package management and administration is a great start to explaining the differwnces, but what I would really like to see is a low level explanation of the differences. To what extent does BSD follow the "everything is a file" philosophy that linux does. Where is information about devices and processes to be found?
coming from a Gentoo background, where portage is based on the bsdports system, package management is not all that foreign in BSD. But when it comes time to tweak things, I start missing my sysfs and procfs, mostly throug ignorance of how BSD does such things.
I think that "most everything is a file" is a core UNIX feature. "Everything is a file" really comes from Plan 9: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs (see Design Concepts, /net, and /proc)
The "everything is a file" philosophy came from the original Unix, but didn't quite stay consistent when things like sockets were added later. Like Linux, BSD keeps its device info in /dev.
/proc doesn't come from Linux, it comes from plan9. The /proc in Linux is a weak knock-off, since Linux doesn't support per-process mount points the way plan9 does. I don't know about FreeBSD, but OpenBSD has a port of /proc roughly on par with Linux's.
I have not been using a bsd system for a long long time, but from what I recall at least freebsd had the same kind of virtual FSs that linux had, procfs on /proc and devfs on /dev but no separate sysfs on /sys.
I understand that this is a UNIX trait, I tried to choose my words carefully. Linux follows that philosophy (to some extent). Not: that is a Linux philosophy.
My main curiosity comes from how Mac OS X, being a sort of flavor of BSD, also follows that philosophy. The Mach kernel probably messes all that up though. Anyone familiar with the such things?
coming from a Gentoo background, where portage is based on the bsdports system, package management is not all that foreign in BSD. But when it comes time to tweak things, I start missing my sysfs and procfs, mostly throug ignorance of how BSD does such things.