Thanks, I was not aware of that. After an afternoon reading BSD, I had mostly eliminated PC-BSD and focused on FreeBSD or Dragonfly mostly because I have had most success with it in a VM. Perhaps I should take a fresh look at OpenBSD.

Can the BSDs support r/w access a Linux filesystem such as ext4 for data interchange (i.e not the kernel itself)?

Since my experience with PC-BSD, as outlined above, I have had a discussion (exchange of e-mails) with someone who was a graduate student at Berkeley, way back when, and actually worked on the BSD project.
He said that while it appears to be gobbling up RAM it is not, per se, using all that RAM. It loads everything it thinks it might need into memory and when a user starts an application it unloads what isn't needed and runs the application(s). A roundabout way of
saying, it isn't using as much RAM as it appears.


Perhaps, PC-BSD is tweaked so this isn't a problem?
My experience with BSD is limited to my recent installation of PC-BSD. What I did notice is PC-BSD is, really, for all practical purposes, FreeBSD. It boots to a FreeBSD prompt (command line) waits for a few seconds and launches the GUI splash screen from which you can pick the desktop of your choice.
During the installation of PC-BSD you are asked what boot loader you want to use or none at all. I chose "None" and later edited /etc/lilo.conf in Slackware and had, at one time, Slackware, m$-windows and PC-BSD available from the lilo menu.


Ext4, no. Not at this time. The docs say it can read ext2 and 3, but that didn't work for me. I went as far as to re-install Slackware64 on a ext2 partition, but PC-BSD still could not or would not read it. Perhaps I was doing something wrong (wouldn't be the first time. )
OTOH, it had no problem see and mounting ntfs and vfat (I was using fat32).

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Yeah, PC-BSD is tweaked a bit. I saw that you could choose grub as your boot loader when I installed PC-BSD in Virtualbox. There are how tos on the Internet on how to dual boot Linux and FreeBSD using GRUB.

I am posting a follow-up to my earlier post in this thread to announce my first non-VM BSD install!

I decided to go with FreeBSD-10.0, despite concerns about Lilo incompatibility mentioned by hitest. I did quite a bit of reading without reaching a definitive conclusion so I decided to explore with the installer and try to avoid borking my disk while partitioning - which appears to have worked!

Initially I created a primary partition with gparted, but it does not support ufs so used cfdisk in the Slackware64 install on that drive to change the type to 'freebsd'. That did not work as expected but I think it was due to my own incomplete understanding of the ufs filesystem, so I ended up deleting and recreating that partition using the FreeBSD partitioning tools. I repeated the partitioning several times and rebooted into Slackware to be sure that I understood what was happening (I did find the FreeBSD partitioning tools to be a little confusing).

I finally created 120GB primary partition (slice) #3 on this drive (two drive system), and a / and swap inside that, and installed.

I then booted back into Slackware64 which manages the MBR on that drive, and added to my lilo-mbr.conf:

Ran lilo, rebooted into FreeBSD! So in the end, multi-booting Slackware64 (drive2), Slackware14.1(drive1) and FreeBSD-10 with Lilo was pretty painless!

I integrated to my local network and internet painlessly as well. I have not yet run X or created any user accounts, but will get to that as time permits.

So far the only surprises were lack of vim and a nasty PAM error when I tried to ssh in as root... I guess it doesn't like that! But I am able to ssh out and sftp to my other Slackware machines on my LAN (all non-priv user accts).

Anyway - thanks to all who encouraged me and offered helpful advice - my BSD experience now begins...

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Great

Awesome!