I'm trying to sort out all of the various Unixes 
available for the PC.  I was hoping for some help
sorting out the various incarnations of Linux, as
well as FreeBSD and perhaps the other PC-based
BSD's.

257 responses total.

I recently put together a Pentium II, and am contemplating
installing some sort of Unix.  I'm not quite sure what I want
to accomplish here, other than giving myself an environment
in which to learn more about Unix.

I have a 3Gig hard drive, with just over 2 Gig free.  How big
a partition am I going to want for the Unix install?

Thanks a bunch!

(jellyware item 241 linked to micros item 199)

I have found the following web sites:

http://www.freebsd.org   seems to be the most useful site I've found, which
means at the moment I'm leaning towards FreeBSD...

http://www.redhat.com  sounds good, if I feel like spending $$$ for a CD...
 Although that kind of defeats the purpose of finding a cheap Unix installation
to play around with...

http://www.slackware.org  doesn't impress me that much, but that might be
because of my cluelessness and not any inherant problem with their site.

Anyone know of any other sites that a newbie such as myself could turn to for
more information?

The Unix Guru Universe page (http://www.ugu.com/) has links to web pages
for the various types of Unices out there.  That site also has a link to where
you can get a Unix tutorial.  Here are some others you might want to look into:

Cheapbytes Home Page (http://www.cheapbytes.com/).  Here you can buy many
of the popular Linux distribtuions like Debian, Red Hat, Slackware, Turbo
Linux, etc. on CD for only $2.  You can also buy *BSD CDs for about $5.

The Linux home page (http://www.linux.org/).  Has information about Linux
on it.

Debian Linux home page (http://www.debian.org/).

Turbo Linux home page (http://www.turbolinux.com/).

Stampded Linux (http://www.stampede.org/).  This is a new Linux
distribution that I know nothing about.

Caldera Linux (http://www.caldera.com/)

NetBSD page (http://www.netbsd.org/)

OpenBSD page (http://www.openbsd.org/)
 
(In case you're wondering OpenBSD and NetBSD are both derived from BSD code.
OpenBSD was formed by a member of the NetBSD project and they have now become
separate entities.  Other than that I can't tell you much about them.)

The only Linux distribtuion I'm familiar with is Red Hat.  I got my copy of
Red Hat 5.0 wth a book on Linux.  It's easy to set up.  As far as other
Linuxes go I'm not familiar with them so you'll have to try them on your own.

Great, that should get me started!  

I am interested in comments from anyone using any of these products - What are
you using now?  Why did you choose that?  And so on.

I use FreeBSD at home.  Chosen mainly because of its emphasis on x86
machines, its BSD heritage, and its relatively active Usenet group.
NetBSD and OpenBSD should both be comparable for learning Unix and all
three seem to have a good lot of application software available and use
each other's "good" system code changes.  I don't know if you can tell
them apart so much any more except maybe in installation procedures and
the philosophy of their development groups--NetBSD strives for operation
on multiple platforms and relatively conservative code development,
OpenBSD more on system security but also multiple platforms, and FreeBSD
on more rapid development and a concentration on Intel X86 hardware
although there are a couple ports to other systems going on there now.
Even those generalizations, I'm sure, are not entirely correct.  I think
you'd do well with any of NetBSD, OpenBSD, or FreeBSD for learning
purposes. Or Linux, for that matter.

I've used Linux distributions from Yggdrasil, Slackware, RedHat,
Caldera, and currently S.u.S.E.  I've had good experiences with all, and
each one is easier to set up and configure than the last.  
  If you're local to ANn Arbor, there's lots of local support.  The
Washtenaw Linux Users Group meets monthly, and I maintain  a majordomo
mailing list with ~150 subscribers currently. It's a great place to ask
questions and get help.  There's also a metro Detroit LUG which meets in
Farmington Hills, and I just heard of a new one in Toledo.  Quite often
at meetings, we'll have a stack of CD-ROM's to give away, with basic
distributions on them.  If we can cross paths, I'll happily pass you a
recent one.
  Check out http://www.lugwash.org for more info.

OK, dumb question:  What is S.u.S.E.?  I've seen the acronym before, 
but have yet to figure out what it is...

I did order a few cds from CheapBytes, so soon I should have FreeBSD 
2.2.8 and recent versions of RedHat and Slackware...

I also managed to repartition my hard drive to make room for one of the 
above.  I'm sure when the disks arive I'll have some installation 
questions...

Thanks a bunch for all the info.

S.u.S.E is a Linux distribution, very popular in Germany.

..as S.u.S.E is packaged/built-up outta' Deutschland..

I have been using RedHat Linux for the past 2 years used everything from 4.0 to
 5.1 If you have any questions regarding installing RedHat do let me know. I
think RedHat will be the easiest to install if you don't know much about your
PC or unix as such.

How many partitions did you make for Linux ???

Just for information purpose you can get Solaris 7 for approx $16 from Sun.
They are giving out free copies of Solaris for personal use. Although I would
recommend you stay away from Solaris installation for the time being.

re resp:12
For a first-time Linux installation, I recommend the following:
hda1: /dos-win  for legacy programs - as small as you can get away with.
hda2: /boot  about 5MB for kernel images
hda3: swap  2x your installed system RAM
hda4: /  root partition - the rest of your drive.

The reason for the small /boot partition is to work around a limitation
in most BIOS, that all files used by the initial boot loader be located
below cyl 1024.  Since modern drives have many more cyl than that, it's
necessary to create a small partition which is entirely contained below
that line for your kernel images.
  On one of my systems, I also separate out a partition for /home, so
that my personal files aren't touched when I do a clean install of a new
distribution.
  If you are blessed with a huge HD, you might want to define two
partitions the size of your root partition.  Hold the second one spare,
so that you can install your next distribution there, and still be able
to boot into your old system, or mount your old root and refer to
configs and scripts you forgot you customized until you booted the new
system and discovered an old problem cropping up again...

I've played with FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Slackware Linux, RedHat Linux,
Turbolinux, and Debian Linux.  As far as the *BSD operating systems go,
FreeBSD is by far the easiest to install.  NetBSD and OpenBSD are fairly
bare-bones and assume a fair amount of familiarity with UNIX.  Of the two I
like OpenBSD better, as it has a smarter install program.  I should add the
disclaimer that I'm only familiar with the SPARCstation ports of OpenBSD and
NetBSD, though, so it's possible the Intel ones are less minimalist.  You'll
find the most commercial software available for FreeBSD, but it still lags
far behind Linux in this department. It will run BSDi binaries, however. 
Also, programs written for other BSD UNIXes aren't usually too hard to coax
into compiling on it; the same can't be said for Linux, which has some
screwy header files.

As far as Linux, I'm pretty impressed with TurboLinux.  It borrows heavily
from RedHat, but the installer seemed smarter and less buggy than RedHat's
latest one.  It can also handle RedHat RPM files, which are a popular way to
distribute Linux software.  Slackware is a decent distribution, and what I
started out on, but it's getting long in the tooth.  The package system is
simplistic, and not much software is distributed in Slackware package form
anymore.  You won't go far wrong with Slackware, but you won't get some of
the ease-of-use features of TurboLinux.  Debian, finally, is a highly
configurable release, but assumes you really know what you're doing. Its
main advantage, IMHO, is it gives you an extraordinary amount of control over
what it installs, but only if you can figure out its obscure package
installer.

The original 386bsd was basically a release of 4.4bsd done by William
Jolitz, as the berkeley/at&t lawsuite was being settled.  Bsdi started
up at just about this time as well, using the same 4.4bsd code base, but
they quickly diverged with their own set of drivers.  386bsd had a fair
number of bugs, and many people quickly released patches for it.  Jolitz
didn't do much more work, so after a while, the netbsd people gave up on
patching 386bsd, and made their own release.  The netbsd people went on
to support a number of other platforms besides the 386 family, but
weren't always real good about squashing minor reliability bugs on the
386, so another group, freebsd, started up, with the explicit mission to
concentrate on the 386 family and on reliability, instead of worrying
about experimental features and portability.  Openbsd started up last;
their goal was to combine some of the best features of freebsd and
netbsd (which had not diverged *that* much), and to put an emphasis on
security features to make it more vandal proof.

I dunno, TurboLinux - sounds like maybe I should swipe some packages - like
the installer - for RH ;-)

The following is from my dual 520M HDD system:
[root@localhost /tmp]# df
Filesystem         1024-blocks  Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/dev/hda7             243969  185662    45709     80%   /
/dev/hda5              10213    1552     8134     16%   /boot
/dev/hda1             122688   23590    99098     19%   /dos
/dev/hdb1             499620  471166     2651     99%   /usr 

Notice, I don't have diddly for games, and my source is mostly just Kernel,
Although I have a couple of directories I'm playing in.. My advice - armature
that I am to this linux-gig is this:IF yer HDD is large enough, by all means
leave a dos partition, and add /boot - "swap" is a given, and - yeah: 2x yer
RAM is just about right.. (being paranoid, I made it substantially larger &
it's a waste). Then, let the installer pile in ALL the garbage you need/want.
This is the FIRST install....

Now, guesstimate the volume of space the assorted /... directories (or their
kids) are chewing up - and the 2nd time you install, you can specify some
ball-park figures for separate "mount-points".. Why? Cuz I can guarentee yer
going to wish to hell you had more room in the <whatevertheheck> directory.

Not a day goes by I don't consider a full reinstall.. But, yee-gods.. the
downloading I'd have to do ;-/

IMHO, chopping up a drive into multiple partitions, and trying to figure
out how to size each one, is a waste of time, and asking for problems.
the more partitions you have, the more potential out-of-space errors you
can get.  Separate partition for swap is a must, separate partition for
/boot is a must if your drive is > 1024 cyl, and the first time you do a
complete re-install of the latest distribution, I think you'll agree that
/home is good to have in a separate partition.  Other than that, let it
all fall into one root partition.

Well, I now have RedHat 5.2, Slackware 3.6, Debian 2.0 and 
FreeBSD 2.2.8, courtesy of http://www.cheapbytes.com/ (thanks, blight!) and
am now contemplating the next step...

Toking, and anyone else down here in southwestern Michigan,
get ahold of me if you need to borrow one of these CDs.

Question:  I need a /boot partition somewhere below cyl 1024?
 How do I do that without messing up my data?  I currently have
 a 3.1 G hard drive, and have managed to partitition off the last
 gig.  The primary partition is FAT32, for Win95b, and I don't plan
 on dumping Windows anytime soon.  And I'd prefer not to have 
 to spend $$$ on Partition Magic or something similar.

Look on the RedHat CD, in the /dosutils directory.  You may find something
called fips, which will shrink your win95 partition just like partition
magic.  READ THE DOCS! The version shipped with RH5.1 didn't support
FAT32, and I had to search the web for the update.  Make sure the one they
shipped with 5.2 includes FAT32 support. You only need 5mb below the
1024cyl line. If you insist on wasting 2/3 of your drive on Win95, then
plan on booting Linux from a floppy.
  For a first-time Linux user, I'd recommend RedHat.  The Slackware and
Debian releases aren't quite as plug-n-play as redhat is, so I believe
you'll have an easier time installing and configuring using the redhat
tools.  My personal favorite right now is SuSE, if for no other reason
than they finally fixed the backspace/delete issue!

Do you suppose (after I got everything else working)(Is that possible?) 
I could port the backspace/delete fix from SuSE to RedHat?  

Re: _wasting_ 2/3 of my drive, as far as I know, they don't make Forte 
Agent for Linux.  And unfortunately, they probably never will, as they 
seem to have stopped development.  Plus I've got PageMill that I need 
for work, Microsoft Visual C++ (that one of these days I'm going to get 
around to learning how to use...) and my fractal programs.  But I'm 
sure I can fit a 5 meg partition in the first chunk of the hard drive 
without too much trouble, and if a gig isn't enough for Linux I can 
always save up for that other hard drive I've been wanting...

By the way, thanks for all the help.  It's much appreciated.

What backspace/delete "fix"? I was under the impression it was a termcap
issue, and RedHat doesn't muck with mine.. Telnetting to mnut can, though..
(Just like the ^J == [enter] issue in party there).

SuSE looks interesting, but I understand the docs are still in German, and...
Cheapbytes didn't have it cheap at ALL..
 
I was thinking of getting the RH 5.2 stuff, archive diskset, Debian and
Turbo-Linux from there.. SuSE if they had it.. FreeBSD is said to be short
some "options" (whatever the hell that means). 
 
Frankly, if I get a new HDD, I'll need to reinstall ANYWAY, so.. I'm guessing
a selection might be useful.

I just found this rather lengthy arcticle on the various 
BSD-descendants out there.  I'm still only a third of the 
way through it, but thought y'all might find it interesting...

http://www.sunworld.com/swol-01-1999/swol-01-bsd.html?0126a

By the way, I must have misunderstood about the termcap
thing, so nevermind.

I did just install "ZipSlack" here at work, but won't get a 
chance to try booting it until later tonight.  It only takes up
about 80 Meg, and is supposed to work on a FAT partition.
I'll let y'all know how it works...

There's a Keyboard-and-Console HOWTO out there, that tells you all the
places that need to be patched to give backspace and delete the
functions we are accustomed to in the DOS/Win world.  It's not just
termcap, it seems to be everywhere.  Just the other day, I discovered
another one: my roommates, who login to my machine for their e-mail
using procomm on their DOS machine, discovered that 'delete' acted like
backspace.  So now, I've got to find out how to get the Procomm vt100
emulation to send a different code for that key, and I've got to figure
out just what that code should be...  What puzzles me is why it's taken
this long for a distributor to include those patches.  Did Linus grow up
without a delete key, so he doesn't see this as important enough to
include in the standard kernel source?
 I just received a second CDrom in the mail today, containing SuSE 5.3. 
It's not the 5-disk set I got in the box, probably more like the basic
cheapBytes version.  BTW, Linux Central in Royal Oak also stamps out
single-CD versions of the major distributions.  They frequently show up
at the Washtenaw Linux Users Group with a stack of them to give away. 
I've got their version of RH 5.0, RH5.1, and SuSE 5.2.  It's their RH5.1
that I'm running on my laptop right now.  I'm willing to pass on any of
these to anyone who wants to try Linux or upgrade from an earlier
release.

  Re: the booting issue.  There's also a program called 'loadlin' which
allows you to store your kernel image on your DOS partition, and boot
linux from there.  I don't hear much about it lately, and it would be
slow, since you'd have to wait for DOS to boot, then run loadlin to
start the linux boot process, but it is there.  I used it to boot Linux
from dos when first installing RH5.0 on the laptop.

If you had ever used an LA36, you would not wonder so much.

Argh!  I got ZipSlack to work with _very_ little effort
on the computer at work.  (It uses the loadlin program and
'pretends' that c:/linux = / , and seems like an easy
way to play around with linux.

On my machine at home, I installed it and tried to run
it, and it gets through 2 or 3 screens full of startup 
stuff, then gets hung up trying the same thing forever.
I can't quite make out what it's saying, because it's 
flashing by at great speed, but i could make out something
like '03:01: rw=0, want=2570??? limit=2064???'
Does anyone have any clues?

(Procomm is a little weird with the backspace/delete without any help from
the host system)

        Is this "Linux Central" you mention webwise? I was looking for a
        CD of the SuSE stuff, but cheapbytes sells only a multi-cd package
        & book combo.. I'd like to get a variety of linux/FreeBSD CD's
        so as to be able to switch over - over even install for others -
        and have much of what I already search the net for around..

        On another note, installing the new 2.2.1 kernel is becoming a
        real challenge. it appears that, not only does it use a different
        module-loading scheme (kmod instead of kerneld), but.. My system
        seems to NEVER have been using modules right under my ol' reliable
        2.0.35 kernel.. Lotsa' munged-up stuff, and I've been debugging
        and cleaning up the /etc/rc.d/* stuff as I go along.

        Oh, and I _STILL_ can't figure out wtf generates the
        /boot/module-info files.. Plus, I get exciting messages like this
        one (in /var/log/messages):

Jan 31 09:50:22 localhost modprobe: no dependency information for module:
"/dev/modem"

        Further, I've seen warnings that the 2.2.1 stuff - or the modutils
        - can break your 2.0.x stuff.. Could be the case in some places,
        here.. Still, I'll be damned if I can find a decent doc on the
        "Use & Feeding of /etc/conf.modules" - it's like everyone should
        already "know" it.

        Additionally, by the time you get all the libs and packages
        upgraded in support of the 2.2.1 kernel, you'll suddenly discover
        that some of yer stuff is now broken good & proper.. Xmahjongg
        went first; then pico; then pico was reborn; then glint (and
        friends) refused to play; and lately, after upgrading gpm, 'mc'
        has decided to scream and die. Oh, and you ain't seen fun until
        two distinct packages decide to argue over whom is going to update
        the same two programs - THAT was fun..

        Well, after reading further yet, I had a "brainfart". The
        following is in the 2.2.1 Makefile:

MODFLAGS = -DMODULE
ifdef CONFIG_MODULES
ifdef CONFIG_MODVERSIONS
MODFLAGS += -DMODVERSIONS -include $(HPATH)/linux/modversions.h
endif 

        Now, the complaints from the kernel and modprobe/depmod are all
        based on symbolic problems.. The following:

MODFLAGS = -DMODULE
ifdef CONFIG_MODULES
#pfv: without following tests, the godDAMNED thing actually WORKS!
#ifdef CONFIG_MODVERSIONS
MODFLAGS += -DMODVERSIONS -include $(HPATH)/linux/modversions.h
#endif 

        SOLVED all that crap.. Man, it was scarey ;-)

MODVERSIONS is an option in the kernel config.  Simply answering 'yes' to
the 'Config Kernel Modversions?' question as you do the 'make config'
would accomplish the same thing as commenting out the test as you did.

        Been there.
        Did that.

        I'm here to tell you it was _not_ working as designed..

        Strangely enuf, it was clue in the docs - I grepped and found
        that somebody had a joystick prob, and the answer was to force the 
        flag.. Instead, I found what seems to be a test that wasn't ever
        reached - or if it was: it failed.

Re the above discussions on partitioning...my own practice is that if I'm
setting up a server, I seperate out /usr.  This does two things; it makes
backups easier to handle for me, and if /usr gets corrupted somehow the
machine will still boot, since the damage will be contained away from /. 
It's a good idea to have a seperate /var in this situation, too, for the
above reasons, and also so a full mail spool won't cripple the whole system. 
/home is another natural to split off, but on my system it's part of /usr. 
This is partially because of how I set up the machine.  I'm using old, small
disks; /, /var, and swap are partitions on the first drive, which is 130
megs.  /usr is the entire second drive, which is 450 megs.  Obviously you
have a lot of flexibility here if you know what you're doing, but it takes a
while to get a feel for how big each partition should be.

For my desktop machine, where I'll be the only user, these aren't issues, so I
generally make one big filesystem, so I don't run out of space as easily.  I
gig should be enough to experiment with Linux.  I used to use it extensively
on a 400 meg partition.  (Of course, on my current machine I have 1 gig for
Windows and 5 for Linux.) ;)

The swap space issue is a little less clear-cut than most people make it. 
2x the physical RAM is an okay starting point, but use your judgement.  If
you have an 8 meg machine, you may need more memory than this, so you might
want to make a 20 meg swap partition.  If you have 64 megs of RAM, you're
probably not ever going to need 128 megs of swap, unless you're doing
something amazingly heavy, like editing huge image files.  My 64 meg machine
has 64 megs of swap, and it rarely uses any of it.  (Let me tell you, a
machine that doesn't have to swap is *ungodly* fast.  If you're swapping a
lot, upgrade your RAM before you even think about a processor upgrade.)

I actually use redhat 5.1 on my k6-2 and i feel quite good about it.
Now I've put my hands on an ancient Mac (68000, 1MB RAM, 20MB hd).
I was wondering if any version of BSD (without using Xwindow) could work
with such a limited hardware.
It would be very interesting to play with 2 different unix box linked
together!
I've seen old sun an hp with the 68020.
How about 68000 with unix?
luca_

        Hmm, check yer kernel's out, and distributions, too..

        From what I can see, they typically bypass the bios, and I've had
        to save space my removing all SORTS of different arch/
        directories.

Update:
     I installed FreeBSD, with relatively few problems.  Then I ran 
out of room on /var (1)  and decided to reinstall.  Since, in all my
experimenting, my Windows partition got screwed up(2), I repartitioned  the
whole drive, giving just over half (1.8 gig?) to FreeBSD.  I got  the Windows
partition bootable(3), and set it up so I can get to the  CD ROM with it, and
left it.  Eventually I will reinstall Win95, but  right now my priority is
getting ppp running on FreeBSD.


(1)  Why was df showing that /var was at 109% capacity?  
Any ideas?

(2)  It was quite amusing, actually.  The FAT got munched, so
when I did a DIR of a particular subdirectory it would show part 
of the text of some c source code, then try to figure out how 
much space was left on the drive...  

(3)  Why does it still show a splash screen, then dump me at
the C prompt?

At work, I run openbsd on a IIci, with 8M ram & 258 M disk.  I'd
consider that more or less a minimal system for 4.4bsd.  The IIci has a
68030.  The 68020 is similar, but lacks an MMU.  You need the MMU to run
unix.  The install setup with openbsd (and friends) uses a ram disk; so
8 M of ram is pretty much the minimun.  (It *might* run in 5 M; but
definitely won't work in 4 M.  I think the IIci takes memory in 4 M
increments.) The basic system seems to be about 90 M, including the
compiler.  There is some fat here; perhaps this could be trimmed down.
But it's cheaper timewise to just get a larger disk.  You could also try
this on a q700, which is basically a faster IIci.  In theory, X would
run on the IIci, but it would be really slow, and nobody seems to have
bothered putting work into frame buffer support for openbsd.  Besides
the macintosh line, you should also look at getting a cheap 386 system.
It's a lot easier to find peripherals for the isa bus.

The original Mac II's were shipped without MMU's, but could have one
plugged in after-market; so some will have that and some won't.  Apple
never sold any 68010 systems; but, if you ran across such a machine,
again, you'd need an MMU, support in the kernel for the MMU on the
machine, & it will be very slow by modern modern standards.  (The 68020
is, roughly, a 2mips processor; the 68010 is about a .5 mips processr,
or one quarter the speed.) The SUN-2 design was based on the 68010.  The
kernel that Sun sold on this machine was basically 4.2bsd.  The 68010
can address a maximum of 16M of ram; however, with the memory chips of
the time, 2M systems were most common.

The 68000 can't restart instructions after a page fault, so can't
support demand paging.  Systems based on the 68000 included the altos
68000 (that m-net used to run on), and the sun-1 design.  The altos ran
system III; the sun-1 ran unisoft unix, basically version 7 unix.
Neither of these versions of unix supported networking.  Networking came
in sometime after demand paging, so it would be very hard to find tcp/ip
in any version of unix for the 68000.  When the 68000 was popular,
networking most often meant uucp.

None of the 68000 macintoshes had MMU's, so getting a "real" version of
Unix to run is most unlikely.  Getting the "fork" primitive in Unix to
work basically requires having some form of memory mapping hardware.
Either that, or *really* fast swap I/O (which is what they actually did
do on one of the cray's.)

(The reason I used the IIci at work was not because of its outstanding
performance, but because it turned out to be easier to scrounge the
hardware and several ethernet adapters to put together a really cheap
router based on the IIci, than to put together the same thing with the
386.  I think this is because 386's were worth more $ at property
disposition.)

well, thank you for all this infos!
I didn't know whether there was an MMU on not in my thing :-(
I'll use it as a vt100 terminal!
luca_

>  (1)  Why was df showing that /var was at 109% capacity?
>  Any ideas?

In BSD (and most UNIXes, in fact) there's a certain amount of space on
the filesystem that's reserved for the superuser.  This is a sort of
'cushion' to help prevent users from taking down the system by filling up a
filesystem.  What you were seeing is a truely full filesystem: all 100% of
the user space was full, plus the 9% of reserved space.  The amount of
reserved space can often be adjusted when the filesystem is created, but
generally there's little reason to do this.

re: /boot partition:  You don't really need a /boot inside the 1024 
limit.  Rather, you can install LILO into the MBR, which is below the 
1024 limit, and it will then load the kernel.  The kerenl itself doesn't 
need to be below 1024. (At least, not on any of the four computers that 
I run, including a 486, a PI 90, a PPro 266, and a PII30)  The only 
problem with this is that installing Win9x or NT will delete lilo. (Win 
erases the MBR) If you plan on reinstalling Win, keep a boot disk so you 
can reinstall lilo.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss