMB Linux server for the department, and DejaNews is the classical example of (b) for Linux.
However, Linux also at the same time makes a much better OS for my four-way PIII number-cruncher.
The article didn't even mention *bsd being superior to Linux, it just mentioned that FreeBSD was undergoing a code freeze in anticipation of the 4.0 release. It seems somebody is being a bit defensive...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I often hit no where I mean yes in make config under linux. My linux system is a 386 with 8 meg of ram, 80 meg hd, no monitor (normally). I telnet in, (from a TERM that isn't in linux's termcap database, at least not for my distribution, and with my space limits I won't want to fix it. this is a headless router after all)
On the above system I know exactly what I have and what I want. So I start out fine, and get to ethernet. I select my card, but then need to say no to the next 20 options. On a loaded 386, there is a noticeable lag between hitting a key and the next option coming up. I hit n (no) 20 times, and go to the bathroom. Get back, and the system is still churning my inputs. Opps, should have hit n 19 times, I needed the 20th option. Start over. I know I shouldn't work like this, but take a close look, there are many options in a row that I don't need before the next one I need - this is boring to watch. It gets worse the second time around, now all the defaults by one are correct, so hit enter a million times hoping I don't get bored and hit enter right through the option that I wanted.
I much prefer the config on my FreeBSD system. Once it is setup, it is always there, and I only need to glance at LINT to see if I want something new.
does anyone know of a decent pointy clicky or curses info viewer?)
:-)
pinfo. It made me like info pages
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
It is certainly different in the sense that FreeBSD development is more integrated than Linux. FreeBSD is after all a complete distribution and not "just" a kernel with several alternative distribution. Probably it is more fair to compare the development processes of Linux kernel + FSF + Debian to FreeBSD.
obFreeBSDExperience
I mostly use Linux, but I tried FreeBSD for a short time. It's extremely cool if you have a fast internet connection since it is extremely simple to decide one day that you want to try tcsh, go to the tcsh ports directory and type
make. The build script will grab the source for tcsh, patch it for FreeBSD if necessary, build it, and you can intall it with make install.
FreeBSD also has more complete and accurate man pages than Linux (and none of that info nonsense either (does anyone know of a decent pointy clicky or curses info viewer?)). It doesn't support all the exotic (crappy?) hardware that Linux does. And it uses BSDish utilities and config files (surprise surprise).
Currently the last point is keeping me from switching to BSD on my home box. (well that and the fear of destroying my Windows partition (blush)).
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
In what sense? There's probably not a current "UNIX" on the planet that has code that's identical to the last UNIX released by UNIX System Laboratory, unless you count Unixware (on the grounds that SCO bought USL from Novell who bought it from AT&T) - the other major commercial licensees have generally added a fair bit of their own code, and the Berkeley folk replaced rather a lot of it as well.
Linux never started with AT&T code, but I'm not sure how much that matters at this point.
Yes, there's some support in the current 2.2.x kernel. I'm not sure how it compares with the *BSD support; in the drivers/usb directory of 2.2.13 there appear to be keyboard, mouse, and audio drivers.
Well seeing as I have been running both BSD and Linux servers in production for about 5 years now. I can honestly say I have never experinced any of the formentioned problems with either system.. Which is odd if you ask me, since you seem to have multiple differnt problems all at once. I suggest you go to redhat's site and verify that you are not using tier 3 hardware? :)
-- You can be a geeklord too
Don't know about yours, but my tar preserves permissions. Admittedly, using tar in this way is idiomatic--one of those arcane Unixisms (though it goes back 30 years). Perhaps you'd prefer cpio which was explicitly created to facilitate pipelined use, and has a more intuitive name.
As for configuration, if you don't understand what something is in a BSD config file, just leave it alone. If you know just what POSIX scheduling or syscall compliance mean, the configuration you quoted from "LINT" makes perfect sense. If you don't know just what these things are, one-paragraph Linux-style help isn't going to be nearly enough--except that it might say "you probably want this" or "you probably don't want this." In BSD-land the attitude of "don't touch what you don't understand yet" will pull you through as least as well, though perhaps without the personal touch of the computer addressing you in the second person. In either case, a good session of RTFM is called for.
You keep defensively referring to "You" and "Your" in your post; who are you speaking of? Me? I use both FreeBSD and Linux, and see no need to defend one side against the other. Yahoo! uses Solaris, Linux, and WinNT--whatever is appropriate for a task--and not just FreeBSD (though the latter does all the heavy lifting).
FreeBSD wouldn't be my choice, either, for a scientific computation server. I'm curious, though, why you chose Intel P-III's for a platform. Most science codes aren't written for SMP (often the algorithms used don't adapt to concurrency in any case) so you're limiting them to the speed of a single P-III, which has pretty anemic floating-point performance. Why not use Alpha, which runs Linux very well and has world-class FP performance, both SMP and UP? Scientific computing is one of the few areas where Alpha is still cost-effective compared to Intel.
Like I said, whatever is appropriate for a task...
"And seeing as freebsd ships with about 1/3rd of the installed applications its not surprising there are slightly less security anouncements"
And that right there is a huge advantage (and one that Slackware shares). Debian may come with thousands of packages, but they aren't the OS. In a lot of Linux distros, it's very hard to draw the line between the operating system and the optional packages. But with FreeBSD, the OS is the OS is the OS. Ports and packages are distinct.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
If I understand correctly, the reason FreeBSD does not use DOS-Extended is because it's just that, DOS. BSD style slices may have been a great idea in the past, but new harddrives are large enough to hold multiple and complete operating systems. It's getting harder and harder to give each OS it's own primary partition under 1024 cylinders. But harddrives are also cheap enough to give each OS it's own drive (at Fry's yesterday there was a 4.5Gig drive cheaper than the Win98 upgrade).
:-)
I blew away Windows so that FreeBSD would have it's own harddrive, and I've not regretted it one bit
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The "Right Thing", trademarked by MIT, has already been tested against the "Good Enough" mindset of UC Berkeley. Unix is here to stay. Now what was the name of that MIT operating system again? I forget.
Linus followed the the UCB mindset and had a Good Enough kernel in no time. GNU followed the MIT mindset (of course) and they still don't have a halfway stable Right Thing kernel.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
This is news for nerds and stuff that matters. Nowhere does it say that Slashdot is GNU or Linux only.
I would suggest checking your bigotry and zealotry at the door...
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Now they announce the 4.0 freeze just one week after I shelled out $39.95 for 3.4. I guess it's time to subscribe...
:-) It's pointless to ask if *BSD can do this, that or the other, because it can. The installation was very easy, and anyone who has ever done an old-fashioned Linux text-based install will have no problem. The disk partioning scheme is a bit different. FreeBSD will not use logical partitions, so don't expect to install it to hda8 :-)
Anyway, for newbies to FreeBSD (and I am certainly still one of them), you will find that it is yet another Unix
And one feature I exceedingly like is the size of FreeBSD. Like Slackware (my other OS), the core of FreeBSD is very small and minimal. You can install it in about 10 minutes. Unlike R*, D*, or S*, you don't have to wade through thousands of packages for a custom install. You can do that afterwards if you want. This may not seem like a big deal to some people, but thousands of packages to choose from can be intimidating to newbies.
And it has a Linux compatibility package, so you can run those closed source Linux apps like Civ:CTP and WP8.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Wow, I hadn't cvsup'd in a little while
:-)
but when I did, suprise suprise -
kue0: 3Com Corp. 3C19250 Ethernet adapter, rev 1.00/0.02, addr 2
kue0: Ethernet address: 00:90:04:bb:76:2a
USB nic's. Thanks whomever snuck that in under the
wire
That little Vaio I've had my eye on is looking
so much better now.
That's what finally swung it for me: on FreeBSD you can guarantee that random command "foo" that you found in /usr/sbin has a man page.
On Linux, you've got roughly a 50/50 chance if you installed a decent distribution. Failing that, there might be a HOWTO. Or maybe some dude with a web page he knocked up one afternoon to tell you what the flags mean.
It's maybe a small thing, but it makes the world of difference.
Agreed. Both 3.0-RELEASE and 3.1-RELEASE were fairly flaky releases (3.0-RELEASE still contained a lot of a.out binaries, and still required you to build an a.out kernel; I can't remember what went wrong with 3.1 but I _do_ remember I went out and bought 3.2 fairly shortly after!) Newbies to FreeBSD would be well advised either to get 3.4-RELEASE, or to wait for 4.1.
On this whole tired argument of Linux vs. *BSD vs. any-other-OS-you-care-to-name - what does it matter what OS you use, as long as you're happy with it? It's your computer, after all.
At one time or another, I've used (in no particular order) HP-UX, Solaris (Intel and Sparc), FreeBSD, Slackware, Debian, Red Hat, MacOS and various versions of Windows. They all (yes, even Windows) have their strengths and weaknesses. That the only OSes which are still installed on my machines are Windows 98 and FreeBSD (until I find another hard disk, at which point Debian goes back on there) probably says more about me than the OSes in question.
Computers are mere tools. OSes are the nuts and bolts. If you want to use a Phillips screwdriver, I see no reason to flame you just because I prefer to use a Torx. Chill out, folks!
--
"This isn't the post you're looking for. Move along."
--
"This isn't the post you're looking for. Move along."
Once you've got a BSD system up and running, it's a very similar experience to running Linux. Some system commands are a little different, and the system configuration is sometimes *very* different. However, the documentation is excellent, and there are a number of good books out there on setting up FreeBSD systems.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
p.s. It's interesting that my post got moderated down to "troll". :)
Not so interesting, I think. Had I been asked to meta-moderate this one, I probably would have called it "fair." By the author's own admission, bracketing his statements with the phrases "RANT ON" and "RANT OFF," the response was not substantive and was quite arguably a troll.
I would have preferred that the down grading be predicated on its being off-topic rather than controversial, because the request for "evidence" is always reasonable. However, as noted elsewhere, neither the article nor its source materials invited any linix or FreeBSD bashing -- it was the mere announcement of a code freeze.
Furthermore, I think a fair reading of the posted messages comprise reasonable, albeit anecdotal, evidence with specifics. Of course no posting made there comprised a refereeable study, but so what? This is not a court of law or a thesis committee review. Whatever criticisms that were posted in reply to the clearly off-topic, more arguably trolling, message, were simply ignored in the response. Moreover, whatever standard the author uses to determine whether "evidence" has been provided, he certainly has not applied those standards to himself, leaving us with only naked and unsupported allegations that straw man claims are unjustified.
I agree that a full and fair discussion of this issue would be interesting to me. But neither the posting nor the moderation complaint was calculated to provide the same. For that reason, the moderation probably was fair.
I do, however, encourage others to hit this issue hard in a truth-seeking and unabashed fashion. It would be nice to fathom this in a somewhat more informative and less cynical manner.
Fry's: May I check your receipt?
Me: No thank you.
Fry's: Sir, I need to check your receipt.
Me: Call the cops. Walk out the door.
Ryan Salsbury
FreeBSD is sold at compusa as the FreeBSD powerpack, which includes the 4CD FreeBSD set, the 6 CD toolkit, and the Complete freebsd book by greg lehey. You can of course buy all this at Walnut Creek CDROM.
Q:Doctor, how many autopsies have you performed on dead people?
A:All my autopsies have been performed on dead peop
If you aim is to get a `why might anyone prefer FreeBSD to Linux'
response, then why don't you just ask instead of trolling? My own
reasons are:
- I can get my ATAPI CD-ROM drive to record painlessly under FreeBSD,
which I never could under Linux (a long and sorry story);
- I trust the security model more.
You've got me. I personally use both FreeBSD and Linux (though i have more experience with the latter), and I think that *BSD and Linux are coexisting in a way of keeping eachother on their toes.
; }return(0);}
It was mentionned quite recently on slashdot that Linus was helping patch BSD code. Frankly, that shows what kind of cooperation we can have between the two freenixes. The more my-os-is-better-then-your-os bickering we have, the less seriously the general public will take our opinions, and the more difficult it will be to take on the operating system that truly is our competition, if only by happenstance.
Lets unite, people, we have a common goal, lets work together. Drop your debian-is-better-then-redhat or redhat-is-better-then-debian or open-bsd-kicks-all-other-freenix-s-rear-ends arguments and lets see how we can put our umpteen thousand heads together and put together software unmatched in the history of computer science.
The day *linux and *bsd users work together is the day freenices will rule the operating system market.
(but lets keep microsoft around so we don't get sued by the DoJ)
#include <signal.h> \ #include <stdlib.h> \ int main(void){signal(ABRT,SIGIGN);while(1){abort(-1)
OFTC: By the community, for the community
Well, I hate do disagree with you, but I must. Here is Southern Caifornia, there's not a better bookstore than Borders.
Walden Books and Super Crown are garbage and have little or no selection.
Barnes & Noble and its Automation BookStar are much better, but really nothing beats a Borders for size or selection. Specifically their computer section is superior to any other bookstore other than a technical bookstore. The one by my house used to be a supermarket and I love the fact that it is all on one floor. Most of the BNs around here are 2 or even 3 floors, and so everybody ends up crowding around the bottom floor.
If I may quote Jordan from the freebsd-arch mailing list:
>> By the way, feature freeze 15th means
>> -can put some feature until 14th midnight?
>> or
>> -can put some feature until 15th midnight?
>Feature freeze means that no new feature work should be started. Work
>already in progress, like IPv6, can proceed right
>up to the code >freeze date.
>- Jordan
-Dom
A few comments:
If by "user-friendly" you mean "lots of sometimes-confusing options" then, yes, the GNU tools tend to have more features, and you can arrange your command-line arguments twelve different ways from Sunday. That's not necessarily a good thing, though I admit it's a matter of personal taste. Taking your example:there is no direct BSD equivalent, but I'd tend to use something like:
in any case. cp has entirely too many options as it is. It's easier for me to remember the tar pipeline than the two dozen options that GNU cp supports. It's the Unix way--combining tools into pipelines and sequences like LEGO blocks--while the GNU way has tended more towards the all-in-one approach. So when you say "there's no equivalent for *BSD" you really meant "there's no equivalent command." It's not impossible or even necessarily harder to do in BSD-land (though I admit it's more typing, and less intuitive to folks used to DOS-land).
You also say that:
I couldn't disagree more! Doing a "make config" (or its curses or X11 equivalent) in Linux is a tremendous leap of faith compared to configuring a BSD kernel. There are over a hundred questions to be answered, and a wrong answer to any one of them can torpedo your chances at a working kernel. You're no more vulnerable editing a BSD config file, and in fact if you have a listing of the LINT config you usually know just what you need to know to enable/disable any given option or driver. I've experienced the Bad Old Days (having edited SunOS config files more times than I'd like to admit) and I have to say that BSD configuration has improved a lot, both in terms of documentation and of things you can leave for the kernel to figure out itself.
You also mention:
I agree (as would a fair amount of the BSD community) that Linux is getting an edge in SMP. The fact is that this is often of limited importance for well-designed server installations. It's actually an advantage (if you can architect it) to distribute load over n entirely separate hardware entities than some n -CPU entity. That way, a failure won't take out n units of capacity, just 1 . Harder to do? Sure, in some ways it is. A bunch of processors sharing memory allow solutions that isolated processors connected only via an LAN cannot. But this hasn't been that much of a limitation for my employer, Yahoo!. Your mileage, of course, might vary.
I've run both Linux and FreeBSD for several years, now, both at work and at home. They both have their strengths. As a "Fundamentalist" Unix person, BSD seems a bit more like "home" to me. But I'm typing this into my home Linux box (a foot from my home FreeBSD box), and I have to admit that there is greater breadth and depth in the current Linux scene--in general, though not necessarily in specific areas. And sometimes the Linux folks seem to be adding legs to the [painted] snake (to use a Zen aphorism). But I see nothing but "synergy" (what a polluted word at this point, but I know of none better) between BSD and Linux, or even between the GNU and Unix (non-commercial and commercial) camps. (And you though the "Gnu's Not Unix" acronym was merely cute.) I'll likely be using both of these great systems for a long time--until something better comes along. (Not likely :-).
didn't eat file systems (unlike 2.2.5-2.2.14 Kernels)
:)
:P
:)
Exactly _one_ of those versions had known fs integrity problems -- 2.2.8. You'll find that 2.2.9 was released about one day later.
it didn't leave the FS in a shitty state that required manual intervention like ALMOST EVERY LINUX CRASH I've ever had/seen.
Really? The only Linux crash I've had that required manual intervention to reboot I managed to trace back to a hardware problem.
Thats pretty crummy, especially when it couldn't even use all of the 1GB of memory in the box,
Current 2.3 releases support up to 64M on Intel hardware.
BTW, FreeBSD 4.0 has support for USB Ethernet adaptors, like those on the Sony VAIO's. Linux barely supports USB, not to mention anything other than a Keyboard and Mouse. Where's that desktop now?
Right. Current Linux 2.3 releases support USB mice, keyboards, joysticks, cameras, scanners, printers, serial ports, audio, and more. But, I guess, without those USB ethernet adapters, Linux is toast on the desktop.
Looking at the supported hardware list for FreeBSD 4.0, I don't see any other USB peripherals supported other than your precious ethernet adaptors. Where's the beef?
You know, you're exactly the kind of BSD user that the previous poster was complaining about. A lot of 'FreeBSD is more stable/faster for me', a bunch of demonstrably _wrong_ facts, and not one iota of solid proof to back up your claims.
Is a little bit of integrity too much to ask?
FreeBSD does not have HOWTOs, we have documentation. :-)
:-)
Anyway, I do not know if it would be interesting for you, in particular to try FreeBSD. Some people like it better, some don't. It's a matter of taste.
For help, check out the official website for general information, the handbook for general documentation, the FAQ for frequently asked questions (including some installation problems) and the FreeBSD Diary for the most recommended beginner's site.
BTW, FreeBSD installation is generally known to be easy and painless. It can be done through the net by downloading just two floppy disk images, and there are mirror sites all over the world, and this list of mirror sites is shown to you during the installation.
(8-DCS)
Many, many things are new with 4.0.
Dillion reworked a lot of the VM subsystem.
Much more USB drivers, including a dozen or so USB ethernet adapters.
Uh, lots of stuff has been being worked on.
As for two week freeze period, it isn't too short
as basically before the freeze everything was going well (minus the small softupdates fiasco)
as the only stuff in -CURRENT is (supposed to be) tested by the programmer.
I'm using my time to make what ever doesn't compile with -Wall -Werror go by without a hitch.
And I'm not sure where you got that 15 day quote. I talked to Jordan about 15 minutes ago and he said he'll play it by ear-- but -RELEASE should come at the end of this month.
-bugg
FreeBSD does things a bit differently than Linux. All code is in a CVS server. Every day (more or less) many developers bring their code up-to-date (with "cvsup" or equivalent) and do a "make world," perhaps after reviewing that day's changes first (which are posted automatically to a mailing list). Then they run their favorite tests and/or applications. So you can say that the FreeBSD system (not just the kernel--everything needed to run a FreeBSD system) is under continuous integration and testing. Everything is known to more-or-less work and play together before the freeze. The 15-day shakedown is thus a time to focus on finding issues that somehow got missed during the continuous develop/integrate/test process.
This is different from Linux; in some ways it's slower and more restrictive, but I rather like it. Although 4.0 has a lot of improvements over the 3.x series, most of them are evolutionary, especially compared to some of the wholesale reworkings of kernel mechanisms between major Linux releases (1.2, 2.0, 2.2, 2.4...). This, combined with the FreeBSD development methodology, mean that instead of a mad scramble to get everything integrated for a final release, it's more a matter of dotting i's and crossing t's until the system passes muster with the core team and the CVS tree is labeled RELEASE.
As to just what is new and/or different in 4.0, there are folks here who know much better than I do...
I'm wondering if trying out FreeBSD would be at all interesting? How much help is there with
;-).
;-), but they're arguably less-advanced. The FreeBSD package system doesn't support versioning of packages (eg, it can distinguish openssh-1.20 from openssh-1.21, but it can't distinguish openssh-1.21-10 from openssh-1.21-11 like debs / rpms do, which I find to be a pain when I'm upgrading my installed ports)
/usr/ports/editors/vim5 ; sudo make install
;-) for most operations, though not for things like deleting large directories; of course, *BSD advocates will tell you it's a safer filesystem than ext2, so your mileage may vary.
;-). There's no menuconfig / xconfig / config like in Linux. Honestly, though, that's really not something to pick an OS on one way or the other ;-)
installation problems? HOWTOs?
You'd probably find it interesting if you're the kind of person who installs different Linux distributions from time to time out of interest
My basic comparison:
* Installation feels about like Slackware in terms of package selection and such
* Base install is very small, as very little comes with the OS--everything is in ports instead.
* FreeBSD has packages like real Linux distributions (and no, Slackware people, tgz is not a package
* The ports system is pretty cool. It's somewhere between Red Hat and Debian in terms of size (at least for FreeBSD; the other two *BSD ports trees are somewhat smaller), and a little more slow about updating (and, oddly enough, a little *more* buggy, contrary to expectation) than the Debian system. At any rate, it's an archive of scripts + patches necessary to integrate all the standard software into your system. Want vim?
$ cd
and it will download the source, apply any necessary patches, compile the package, and install the package (which you can remove later either by make deinstall or by pkg_del vim5)
* Documentation is quite good and thorough, though a little out-of-date (it's basically for 2.x, though is being rapidly revised to reflect the 3.x that most people are now running). It tends to be a little more basic than Linux HOWTOs in terms of what it covers, but it's a lot more thorough about covering essentials than the HOWTOs are.
* Usage-wise, FreeBSD is mostly BSDish. That means no SysV init that you're probably used to (the vast majority of Linuxen use SysV init for various reasons) and similar differences like that which you'll have to pick up as you go with the help of the FreeBSD Handbook alluded to above.
* The BSD toolset tends to be a little less user-friendly than the equivalent tools from Gnu. Eg, with Gnu tools, you can decide after the fact to add the switches, and they work:
rm foo -rf
rm -rf foo
are both acceptable with Gnu rm, but not with *BSD rm. Similarly, the Gnu toolsets tend to support options that the *BSD ones don't:
cp -Rv
on Gnu will show you what it's copying. There's no equivalent for *BSD.
* Some technical differences. In the Linux world, the "standard" Microsoft scheme of primary partitions + logical partitions within an extended partition is used. For the *BSDs, you make one partition, and then set up slices within it (conceptially, this is like logical partitions w/in an extended partition).
* Performance differences--FreeBSD SMP is noticeably slower than under Linux on the same hardware. FreeBSD is Intel-only (with Alpha port progressing and Sparc planned) whereas Linux runs just about anywhere, more like NetBSD. FreeBSD's net stack is rumored to be faster / more correct than Linux's, though you'll never find anyone to substantiate that one way or the other (beyond some of the Linux developers pointing out pathological cases where standards conflict and they argue Linux does the Right Thing and FreeBSD doesn't). UFS, the FreeBSD file system, is slower than ext2 (even with soft-updates--basically "go faster" stripes you can add in when you recompile your kernel
* Kernel compilation is more like the Bad Old Days under commercial Unixes. You have a flat text file full of all the options you want in your kernel, and if the ones you need aren't there, you try to steal them from a different one and add them in
I'm tired, so I'll quit now. Others, feel free to add in other differences.