[ntp:questions] drifting on crystal
Brad Knowles
brad at stop.mail-abuse.org
Thu Jan 13 09:51:22 UTC 2005
At 8:44 AM +0000 2005-01-13, Pete Stephenson wrote:
> I know very little about FreeBSD, except that it's used as the base of
> Mac OS X and that it's another system I managed to successfully install,
> but Debian just came across as more...er...me-friendly right off the
> bat. That, and the apt package manager is a Most Wonderful Thing(tm).
MacOS X uses a Mach micro-kernel, with a userland that is
primarily derived from FreeBSD, but also includes components from
other *BSD versions. That's not the same thing as saying that
FreeBSD is used as the base of MacOS X.
That said, FreeBSD has over thirteen thousand ports defined, and
no other OS on the planet has anything that compares to:
cd /usr/ports/directory/program; make install
Here's the list of top-level categories which are defined (62 total):
accessibility devel irc packages vietnamese
arabic distfiles japanese palm www
archivers dns java picobsd x11
astro editors korean polish x11-clocks
audio emulators lang portuguese x11-fm
benchmarks finance mail print x11-fonts
biology french math russian x11-servers
cad ftp mbone science x11-themes
chinese games misc security x11-toolkits
comms german multimedia shells x11-wm
converters graphics net sysutils
databases hebrew net-mgmt textproc
deskutils hungarian news ukrainian
That comes out to an average of more than 210 ports per top-level
category. I challenge any OS on the planet to be able to combine
that many port/package definitions with the trivial ease of
installation provided by the FreeBSD ports system.
This is the standard by which all other OSes are measured, at
least in this particular area.
> Once I get the Cobalt up to speed and serving time, then I'll work on
> getting it more accurate -- GPS or WWVB input, etc. Maybe some new
> hardware and FreeBSD for a new, dedicated timeserver...we'll see.
One of the best time servers you can build today is running
FreeBSD on a Soekris SBC no bigger than a thin paperback.
Poul-Henning Kamp has a lot of experience in this area, and has
written a lot of good material describing how he's done it.
--
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755
SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.
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