[nycbug-talk] Cloud Providers with FreeBSD

[Scott Robbins]

On Sun, Aug 22, 2010 at 06:31:09PM -0700, Pete Wright wrote:
> 
> On Aug 20, 2010, at 3:22 PM, Matt Juszczak wrote:
> 
> > Hi folks,
> > 
> > 
> > Thanks for any input!  I may end up going with Linux CentOS on Rackspace Cloud for now (though some people have mentioned that other distributions are more related to the FreeBSD type of thinking and have the ports collection?).
> 
> 
> i know this is not directly related to what you are looking for.  but i think there are two possible solutions.  IIRC there was some work to get linux KVM virtualization to support FreeBSD, if that is indeed still happening the perhaps you could find a "cloud" vendor who supports KVM - which I think is a "better" virtualization method for linux anyway...
> 

Unless I'm misunderstanding something, it's definitely there--just took
a quick look, on a CentOS 5.5 machine, at their virt-manager (the GUI
setup program for a kvm-qemu guest) and if you choose Unix, FreeBSD 6
and 7.x are listed as choices.  When I play with kvm-qemu on CentOS, I
tend to do it by command line, and I've setup an 8.1 guest with no
problem. 

I suspect the Linux that Matt is discussing is Gentoo, which was
developed by Daniel Robbins, who had worked on Free (and, IIRC, Open)BSD
before developing it.  

There's also ArchLinux, which is BSD like in many ways, but primarily
uses binary packages.  (However, you can use their abs system if you
need to customize and do a portslike installation.)

There's also Crux which has ports and its own BSD like handbook, but I
haven't heard much about it lately, and haven't used it in years.  Of
the three, Arch will take the least time to setup. 

Of the three, Arch seems to be the most active, and is probably the
quickest to set up, while still allowing you great flexibility.

The advantage of CentOS is that it's usually pretty stable, sort of a
set it and forget it type system, leaving you more time to concentrate
on the apps.

The disadvantage is that its packages are often out of date, and
(TOTALLY subjective impression) probably a bit slower.  It's considered
to be binary compatible with RHEL.  


-- 
Scott Robbins
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