I will start off by admiting that i am Biased towards Gentoo.
However, i dont have many negative tings to say about FreeBSD, so i suppose thats a huge compliment to the FreeBSD developers.


What seperates Gentoo (my favorite linux distro) from toher linux distro's is the package management system (portage). Which i know is inspireed from the FreeBSD packege management system Ports.

So i decided to give FreeBSD a try (just incase i was a BSD user stuck in a linux users body)

Portage vs Ports...

I liked the way FreeBSD Ports uses make for most things that gentoo has a sperate prgram (emerge) for.

For example, to search for, and install a program such as gaim...

Gentoo


FreeBSD


Using "Make" has a much more unix feel to it all.
(and yes, the make scripts take care of dependency's just like emerge does in gentoo)

Pro FreeBSD points:

Searching the ports Free is lightning fast!
running a portage search into gentoo takes upto 5 seconds.

Also, pre-compiled binary's were more available for FreeBSD.
Those with slower CPU's and Internet connections dont need to spend all day downloading and compiling thigs like Xorg or KDE / Gnome.


Pro Gentoo Points:


some packages have differant compile options, for example audio programs can be configured With or without support for different formats, like CS's m3's ogg vorbis, midi, flac etc etc.

with gentoo, these preferances are all stored in USE flags, and done automatically.

with FreeBSD, a menu screen is poped up before package compilation with checkk boxes.

The FreeBSD system is easyer that configureing USE flags, but is a minor inconvinience having to set them each time, i prefer gentoo's automated method.


Although Both FreeBSD and gentoo have similar boot scripts,
After installing Xorg and Gnome GDM, i could not find a pre-written boot script for graphical startup.

in gentoo, all daemons and services come with a boot script which can be added to a rn level with the command "rc-update"

In FreeBSD i had to write my own Graphical Login Boot script.

There was also virtually zero help on doing this on-line.

The FreeBSD website listen my hardware as compatable with FreeBSD-6 amd64.

However my dmesg logs are fill of "nve0: timeout" "nve0: link down" "nve0: link up"

nve0 is my nForce-3 network card. Networkin works fine, but my logs are getting full of these errors.

Also, im having alot of trouble getting my sound cad to work.

Attempts at running the media player causes the system to crash.

And through no fault of there own, Nvidia have not released an Amd64 Graphcs driver.

however, the Xorg nv open source GeForce driver is very vry very smooth, but unfortunatly, takes upto 28 seconds to switch from Xorg to a console by hitting Ctrl+Alt+F1



so, in conclusion, i will be sticking with Gentoo, but FreeBSD was very impressive.
I will be keeping it installed on my system, and will continue to attempt to get sound and networking working correctly.

The horny little devil of FreeBSD is also annoying.

I think in time, your problems with the network/sound card problems will be fixed (as long as the ones developing know about the errors).

Personally, I have been pushed away from Linux because of compatibility issues with my unfortunately favourite programs and also the problems I had at school with Mandrake Linux

On the whole interesting post, often power is over-taken by usability and function.

Its not that i dont like BSD,
Its just that Gentoo Linux has all my my favorite FreeBSD features, none of linux annoyances, nor BSD issues with nvidia.

(why would Nvidia develop x86 and x86_64 frivers for Linux, but only x86 for FreeBSD ???)

Anyways thanks... I expect sooner or later a BSD guru will hopefully show up and tell me where i went wrong

well they are planning to change the logo themselves
http://logo-contest.freebsd.org/result/

Mandrake is INO not the best distro around..give Ubuntu or SuSe a try . the latest versions are really awsome

FreeBSD seems intersting ..i think ill give it a try..but i am sure iwill stick with gentoo.

...ahem...

Solution:



'emerge --search gaim' = 'eix -s gaim'
'emerge --searchdesc gaim' = 'eix -S gaim'

Lightening fast if you ask me .

For me, emerge --search can take upto 30 seconds on my 256 mb RAM. eix takes 2 seconds for anything.

I've been using gentoo for almost a month now ... and am hooked to it. It's just amazing. I've even got Photoshop (albeit 6) to work under linux without any problems using Wine. And the package management system is just great. No more dependency problems or library problems. Updating the system is a snap.



I hear ya. Mandrake was the first one I used myself. I had trouble installing some programs myself. The libraries just wouldn't compile. Of course, I was too much of a newbie back then, but it was very irritating. I jumped over to slackware which gave me more command over the system which I used for almost a year and now finally, gentoo. A friend of mine also was bouncing from distro to distro and when I suggested gentoo, he loved it.

I'd like to try out BSD. But, not right now. I've read quite a bit about how gentoo's portage was adapted from BSD's ports.

A few days ago i was wondering why the portage tree wasnt indexed for fast seaching (similar to slocate)

And there it was all along, eix.

Ive been using gentoo for years, and im still learning new things

thanks for that.