Old Machine and BSD

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
1

I have a machine that ran windows 95 and I'd like to turn it into a print server. Since, of course it runs NetBSD, I was wondering how challenging it is to pick up BSD coming from Linux?

In other words, fellow Linux users please share your experiences with BSD here.

2

BSD uses the BASH shell and a bunch of GNU tools so it won't be too hard.

You may want to read the man pages of pkgsrc though.

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most BSDs come with extensive man pages, not just for commands, but for a whole range of introductory and general topics as well. So if you're comfortable with man pages, you'll feel right at home. One thing to note: BSDs generally don't support --help (or other double-dash command line options), check the man page instead, when you need to see what a command does, and which flags it supports.

Peripherally all the tools are the same, but the core can be quite different to linux, ie. different file systems, different networking tools and config files, etc. But there should be man pages on all of it. If there's some topic you want to know more about, you can run

$ man -k topic

to get a list of man pages pertaining to that topic :)

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Thanks!

I'm familiar with man pages. However, I've never had to use them yet. This is probably a good opportunity to get to use them. That's probably a skill or experience I should be familiar with if I want to be serious about admin.

Thanks again!

5

Thanks for the tip When its installed then I'll check that out.