[geeks] RE: [SunRescue] Objective facts and biased opinions about OS choice <very long>

[Chris Byrne]

Patrick Giagnocavo
Sent: Monday, April 09, 2001 20:45

>I am confused here.  IIRC OpenBSD has virtually NO SMP support, and the
>lxrun program is for Solaris, not OpenBSD.  OpenBSD has a "emulator" where
>you can almost-transparently run Linux, FreeBSD and BSDi binaries, and
>depending on platform can handle SunOS , etc.

Sorry, I should have been more specific. There are ports of BSD which have
excellent SMP support. You can then hack the rest of OBSD onto that Kernel.
It's what they recommend you do, but it isn't supported in the standard OBSD
distribution. The same thing applies to UltraSparc support, and 64 bit
support in general.

lxrun has been ported around to several different architectures and OS's at
this point. The original work was actually done at SCO then some hardcore
BSD folks, some AIX folks, and some Sun folks got a hold of it and mutated
it into what it (and the several other packages like it) are today.

>>That being said, it does what most USERS want, which is email, web
browsing,
>>listening to music, and playing games. It is also the king of commercial
>>applications availability.
>
>The answer really is to let the end users have the pretty desktop and then
>do anything that MATTERS under Unix.  For instance, you can have ODBC
>connecting to a remote Unix-based database, rather than fscking around with
>Access "multi-user" mode.

Or get the pretty desktop onto a platform that works in a non-braindead way
sure.

>You CANNOT turn NetBIOS OFF.  Period.  Probably this is fixed in 2K, maybe.

Actually you can, but to do so you need to criple the OS. You can also
unbind NetBIOS from all the adapters, but it has this annoying habit of
rebinding itself after you reboot, or if you apply any patches service packs
etc...

>> BeOS: Elegant, very very elegant. Great memory management, great
graphics,
>> great sounds, good looking, resource efficient.
>> Horrible networking, no security, little application availability, poor
>> hardware support.
>
>QNX for graphics and C++ nerds, IMHO.

Now QNX is a cool operating environment. How many other OS's can you fit the
OS, TCP/IP, a good looking GUI, Email, FTP, and a web browser onto a single
floppy

>> Classic is very easy to use, and looks very good. Someone who's never
used a
>> computer before will have a much easier time figuring out a Mac than jsut
>> about nay other computer.
>
>What IRIX would be if the original designers only had 4MHz and 128K to play
>with.  :-)

Actually I'd say that's a pretty fair statement. My only problem with MacOS
is that they never upgraded the internals to the point of "goodness"

>> OS-X is essentially the first release of a new BSD based UNIX, with a lot
of
>> propietary extensions. It's immature thus far, but has a lot of
potential.
>> And of course being BSD based in particular Mach microkernel BSD based,
the
>> problems that classic had are greatly alleviated.
>
>I disagree a little.  The core is a reworked version of
>NeXtStep/NEXTSTEP/NextStep (you can spell it any way)

That's a very little disagreement since $nextstep = (/^next\b/i /^step\b/i)
(oh my god did I just make a joke in perl... somebody shoot me quick ;-) is
also essentially a mach BSD based rework

Chris Byrne