[died in the wool NetBSD person alert]

Surely the initiative to make more of the FS and other things runtime loadable
modules also provides a niche here? One can imagine stripped down kernels
being viable for install with a sane procedure to add in /lkm stuff runtime
to re-bloat them :-)

I just blew away my NetBSD-current to try FreeBSD-2.2-960501-SNAP. It certainly
installed very simply although the disk editor didn't want to do A(utomatic)
options on a 600Mb sub-split of my IDE which is a bit odd, and SNAP doesn't
have enough backlinks in the ftp area to install any packages (which is also
a bit odd because its like 20 symlinks and a script to make all 2.1 packages
viable under 2.2-SNAP names)

I will be going back to NetBSD after I get a chance to run FreeBSD
for a while. I'm hearing good things about merged VM buffer cache, but
I can't say I find the ATAPI any better than NetBSD's. It may have audio
but the driver makes the same mistake about byteswapped vendor labels and
the probe delay on the second IDE is just terrible. Shame FreeBSD, shame.

The worst aspect of the other camp has to be their ppp. at first glance
its smashing, and I found driving manual dial very easy. Once you want
to go live however, I rather like pppd/chat interaction and would prefer
this dialogue-based PPP to get out of the way. The runtime config is messy
as all heck.

Overall a nice system. I just like sasparilla better and this one is cherry
flavour...

-George
--
George Michaelson         |  connect.com.au pty/ltd
Email: ggm@connect.com.au |  c/o AAPT,
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