[CLUE-Tech] Nessus

[Evan Widger]

black at galaxy.silvren.com wrote:

> 
> Also, what do you think about FreeBSD? I realize this is a Linux site, but
> if anyone has some easy compare/contrast statements about FreeBSD and
> Linux, I'd love to hear them.
> 
> Thanks

I can't speak to the nessus issue but I can talk about freebsd. I'll 
probably get flamed uo the yin-yang for this but oh well. I have used 
redhat 6.x and suse 7.0, the former was my desktop operating system for 
several months. my major annoyances were having to find a bunch of 
different HOWTO's to figure out how to do anything, and having to 
download 30 different packages that all depended on eachother just to 
install something new. my understanding was that hey, it's a UNIX-like 
operating system, it's supposed to be hard. then several months ago when 
i had an inkling to get back into linux a friend recommended freebsd. 
thinking he'd be able to help when i was stuck i went ahead and 
downloaded the .iso and started installing. the only help he would give 
me is to point me at the freeBSD handbook, which is a great reference 
manual for doing just about anything in freeBSD. i had to recompile the 
kernel to get sound working, the multimedia section told me what to 
change in the config and pointed me to the chapter on kernel 
recompiling. the ports system is one of the other great things about 
freebsd. any program in that system (which is alot, most everything the 
average user/administrator would ever need) can be built with the simple 
command of 'make install clean' whereby it will automatically download 
the source tarballs of the package you need and any packages it depends 
on and any packages they depend on etc., and compile and install them in 
the correct order such that when it's done you have a working progream. 
it's fantastic. the 3td great thing about freeBSD is the linux 
compatibility layer. freeBSD should run just about any program written 
for linux, without much hassle. alot of the stuff in ports still create 
linux binaries but have been set up to install on a freeBSD system. i 
personally like the fact that freeBSD isn't just the kernel or distro, 
it is the operating system, there's centralized documentation for it and 
it's very easy to install and use, even for a relative newbie like me.

i can't think of anything else at the moment but i'd be happy to answer 
any other questions, though i'm far from an expert.

-Evan Widger