The following URL was posted by the usual troll to the FreeBSD current mailinglist: Gregory McGarry compared NetBSD 2.0 and FreeBSD 5.3 by running several benchmarks.
Just yesterday i downloaded NetBSD 2.0 to upgrade Olga today. I was curious if the new version felt more speedier than NetBSD 1.6.2.
What I like about NetBSD is their Installer which looks a lot better than sysinstall and supports localization (Currently English, French, German and Polish).
Unfortunately it lacks a mergemaster like functionality. A serious bug: while upgrading i noticed that the installer does not check if there is enough free space on the hard disk. tar failed to extract all files, but the installer claimed “selected distribution sets unpacked successfully”.
4 thoughts on “FreeBSD vs. NetBSD”
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NetBSD _has_ mergemaster-like functionality. It’s called etcupdate, and has been in the base system since NetBSD 1.6. Cheers.
Yeah, but is not called from the installer. The installer failed to merge my sendmail.cf and /etc/passwd.
Hmm, interesting. I didn’t know that FreeBSD’s installed ran mergemaster during an update. Well, this could be something worth suggesting for NetBSD’s sysinst 😉 Possibly to the tech-install@ mailing list.
No, sysinstall doesn’t even support binary updates AFAIK. So we don’t need a benchmark to determine that the NetBSD installer is better than the FreeBSD one :-).
(But I know that sysinstall prints an error message if the hard disk is too small.)