Subject: Re: Request for Comments on article
To: Steve Lumos <slumos@nevada.edu>
From: Thomas Michael Wanka <tm_wanka@earthling.net>
List: netbsd-advocacy
Date: 02/26/2000 15:24:28
Hi,

here are my comments:

Xfree86 states that the Intel i810 driver needs a kernel module (which AFAIK is currently only available for linux)

I thought MSDos was based on CP/M.

The SuSE Linux distribution includes the source of the installed binaries in both original and modified versions(or patches) to be copied to your disk whenever you like (that was mandatory for GPL licensed materials I thi
nk). That does not include the sources of commercial binary software.

One thing you did not mention is, that different distributions of linux are not equal. If you are not willing to build your own distribution it will be sometimes really hard to find what and where the things you need are.
 There are AFAIK three differnet *BSD versions. There are somewhere around 10 or 20 linux distributions around. It should be as hard to modify sources built for one of the *BSD versions to run on one of the other *BSDs or
 one of the linux distributions as it was to modify the sources of one linux distribution to run on other linux distributions (have not tried to make linux binaries to run on NetBSD). The linux distributions are commercia
l projects, this will give users at least some kind of support (even at 
its cost!), but to my experience, if you do not know your distribution 
too well, you might end up paying for the information where things 
are.

So if you need to use programms that are not availabel for your 
distribution or worse that are only available for another distribution, 
you need to know these two ditributions very well (e.g. to install 
source written for redhat on a suse system that requires libraries, 
you will need to know where redhat keeps them and where suse 
keeps them and have to modify the sources accordingly)  

 mike