Michael Neumann wrote:

> Ralf Mler wrote:
> 
>> Am Donnerstag, 22. Juli 2004 10:22 schrieb Michael Mueller:
>>
>>> To make it short: I love it :-)
>>>
>>> I'm not using it as a server but as a workstation both at home and 
>>> @work.
>>> I was always quite satisfied with woody on both my boxes but was 
>>> since I'm
>>> not willing to use the old software woody provides (e. g. kde 2.2) I was
>>> using lots of backports.
>>> First I switched at home and after using it at home for about half a 
>>> year,
>>> I switched at work too last week :-)
>>>
>>> The imho coolest thing of FreeBSD ist the strict separation between base
>>> system and Ports. I'm using 4.10 stable - let's say that's somehow like
>>> using Debian woody - but I can always install the lates software like 
>>> kde
>>> 3.2.3, ruby 1.8.1 etc....
>>> One thing to consider is, that if you want new versions, you nearly 
>>> always
>>> have to compile them by yourself... in the case of ruby no big deal, but
>>> when you want to compile kde or openoffice you can easily keep your box
>>> occupied the whole night or more...
>>> I'm using it on a celeron 1100 and it's ok to do such things at 
>>> night....
>>> but it wouldn't dare to compile big programs on let's say an P2-300...
>>>
>>> However FreeBSD when compared to linux lacks supports for some new
>>> 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? 
> 
> 
> Yes, you can run Linux binaries on FreeBSD. The linux syscalls are 
> "simply" mapped to FreeBSD syscalls.
> 
> But that does not work in any case. Mostly, the problems are due to 
> missing shared libraries. But for example the Linux version of 
> Mathematica 5 runs fine on FreeBSD, Maple, too.
> 
> Regards,
> 
>   Michael
> 
> 

Good point.  This isn't emulation and precisely why Linux binaries can 
be run in FreeBSD with only +- 3% difference in performance for many apps.