i use slackware. i know a bit about BSD and UNIX, and i think i might try to boot win2k (don't hate me: it's for games) Slackware, and Free BSD. what comes with freebsd? Is there a certain extra package i really need? give your

With FreeBSD you can install anything you want.. there are lots of ports (more than 9000 I think).

What do you mean by need? As in required for the system to work or just packages that are really cool and useful. I have yet to find a piece of open source software that is not a port of package.

There really aren't "features" per se. You get an OS, and you can install whatever applications you want.

The base FreeBSD OS comes with a webserver, ftp server, ssh, MTA, etc all built right in as standard. You can choose to install any of the optional packages from the Ports system (over 10,000 to choose from last I saw) via either building from source (with the FreeBSD-specific patches included) or just install the binary package. The ports system contains all the same software you could install on Linux. You can even run Linux binaries on FreeBSD with it's binary emulation, which runs some Linux software even faster than it is on Linux itself!