“One of the more intriguing capabilities of the BSD operating systems is their ability to run binaries for other Unix-like operating systems. I recently found myself requiring the commercial PGP Command Line for a project. Rather than install a Linux box just for this one piece of software, I jumped through some hoops and made it work perfectly on one of my existing FreeBSD systems. Getting a random piece of commercial Linux software running on a FreeBSD system isn’t always as transparent as you might like, but you can do it with a minimum of fuss if you have a few extra troubleshooting skills”.
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2006/01/12/Big_Scary_Daemons.html
You need to add “l” in the end of URL. s/Big_Scary_Daemons.htm/Big_Scary_Daemons.html/g
Corrected the link… thanks for pointing it out
Running generic Linux binaries on Linux is difficult enough.
Looks like a lot of trouble for very little benefit. Seems to me that for the few Linux Specific apps out there you could throw together a CentOS box to run the apps native for nothing.
Telling a lot of BSD users that they should use Linux is the same as telling a Mac user they should switch to Windows or at least would be received the same way.
Why build an entirely seperate box just to run a few commercial apps like PGP, RealPlayer or Oracle?
Read the article, the process outlined is pretty simple. It’s only 3 pages long because that’s how Lucas tends to write. If it were a strict “HOWTO” it would all fit in less than a page:
-vi /etc/fstab and add linux procfs
-vi /etc/rc.conf and add the linux_enable=”YES” line
-cd /usr/ports/emulators/linux_base-rh-9 && make install clean
-type “linux”
-mkdir .pgp
It only gets hard when you have to wrangle with rpm, but you’d be doing that on your CentOS box anyhow…
Edited 2006-01-14 00:07
Simple, because there is no substitute for running native. This is not about running the Linux version of vim but running enterprise applications. The end result is that it’s about providing viable and stable solutions for the business not about how cool you look to your friends running Linux binaries on a BSD box. Anyone that runs this setup in a permanent basis in a production environment is a sloppy SA to say the least.
Running Oracle on FreeBSD is faster than running it on Linux, even though it is a Linux binary, using the Linux compatibility layer.
“Running Oracle on FreeBSD is faster than running it on Linux, even though it is a Linux binary, using the Linux compatibility layer.”
While I am a fan of BSD (and not of Linux in general), I am sure that I am not alone in wanting actual proof of this statement before I’d believe it.
Do you have such proof? Or are you just trying to incite the wrath of lackwits like Moulinneuf?