Free BSD vs. Linux whats the diff???

[gmcd33]

I see a few guys on the board here use Free BSD. Whats the deal with Free BSD? I went to their web site and read a little about it. Whats the difference between linux and free bsd???

[Protester]

They are basically different flavors of "Unix". BSD is generally the better server OS. All the big websites (yahoo, MS hotmail (hehe), excite) etc run their webservers using BSD.

[Stef]

Its not BSD's server applications that make such an excellent NOS, but, its the fact that it comes with a high performance TCP/IP stack.

By default, BSD's default receive window is 256KBytes compared to Linux's 64KByte receive window!!!

If your looking for free software, Linux has tonnes more then any free or open-sourced operating system on the planet. Linux is also very scalable in the high-performance server environment. Since the OS kernel is entirely written in C and is open source, you are given the option of recompiling the kernel for your own performance needs.

Stef

Stef

[Protester]

Actually FreeBSD has all the apps and utils that Linux has, is also free, is much more scalable and robust AND you can recompile the kernel to fit your needs. :P

[Stef]

I always though BSD's where free but not open-sourced. Probly got it confused with another free OS.

One question though, is FreeBSD cluster'able?

I know that Linux is a popular *NIX variant to run over a cluster. Shell, IBM, and Hellewt Packard (or whatever) uses Linux in various embeded and clustered applications. How does FreeBSD compare in this aspect? Are there any embeded electronics boasting the FreeBSD kernel?

I'm not BSD bashing here, I'm only curious to see if there are the same type of high-performance computing / embeded electronics beign developed for other flavors of UNIX.

I use Debian GNU Linux myself. I have used many RedHat variants out there and find that there all trying to achieve what Microsoft already has. (user friendlyness at the cost of performance)

Stef