From: Michal 'hramrach' Suchanek <hramrach_l@...>
Date: 2004-07-22T18:55:29+09:00
Subject: Re: [OT] FreeBSD <-> Debian

On Thu, Jul 22, 2004 at 06:09:12PM +0900, Ralf M�ller wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 22. Juli 2004 10:22 schrieb Michael Mueller:
> > To make it short: I love it :-)
> > hardware.. AFAIK there is no USB 2.0-support in the 4.X STABLE Line... But
> > since I don't have any fancy Multimedia-equipment I don't care..
> >
> 
> sounds great,
> what i wonder about is the linux binary compatibility. Do You know, what it 
> exactly means? Can i simply run binaries compiled for linux, or can i even 
> compile for linux on a FreeBSD machine? Is it possible to install rpm or deb 
> packages? 

The ports system benefits from the focus on source packages. Afret
trying FreeBSD I saw more packages than I could imagine any distribution
could have. But now that I have seen Gentoo Linux I think it is because
of the focus on source packages, not different kernel+license.

I am currently using NetBSD and the binary emulation in there is used
like this: there are packages which wrap some basic SuSe rpms (like
libc) and others that wrap Linux binaries (like OpenOffice or Mozilla).
It is then possible to install them without recompiling the software for
NetBSD. However, I recompiled even OpenOffice on my PIII 500 because the
native one is quite stable and the binary emulation would crash even the
whole system.
Another problem is convincing the package manager to install packages
for different platform. I think it is easy to just unpack the package
but running the install scripts and tracking dependencies as usual would
be probably quite hard.

Michal Suchanek