I am curious as to what type of BSD you prefer and run. I currently run OpenBSD 5.0 on my desktop and FreeBSD 8.2 in a VM.
Happy Holidays, Folks.

I'm running NetBSD on my old firewall. I used to run OpenBSD a while back, but the motherboard went out, and I have been distro swapping ever since.

I neglected to mention that I'm running pfSense on my router/firewall. NetBSD is awesome.

NetBsd is the only one I have ever used and it will be my fav distro shortly. And please no one come with Mac OS!

OpenBSD because I like the focus on security, and the mailing lists are very enlightening (and very entertaining at times). I run it under KVM on Slackware, on a crappy PIII, and plan to replace my home router sometimerealsoon with it.

Looks like the Slackware users like BSD too.

Yeah, the focus on security initially drew me to OpenBSD, I like the concept of secure by default. Yep. I love BSD.

Personally very fond of FreeBSD. Some of my favorite OpenBSD-spawned projects are ported there - PF and OpenSSH, including the "portable" version, so sshd(8) is not necessarily tied to the base system.

• The Ports system works really well (if you have the patience for building and compiling source prior to installation). It generally allows for significant customization. It allows one to upgrade production daemons to a new major or minor version without having to install a new OS version. And, so long as you're diligent about reading /usr/ports/UPDATING, things very rarely break.
• Jails are an extremely handy feature for isolating services and/or end users. They're also baked into the OS. No patching or add-on apps needed.
• Many aspects of both system and third-party (Ports) daemon behavior can be controlled through a single configuration file.
• Filesystems are laid out in a sane and predictable way. Upon installing a new Port, you can make an educated guess about where it placed config files, scripts, and/or binaries, and you'll be correct.

I'm running a production FreeBSD host for some Perl developers, another one for an HTTP proxy, and another for Nagios. Sometime after the Xmas break, I'll be deploying redundant OpenLDAP services on FreeBSD. It's not perfect, though. I wish the resources were available to build in better SAN (device drivers, multipathing) support, as I have lamented before. I occasionally donate money and documentation patches to the FreeBSD Foundation, but I believe a major commercial backing will be needed before SAN support is as advanced as it is on, say, RHEL or Debian. Should that day arrive, I'll have several other uses for FreeBSD.

For their parts, I like NetBSD and OpenBSD very much, in concept. I installed the former on a laptop, and found it to be incredibly "lightweight" and quick (subjective). I don't have a lot of interest in trying out the latter, but I still donate to the OpenBSD project because of the fantastic utilities that camp rolls out (which get ported to other OSes).

As Desktop system: GhostBSD
AS Server System: OpenBSD
AS NAS: FreeNAS
As FireWall System: M0n0Wall or pfSense

NetBSD. Xen support makes it the perfect BSD for me. It's very light and fast, and not far behind OpenBSD in the security ratings I've looked at. In some places I use OpenBSD as a firewall because it has excellent bandwidth-shaping, or packet queueing, and because PF in NetBSD is quite a bit behind the latest OpenBSD release.

I'm surprised by the lack of FreeBSD love going on. I just recently install 9.0 and love it. Fast, stable, professional, there's really no limit to what you can do with it.

OpenBSD. I run it on everything except for my daughter's Ubuntu machine and my wife's Win7 machine.

I forgot to mention that I'm running FreeBSD (pfSense) on my router/firewall. It has rock solid performance.

I do not wish to start a new thread for just a small query of mine.
I've been testing PC-BSD9.0 in Vmware since some time and when I checked for VLC player in AppCafe, it's 220MB plus.

How will a mere mortal with a poor internet connection in a few kbps be going to install extra apps here? Please enlighten the n00b?

Regards,

Very slowly, from the sounds of it...unless you can get to a system with fast internet and download all of the packages for your version of PC-BSD and create your own repository (I've never actually done that with PC-BSD, so don't take my word on it, but I've done that for many other BSDs and Linux distros, so it *should* be possible).

Thanks for the quick answer but that's kinda demotivating.
Don't know what else to say. Can it be installed from source like in general Linux?

Regards,