NomadBSD

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

I made a copy of Nomad BSD onto USB and tried it out on two laptops: Dell Inspiron 5558 and Lenovo Thinkpad X201.

Nice responsive software on both systems and it is comparable to antiX in USB boot time. This is a live distribution:
https://nomadbsd.org/

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Brian Masinick

[Member Dzhigit]

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Interesting. Are the Live USB features as powerful as antiX’s?

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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Dzhigit wrote:

Interesting. Are the Live USB features as powerful as antiX’s?

No, the features of the distribution are not particularly interesting, but the performance of the image was decent.
You’d have to be a Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) fan to want to use it. However, if you want to explore it, trying out the Live image is the way to go. In fact, I did a search of Live BSD images and found it. So if you are curious and like to experiment, from that perspective it’s decent. Comparing features, the only features I can think of that are remotely comparable to antiX is that it’s capable of booting live and boots in a similar amount of time from the Live image.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 2 months ago by Brian Masinick.

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Brian Masinick

[Member fatmac]

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I tried it before, maybe I should take another look, (not a big fan of FreeBSD, prefer Net or Open).

Wish NetBSD still did a live version; OpenBSD has FuguIta, (should you happen to want to take it for a spin).

http://fuguita.org/

Linux (& BSD) since 1999

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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The one “redeeming feature” of NomadBSD is that with the live version, boot times and start-up performance are pretty good, generally better than what I recall.
I really have not experimented with many of the BSDs in the past decade, though between 2000-2010 I often used them and they actually had slower performance than most Linux distributions – and I could easily gauge that because I had a Dell Dimension 4100 desktop that was approaching a decade old by the time I retired it.

In practical terms, most BSD systems, especially the original ones, were solid server operating systems, but only “passable” as a desktop system; in other words, they worked, but their desktop features and desktop performance was unimpressive, whereas, from the nineties to the early 2000s it could be argued that for a while the BSD-based systems had advantages in server configurations. Since I have not used them much, I have no idea if that remains true.

I will look into http://fuguita.org/ – thanks!

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Brian Masinick

[Member oops]

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Brian Masinick wrote:

…

In practical terms, most BSD systems, especially the original ones, were solid server operating systems, but only “passable” as a desktop system; in other words, they worked, but their desktop features and desktop performance was unimpressive, whereas, from the nineties to the early 2000s it could be argued that for a while the BSD-based systems had advantages in server configurations. Since I have not used them much, I have no idea if that remains true.

I will look into http://fuguita.org/ – thanks!

Yes Nomad (based on FreeBSD) is a nice OS for old PC too, even for desktop now (with some embedded customisations into Nomad12 like: sysrc -f /etc/sysctl.conf kern.sched.preempt_thresh=224 … and so, for Desktop use) … But Unix is not Linux, and need some practices.

[Member seaken64]

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I’ve tried BSD a couple of times in the last couple of years. It’s been a failure for me each time I tried to install it. I’m barely capable of using Linux, it seems BSD is too foreign for me yet. I did not come from a Unix background but came to Linux through CP/M-DOS-Windows.

But I’ll give NomadBSD a try.

seaken64

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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seaken64 wrote:

I’ve tried BSD a couple of times in the last couple of years. It’s been a failure for me each time I tried to install it. I’m barely capable of using Linux, it seems BSD is too foreign for me yet. I did not come from a Unix background but came to Linux through CP/M-DOS-Windows.

But I’ll give NomadBSD a try.

seaken64

I’m the opposite; I used mainframe computer systems and minicomputer systems.

I did try out microcomputer systems in a few college labs but I used UNIX long before every day DOS and Windows use.

I did actually get to use and sample many of the early personal computer systems including a Mac.

Early on I valued UNIX networks, shell utilities, editor options and some of the earliest network apps.

I also knew UNIX vs. the BSD variation and was familiar with both. BSD had additional editing tools but UNIX owned much of the other code, which led to a rewrite around the same time that Linux was emerging because UNIX claimed ownership of system code. Similarly UCB claimed all BSD tools (vi and other creations. Ultimately it was resolved.

BSD was developed on more powerful hardware and Linux was developed on PC hardware, explaining why early Linux was stronger in personal apps and BSD was stronger in server apps, a situation that is not nearly as distinct as it was 20-30 years ago.

Both of them are rich in capabilities.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by Brian Masinick.

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Brian Masinick

[Member oops]

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… I also knew UNIX vs. the BSD variation and was familiar with both. BSD had additional editing tools but UNIX owned much of the other code, which led to a rewrite around the same time that Linux was emerging because UNIX claimed ownership of system code. Similarly UCB claimed all BSD tools (vi and other creations. Ultimately it was resolved.

Hi,
Thanks for the explanations Brian.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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I over simplified the details, but the essence is that AT&T was seeking revenue and/or ownership protection for the code that they wrote and felt (probably rightly so) that AT&T was due not only revenue but also infringement penalties.

UCB countered with the same, claiming similar protection for the utilities such as ex and vi, which were incorporated into AT&T UNIX, though acknowledged that they were written by Bill Joy and UCB resources.

The BSD movement feared similar penalty so the PC version of BSD was completely rewritten and the minicomputer versions, still popular, eventually melded into hybrids containing capabilities of both. One example of that was Digital Equipment Corp. ULTRIX, mainly BSD 4.3 4.4, later added UNIX System V and because Digital UNIX, and lastly Tru64 UNIX before sold out to HP. (I left Digital before that was completed but returned as a contractor for 1-2 projects).

By the time Tru64 UNIX was branded Red Hat Enterprise Linux was already beginning to replace some large computing services. By 2005 projects were underway in large financial services companies to replace many Sun Solaris servers with Intel servers running RHEL.

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Brian Masinick

[Member oops]

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… Interesting, that was a long story .

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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oops wrote:

… Interesting, that was a long story .

There is a LOT to the complete story. The yellow-covered “Bell System Technical Journal”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs_Technical_Journal
has a wealth of information.

BSD: Berkeley Software Distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution
tells more about BSD.

Any inaccuracies in my recollection ought to be pretty accurate in these resources.

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Brian Masinick

[Member oops]

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Dzhigit wrote:

Interesting. Are the Live USB features as powerful as antiX’s?

No, but a kind of snapshot can be done to meet the usb key (ex: 16GB) via:

truncate -s +10G nomadBSD-15GB.img

Into VM VirtualBox (modif, updates):
VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename nomadBSD-15GB.vmdk -rawdisk nomadBSD-15GB.img

Then to usb key:
dd bs=1M if=nomadBSD-15GB.img of=/dev/sdX conv=fsync

• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by oops.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by oops.

[Member PDP-8]

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The interesting thing that gets frequently glossed over about BSD at the start of the PC era, is that the actual compiler, RMS’ biggest hit – GCC is used!

ATT didn’t have any problem with Jolitz’ 386BSD, but BSDi’s BSD/386 (at $995 was quite the bargain!) did get entangled in that lawsuit thing. Not sure that BSDi was allowing people to *share* their code either, whereas Jolitz’ version did. This is where I think the rubber met the fork in the road for many culturally.

Only until relatively recently has BSD tried to rid itself of GCC with the Clang/LLVM environment.

Anyway, I have to shield my eyes when certain sectors of BSD fans go gaga about licensing issues and anti-FSF drama, when their very beginning and next couple of decades relied upon it.

Heck, even Steve Jobs had no problem with NeXtStep being compiled with GCC. In a spirit of sharing, contributed Objective-C to it.

I’ll stop – I guess I’ve read too many histories elsewhere that only start with the Linux kernel.. 🙂

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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Thanks PDP-8; nice additions to the discussion.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by Brian Masinick.

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Brian Masinick

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