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Re: [Sheflug] BSDs

And Lo! The Great Prophet "Netsonic" uttered these words of wisdom:
> Following a message earlier that mentioned BSD again, are there any
> particular recommendations concerning which one is the best/easiest to use ?
> 

Depends what you want, as they each have their particular strengths. 
FreeBSD is probably the "best" in terms of user-orientated BSDs. It 
originally was only for x86 architecture, but there's since been ports to 
other architectures. But as it's still heavily based around intel, it's got 
good performance and also benefits from having a huge 'ports' collection 
(see http://www.freebsd.org/ports/ ).

NetBSD is the proverbial adjustable spanner. It runs under a huge number of 
platforms, as a quick look at the list on http://www.netbsd.org/ will tell 
you. Great if you want uniformity over a variety of machines and archs. I 
can't remember what their ports collection is like though :)

OpenBSD is just geared towards security. As such, its hardware support is 
limited, it doesn't have as many ports, but it's probably one of the most 
secure OSs you can install. Open's page is at http://www.openbsd.org/

None of the BSDs support SMP particularly well (if at all), though Free
does have SMPng as an ongoing project to get fine grained control to
/really/ make use of SMP.

Once installed, they're all pretty much of a muchness. Yes, there are 
differences, but they aren't huge. As for ease of installation... well if 
you can follow textual menus, you should be okay :)

In the end, take your choice. I have open running on a dedicated firewall, 
and once SMP matures on Free, I'll probably start looking at that for my 
workstation, however I suspect Linux may stay, depending on what I can find 
in the way of audio/MIDI apps for Free. If its a server install, any of 
them'll do the job soundly.

Chris...

-- 
\ Chris Johnson           \ NP: Chemical Brothers - 09. Hey Boy, Hey Girl
 \ cej [at] nightwolf.org.uk    ~-----,   
  \ http://cej.nightwolf.org.uk/  ~-----------------------------------, 
   \ Redclaw chat - http://redclaw.org.uk - telnet redclaw.org.uk 2000 \____



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