[Lilux-help] FreeBSD, compile from source and Distributions

[Patrick Kaell]

>> * Slackware is the most UNIXish Linux distro around (I have experience 
>> with Solaris, SunOS, AIX, Tru64, HP/UX and *BSD). The init system is 
>> an enhanced BSD style init with support for SYSV init scripts for 
>> compatibility reasons. The only other Linux distro which uses BSD 
>> style init scripts is Gentoo.
> 
> 
> ... and I thought that *BSD was more 'unix-like' than any Linux 
> distribution, because it has been around long before Linux started to 
> exist ?!

You are right. BSD is more UNIXish than any Linux distro around (did I 
say otherwise?).

BSD was never a 'clean room' reemplementation of Unix like Linux, but a 
series of gradual modifications. After 20 years of modifications, the 
BSD kernel didn't contain much AT&T code anymore. Thus the BSD people 
decided to distribute BSD freely without the AT&T license. FreeBSD 
appeared and based on 4.3BSD. However the Unix owner of that time 
(Novell) did a court case against the university of Berkeley. After 
settlement, Berkeley had to remove some code from the BSD kernel and a 
new version 4.4BSD appeared. This was a difficult time (around 1993) for 
the FreeBSD people, because the new kernel was missing code and wasn't 
functional anymore. They had to rewrite the missing parts. In the user 
space BSD contained utilities like awk and tar which were almost 
unmodified AT&T code (Berkeley concentrated on kernel development and 
some utilities remained mostly unchanged). These utilities were replaced 
by their GNU counterparts in the FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD systems.

Today, *BSD and Linux are free Unix compatible systems, free of Unix 
copyrights and Unix code (whatever SCO says!).

FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD also contain many System V APIs (like System 
V IPC (shared memory, semaphores and messages)), so the difference 
between *BSD and Linux isn't so great as some people makes one believe! 
Linux perhaps contains more GNUishms than *BSD. Thats all. The free *BSD 
systems even are compiled by GNU gcc! So we nearly could speak of 
GNU/FreeBSD. However, the free *BSD system aren't based on GNU glibc, 
contain their own version of 'ls', 'ps', etc. and don't ship with the 
GNU bash as standard. But I always install the GNU version of 'ls' on my 
*BSD systems because of the colours ;-)

Patrick Kaell