Subject: Re: Linux

From: "Hamish (H.I.) Macdonald" <[email-masked]>

>>>>> Greg Higgs wrote:

>> Can anyone compare NetBSD and Linux/68K for me?  I'm wondering
>> which one I should put on my Amiga (030 25MHz w/MMU, plenty
>> ram&HD).

>>>>> On Tue Oct 26 04:43:00 1993,
>>>>> Markus Wild wrote:

mw> plenty of RAM&HD sounds like a candidate for BSD to me :-) Anyway,
mw> Hamish will sure fill you in why you should try Linux instead:-)

Well, as pointed out by Ty Tsarna, NetBSD is the more usable system at
this time.  As I've pointed out before though, I believe that in the
long run Linux will use less memory resources than BSD.

I'll make myself clear: Linux/68K is currently in what you could
describe as an "alpha" state.  It is not usable for anyone other than
a kernel hacker.  When it *is* usable, I will be notifying the
comp.unix.amiga newsgroup as well as the linux-activists mailing list
680x0 channel.

mw> One thing I don't think Linux has yet is an ethernet driver for
mw> the 2065 board, so if you want to network your system, you'll have
mw> to go BSD for now.

Greg didn't say what type of Amiga/HD controller he had, so it's hard
to say whether NetBSD will support his configuration or not.

>> - which one is more robust and bug-free

This would be NetBSD for sure, I'd say.  There is still quite a lot of
work to be done with Linux/68K.

>> - how much HD and RAM is needed for each

mw> BSD: I'd say don't start below 8M RAM, 4M *might* work. HD: >= 100M
mw> for binaries only, double if you want to keep sources as well. 

Linux: You'll probably have a quite usable system with 4M of RAM.  HD:
Depends on what you want to use it for.  I'm sure that the hard disk
requirements will be similar to that of BSD (once we both have shared
libraries).  One difference I can think of is that BSD swap (unless
the mechanism has changed) is backing store for your RAM.  Thus you
would need 8M of swap to backup 4M of RAM, and you would have 8M of
virtual memory.  With Linux, if you had 8M of swap and 4M of RAM, you
would have 12M of virtual memory available.  Swap is in addition to
RAM memory in Linux.

>> I prefer Linux, but it seems like there's a lot more help floating
>> around for bsd.

This would probably be because there are more people using NetBSD than
Linux.  I don't think you could say that there is anybody *using*
Linux/68K.  It is still in development.

mw> There's quite a bit of mail going on on the Linux mailing list
mw> (with similar "hickup" style volume peaks as on this list), Hamish
mw> will certainly tell you how to subscribe.

Sure:

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Hamish.