On Sun, Feb 22, 2004 at 01:31:36PM -0600, Joe Dunsmore wrote: > Can I find out all that my os is loading at startup by looking at the > init file? I've heard debian, gentoo, slackware use up less memory > usually than the commercial distros, how much of this do they use? what > does windows 3.1, 95, xp use compared to modern linux? On RedHat/Fedora you can run 'chkconfig --list' to see everything that's being run on boot. Disable thing you don't use like isdn, pcmcia (if it's a desktop), cups (if you don't have a printer attached), kudzu (if you aren't plugging in new devices) etc. 'chkconfig <name of service> off' will disable the service > I don't think osnews counts as a freebsd zealot and they say: > > http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5821&page=2 The woman who wrote the article is a BeOS/OS X/BSD fan. Also, read the rest of the article where she talks about the problems she had: "The FreeBSD installer let me choose of 2-3 ways of configuring X, and I first chose the graphical one, which failed. I decided to deal with X later (after the installation had finished), and so later I just copied my XF86Config from my Slackware 9.2-Current partition and used that successfully." This is the sort of thing that RedHat/Fedora & company do for you automatically, joe six pack can't be expected to figure out how to fix his XF86Config. Another one: "When I created the "eugenia" user using the installer, I typed /bin/bash as the shell for that user but what I didn't remember was that the location of that binary on FreeBSD was /usr/local/bin/bash. I could edit the passwd files later to correct this, but as I was already booted to KDE as root (couldn't login as "eugenia" yet because of bash's wrong path) I decided to use the kuser KDE application to fix my user's entry. A minute later I had everything saved and tried to login as eugenia. Seemingly everything went ok. But when I needed to "su -" to root to do some additional first-time configurations I noticed in terror that I could not login as root at all anymore. Apparently kuser had mangled both the /etc/passwd and /etc/master.passwd files and deleted the first 3 lines of these files which contained the information for root. It took me over an hour trying to find on Google clues as to how to put my installation back together as my last resort would have being re-installation. " I think that one speaks for itself. Another: "The ov511 driver for FreeBSD is not up to date for 5.2, but even if it were, it would not work with Gnomemeeting because the driver port from Linux was done to merely grab snapshots from it and not to do video. I wrote to some of the ov511 developers about it and they told me that they wouldn't do the job to completely port the driver properly because there is no infrastructure on FreeBSD like Video4Linux is on Linux. " ^-- This is some of that support I mentioned that doesn't exist in FreeBSD. Many applications use the V4L and V4L2 API.. pretty much any video conferencing programs, all the TV tuning applications (MythTV as well), radio applications (for radio tuners), and most webcams. Aside from all that, a majority of FreeBSD's support for newer hardware is a port of drivers from Linux, usually with some lost functionality in the transition. > "Not all is bad though. On the upside of FreeBSD you will find its > speed. On my AthlonXP 1600+ 1.4 GHz, FreeBSD boots in about 16-18 > seconds, the same as a lite Slackware or Gentoo, but way faster > comparatively on other popular Linuces like Fedora or Mandrake or SuSE. Wow! It boots faster. Tell you what, shove all your nice tidy init scripts into a single bash script in /etc/rc.d, remove all the applications that don't have an equivalent on FreeBSD, then reboot. Comparing boot times on two different OS's is like comparing clock speeds between AMD, Intel and IBM (Mac). > As I have mentioned in the past Slackware was the fastest platform to > run X/Gnome/KDE according to my tests, but the crown of DE speed now > goes to FreeBSD 5.2. GTK apps are a bit faster than in Slackware overall > but applications load significantly faster on FreeBSD." That's assuming the applications you need/want even run on FreeBSD, even worse is their comparision between different versions of Linux -- it's the same kernel, the same libraries, and the same programs. Speed is only going to be affected by your hardware configuration and whiz-bang features. > "Faster than Linux on the desktop (at least compared to kernel 2.4.x > distros)" See above, do the init script thing, disable all the support for things that don't exist in FreeBSD, and configure KDE/GNOME similarly and you'll get pretty much the same performance, with less polish, and less user friendly-ness -- Matthew S. Hallacy FUBAR, LART, BOFH Certified http://www.poptix.net GPG public key 0x01938203 _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list