[averydonovan]

I have installed and used all three major variants of BSD: FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. FreeBSD is notable for how fast it is, NetBSD supports over 3-dozen computer platforms last time I checked and is also pretty fast, and OpenBSD is a bit slow but secure. FreeBSD is my favorite since it is the fastest, has the best hardware support, and has the largest ports collection. It is probably the easiest one to start out with, too, since it has a larger user-base than the other BSDs. As long as the hardware supports it, I'd take FreeBSD over any distribution of GNU/Linux.

 

[Stephonovich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Elec If you really just wanna mess around with a bunch of different OSes, I'd almost recommend you buy a copy of VMWare, since that makes it easy to do what you're talking about in a nice safe sandbox. The downsides are that it can be slow and it's expensive (like almost new pair of headphones expensive). Hard drives are ridiculously cheap these days, but it adds up if you need a bunch of 'em.

I suggest (in no particular order) bochs, QEMU, and Xen. (OK, so it was alphabetical)

bochs is the one that usually comes to mind when talking about open source VMs, and likely the most stable. QEMU claims to be faster and have more features, and Xen is a whole 'nother ballgame. I'd never even heard about it until Googling. I must say, it looks interesting.

 

[Welly Wu]

FreeBSD Handbook doesn't explain things as well as my book.

 

[Aman]

Don't get books.

You need two things when using *nix/*bsd:

1. The 'man' manuals.
2. Trial and Error

The rest is a waste of time/brain-power/money.

By the way...

FreeBSD for Workstations
OpenBSD for Security
NetBSD for ... i dunno

 

[Welly Wu]

nevermind

 

[Stephonovich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Welly Wu Hmm. I wonder about two things: How much hard drive capacity will I need with the latest version of FreeBSD or OpenBSD? How much RAM? Can I share my existing Linux /ext3 filesystem? What kind of filesystem does FreeBSD or OpenBSD use? Looks like that FreeBSD is much more popular and has better hardware support. It also looks to be a bit easier. Also, it seems to be faster. I guess that has decided it for me then. FreeBSD just released version 6.0: http://www.freebsd.org . Is anyone here using it?

About to go to work, so I can't do much research. Google is your friend, though.

If I had to guess, I'd say 1-2GB would comfortably hold a BSD install. More would be necessary if you were planning on adding any personal files, music, or anything of the like.

As for RAM, it's most likely like the majority of distros. Without X, 8MB is sufficient. With X and a lightweight WM (Fluxbox/Blackbox et. al.), 32MB is fine. With a big DE like GNOME or KDE, 128MB is pretty good. More, of course, is always fine.

BSD can utilize any common UNIX file system, AFAIK. ext2/3, ReiserFS (perhaps not 4, though), XFS, JFS, and so on. ext2/3 is kind of a standard, though, so surely it would work with it.

I've heard people claim that FreeBSD is a superior desktop OS than Linux. Dunno. It does have the most excellent Ports system, which Gentoo's Portage is based on. It has a huge package selection, as well. Try it out.

 

[the_villain]

FreeBSD hasn't got any support for ReiserFS for my dissapoinment. The default filesystem of FreeBSD is UFS, which seems pretty stable up to now for me. I don't know whether you can install FreeBSD on ext2 or ext3 partitions. FreeBSD supports NTFS and FAT32.(can mount them). The porst system is really well working. As for stability it is on my top list with Slackware and LFS (Linux From Scratch). I like it very much. You can do (almost) everything for desktop (WM's, packages etc .) as well with FreeBSD as with Linux.

 

[antiant]

have you ever been here? http://www.ocforums.com/ or here http://forums.anandtech.com/ might help out, seems to have some good info on a lot of stuff

 

[SiBurning]

From an end user or administrator's point of view, the biggest difference between BSD and linux is in the distribution model.

The BSDs are controlled by a small core group with the same shared goal of making a stable operating system, although each has another specific goal. The result is that all of the BSDs are well organized and reasonably well documented. OpenBSD is the best in this regard, having the best documentation and the most logical organization.

Linux is uncontrolled by a large, diverse crowd with people often working at odds with each other. I've seen RedHat distributions ship with three firewalls installed at the same time, and two of them were incompatible which meant that none of the firewalls worked at all out of the box. My experience with Slackware was much better, but that was when linux was still a 0.99 kernel. Then again, linux is the only one on which you can expect to play games for more than 5 minutes. Noone in the BSD world is going to spend time fixing Wine when it breaks.

I do not recommend you start with OpenBSD. FreeBSD is by far the better choice for general use. The FreeBSD community is very helpful, and there's quite a choice of software. They are also way ahead of OpenBSD in supporting hardware, and you might even get those five minutes of gaming in before the next release of Wine breaks. OpenBSD is behind in all of these and many more. If you want to run a server, then you might be better off running OpenBSD. OpenBSD is just so well organized it's a pleasure to use.

Just to stress the main point again, there have been many times I had trouble on linux and did not have a solution after several days. I never once had a problem on BSD that I couldn't find a solution for by the next day. The linux community may be much larger, but the complexity of configurations overwhelms this advantage, and much of the linux community is way more likely to just call you an idiot than help you. Misery loves company. If you've done your research and have exhausted the possibilities, try EFNet #freebsdhelp, which is a very helpful place for people who don't ask silly question that are in the man page. Just don't try asking freebsd questions on #freebsd on EFNet. They'll just ban you for it.

To really play with FreeBSD and install all kinds of software like X and multimedia, you want 40GB. For a minimal, but complete OpenBSD server, you can get by on 10GB. If you already know what you're doing and what you want, the server numbers can be much smaller, and probably 80% of the space will be for log files. The actual recomendations should be listed on the websites.

 

[Welly Wu]

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[funnytimes]

For $2000, you have enough for a good laptop, and enough for a beastily (probably overkill, assuming you were building it yourself or stacking coupons) desktop. A laptop is much more useful because it is more flexible in terms of where and when you can use it, especially for school.

btw, have you gotten news back from the schools yet?

 

[Welly Wu]

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[Welly Wu]

Books rule. Safari rules more.

 

[gsferrari]

Dont waste money on books...the links majid gave you are more than enough to get you started. Plenty of online "manuals" and "guides" that will accomplish the same thing. Why blow $100.00 on books that you may probably never read?

I NEVER read a book that is more than 150 pages if it is dealing with technical stuff...Thank goodness Cisco has all training on the web with a virtual instructor...books are doorstops where I come from

[EDIT] Easier to buy parts compatible with OSes if you are playing with a Desktop. Laptop hardware varies from OEM to OEM and parts are near impossible to change. You get stuck with what you buy [/EDIT]

Get a nice 64bit desktop. Go really low and easy on sound and graphics. Get a good display since you will be looking at it for a long time. Load up on RAM and get two identical HDDs just to toy with RAID.

 

[Welly Wu]

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