Choose Free BSD or Open BSD? Which one?

explorer1979 · 11-27-2002, 08:58 PM

For beginner in BSD family, choose Free BSD or Open BSD is better?

I am have some experience on Red Hat 7.2 and 8.0

And do someone can talk me what is the different of Free BSD and Open BSD?

And where can find the document web site for reference and learn the BSD

Thanks

leed_25 · 11-27-2002, 10:15 PM

I run FreeBSD at home and on my desk at work..

www.freebsd.org.

Blackknight · 11-28-2002, 04:42 AM

FreeBSD is known to be the more friendly BSD and it is !!!

Well, OpenBSD is mainly for security tasks even if some people use it for desktop. NetBSD's main goal is the portability, so use it if you have an exotic hardware.
But the FreeBSD's installation procedure is the easiest one.

explorer1979 · 11-28-2002, 08:19 AM

Thanks all of the suggest.

I decided download the Free BSD

stickman · 11-29-2002, 10:07 PM

Between the two, FreeBSD is probably the easier to install and setup. Personally, I prefer OpenBSD.

Obitus · 12-15-2002, 01:26 PM

My personal opinion is that FreeBSD is probably one of the most recognized and best supported of the BSDs. It's probably the best choice for a desktop, especially if you have an Nvidia graphics card since they support FreeBSD now.

OpenBSD is the most secure out of the box but to be useful in a desktop environment would need serious modification that would greatly decrease it's security. I run OpenBSD on my firewall/NAT/DHCP server box though and for that task it works great. Even though the computer is only an old Pentium 75MHz with 24MB or RAM. I would say that for a task like that though that OpenBSD is the best choice and it has quite a bit of good documentation on it's website. It sucks that you can't download the iso version though.

NetBSD is my current favorite. It's running my DNS server currently while I learn more about it. The new 1.6 version is small and very easy to set up if you are installing it as the only OS on the machine. Even more so then FreeBSD for that task. If you need to dual boot then it becomes more complicated but that is true of any operating system. The worst problem with it is that it has probably the least documentation of all the BSDs. However, in many cases the answers found in FreeBSD documentation can also be used with NetBSD.

If you do need documentation though you would probably want to stick with FreeBSD until you have a better grasp of BSD and the way it works.