From: spedpr@thor.cf.ac.uk (Paul Richards)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: 386BSD or LINUX?
Date: 5 Nov 92 14:36:29 GMT
Organization: University of Wales College at Cardiff
X-Mailer: Cardiff Computing Maths PP Mail Open News Gateway

In article <1992Nov4.052106.29266@menudo.uh.edu> wjin@cs.uh.edu (W. Woody Jin) writes:
|In article <Nov.2.20.33.38.1992.18690@remus.rutgers.edu> glenw@remus.rutgers.edu (Glenn Wasserman) writes:
|>As the subject heading says, which is it? Which is the better,more
|>supported operating system (I know I'm going to get a lot on this
|>one!)
|>
|>I have Linux running on my machine now, and I'm just wondering if this 
|>is the right choice. Is 386BSD more stable? 
|
|Version numbers say it : Linux 0.98  <--> 386BSD 0.1 p58.
|
|I have 386BSD 0.1p58 running (not properly). Still, 'ps -aux' does not
|work properly (reports 'nlist ... so so..' and all the CPU usages are
|0 % ).  Booting takes forever loop, fsck reporting some error messages
|(So, I had to type ^C and did fsck manually - this was a new problem
|after I did patches).  I still cannot do 'mwrite' nor downloading or

I got rid of this problem by removing patch 21 and 38. I still get an
occasional fsck error when rebooting but they are rare and the
continuous reboot cycle has stopped i.e. fsck fixes these problems ok
now. I'd suggest NOT installing these patches unless you really need
them since thay seem to trash some disks.

|uploading using modem (tip, rz, and sz as described in INSTALL.NOTES).  
|It just simply does not work (using given binaries, source codes, and 
|58 patchkits -  I think I have to ask around how other people are doing).
|
|Installing DOS and 386BSD in a single IDE drive is an extreme headache,
|which I don't want to suggest you to try unless you have lots of free time 
|or nothing to do.  I could finally do it after spending a whole day.
|But there is something mysterious.  Whenever I format C: drive (in DOS)
|it says "Trying to recover allocation unit xxxxx".
|
|>Is there any reason to switch?
|
|Not now, unless you are extremely intrigued (like me).
|I would not recommend current 386BSD to an average UNIX user who is busy
|doing his regular jobs.
|But when you hear 386bsd is stable,  I am sure that 386bsd will be THE unix
|system on 386/486.  And I am eagerly waiting for 386BSD 0.2.
|

Well I think 386bsd is pretty stable now. Kernel crashes are very rare,
so rare that I can't remember when my kernel last crashed. 

I am having problems with XFree86 though which seems to crash quite
regularly and once it has crashed it won't run again until I've rebooted
the machine. (Most of the crashes are bus errors/segment violations).

As time goes by I think you'll find that 386bsd has more thought put
into it. Linux developes very rapidly but not necessarily along the
right lines. Shared libraries is an example of this, they've been
available in Linux for quite a while but it's not the best
implementation. We may have to wait a while before they get put into
386bsd (Not too long I hope) but it'll be the better implementation in
the end.
-- 
  Paul Richards at Cardiff university, UK.

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