hi all,

i'm looking for a thin client/server solution and while comparing the selection of GNU/Linux distro's the last two weeks to find the tool for the job i actually couldn't find one that met ALL my requirements.

1. rock solid stable
(it should be installed and keep running till my pension)
2. secure as hell
(remote access enabled only for those authorized,otherwise i never get my pension)
3. good package management
(i need to keep it up to date from a remote location)
4. quickly installed (i need to be able to replicate a working set up to several machines)
5. fairly up to date
(not bleading edge but definetly leading edge)
6. excellent documentation
7. geek appeal (please...no point and click install)

while comming to the conclusion (what i already knew) that debian comes the closest to my requirements, i just happend to stumble on something i wasn't introduced to yet....FreeBSD.

first of all, the deamon is definitely NOT as sexy as the penguin, nevertheless it looks as a serious competitor (and it also gave me a Slacky feeling)

now i want to give FreeBSD a testdrive, but when briefly going through the manual and some extensive googling i couldn't find much on the subject, especially not as much as LTSP for linux.

so.. the question is...anybody knows where to find some good reading material for BSD on this subject?

much obliged.

Yep... pretty much any of the three main BSDs would fill this. I'm a fan of NetBSD for when failure is not an option, but that's without any good reason because the others have never given me an issue.

Yep... covered.

FreeBSD has the ports system with is excellent. pkgsrc is also a very good package system but can be a little more involved when it comes to upgrading. Although, make upgrade works fine 99.999% of the time.

All of them install very quickly, mainly because they install a minimal base system and you only add what you need on top of it.

All of them are in active development. And they also get upgraded versions of the programs into their respective package systems fairly quickly. For all of them, keeping the system up to date is a pretty painless operation.

One of the primary selling points of the BSDs is the massive amount of excellent documentation. For example, if you install FreeBSD with the documentation you not only have the excellent manpages but you have several books and a few dozen articles installed on the computer. These cover everything from a very basic introduction to using the OS right through developing in the kernel.

Point and click... in an install?

None of them have that problem.

Most of the information in the LTSP project will apply to the BSD projects. NetBSD has extensive guides for netbooting... and almost any project on creating a thin X client applies to the BSDs. I mean, this isn't that different or that complicated.

The big thing is knowing how to edit xdm-config, Xaccess, and Xservers -- take a look at http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO...ook/x-xdm.html for a very basic introduction.

mmmm, if all above is true, that would pretty much make it the perfect Nix distro.
this can't be true ofcourse so i will give BSD a spin and prove there's some ugly downside to it

those bsdforums seem pretty active, will have a day trip over there and look around before i pack my things and move from linux camp to bsd world.

thanks for the tip!