[CLUE-Tech] Nessus

[Collins Richey]

[ snips ]

On Fri, 15 Aug 2003 18:18:25 -0600
Evan Widger <PsychoI3oy at linkline.com> wrote:

> 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. 
> 

You should give gentoo linux a whirl.  It has the solution for
installing all the dependancies automatically.  See below for comment on
ports.  

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, 

I ran FreeBSD a couple of years ago, and it performed quite well. 
Typical X packages and window managers seemed to be a lot peppier that
under linux (especially program load times).  But I was never able to
get my sound card working. That's the one drawback of xxxxBSD - you
can't always find a driver for your peripherals.

Also, in spite of the benefits of the ports system, I was always finding
software that I wanted to try that wasn't in ports.  

I especially didn't like the slices approach to hard drive partitioning
and the fact that only primary partitions are supported.  I had to do a
lot of juggling to make linux and FreeBSD coexist on my harddrive.

The gentoo linux portage packaging system was modeled on ports, and it
does everything that ports does and more.  There are thousands of
packages in the portage repository, and new versions appear almost
before they are announced on Freshmeat.  There is no one single gentoo
handbook, but there is a lot of good documentation on the website.

That being said, FreeBSD is certainly worth a try.  I learned a lot.

Enjoy.
-- 
Collins Richey - Denver Area
if you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the 
worries of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.