BSD suggestions

[TheEliteLlama]

Can anyone give me a point in the right direction? I'm looking to get into BSD which I understand is harder to learn than Linux, despite the similarities. My real question is which distrobution would be best for a person to start out with? It won't be used for anything except for test purposes until, of course, I get the hang of BSD. I'll be putting it on my old AMD 1700+ machine, so x86 is all that is really required.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Nothinman]

It's not really harder (well I find the BSD userland a PITA compared to the GNU one found in Linux distributions) it's really just a little different. Generally you just pick one and go, you'll be able to do almost all of the same things in all of them.

 

[TheEliteLlama]

Okay, thanks. Does anyone know how well the ports system of FreeBSD works? Is it really as useful and simple as they claim?

 

[drag]

A good description of the FreeBSD ports system.

Never used it myself, but all in all it seems pretty keen-gear.

 

[Vadatajs]

Originally posted by: TheEliteLlama
Okay, thanks. Does anyone know how well the ports system of FreeBSD works? Is it really as useful and simple as they claim?

Yes it is. If I remember correctly, all I had to do was cd to the proper directory*, then type 'make install' to install the package. I only ran freeBSD for a few months, but I found the documentation very good (especially the handbook), and the overall experience was very positive.

*this was the hardest part.

 

[n0cmonkey]

FreeBSD is probably the easiest. OpenBSD is great. NetBSD is the one I really want to try (as soon as I get a spare machine).

I don't know how FreeBSD's ports are, I stopped using it in the 3.x series. Worked just fine then though.

I have OpenBSD on a number of computers, and can't imagine using something else for most of them.

There are some neat developments in NetBSD that I'd like to play around with. But the installation is supposed to be tough (probably not much tougher than OpenBSD). I'll get around to trying it out the next time I have a spare machine. Or maybe on my sparc64 if OpenBSD continues to dump...

 

[Nothinman]

A lot of people swear by it, I wasn't impressed.

Ports that is, although I guess that statement would apply to BSD in general for me =)

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
A lot of people swear by it, I wasn't impressed.

Ports that is, although I guess that statement would apply to BSD in general for me =)

Of course you weren't impressed. In many (most) ways, apt is better.

 

[skyking]

Done the apt thing some, it is nice. Ports works fine for me though, and I have never installed FreeBSD from a CD. I do the two floppy net install, follow directions, say yes when it asks about the ports collection.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
FreeBSD is probably the easiest. OpenBSD is great. NetBSD is the one I really want to try (as soon as I get a spare machine).

I don't know how FreeBSD's ports are, I stopped using it in the 3.x series. Worked just fine then though.

I have OpenBSD on a number of computers, and can't imagine using something else for most of them.

There are some neat developments in NetBSD that I'd like to play around with. But the installation is supposed to be tough (probably not much tougher than OpenBSD). I'll get around to trying it out the next time I have a spare machine. Or maybe on my sparc64 if OpenBSD continues to dump...

The install is really easy (curses interface for partitioning, not command line), although when I tried a -current snapshot once, it was pretty unstable.

 

[TheEliteLlama]

Thanks for all the input guys! I think I'm going for FreeBSD stable for a while. I'll probably end up trying OpenBSD because the security features look uber-promising.

 

[skyking]

I'd go with 4.9 if I were you, the 5 series still has some issues, and not much fun for a beginner, that
try downloading the release floppies, get ports, update to stable. after you get done with buildworld, mergmaster, et al, you will be a semi-guru

 

[TheEliteLlama]

I have 4.8 that I got on CD with a copy of LinuxFormat. I think I'll just stick with that till 5 becomes stable.

 

[skyking]

that'll do!

 

[Mucman]

Wonderful BSD resource full of friendly people!

I've been using FreeBSD for two years now. I tried Linux (Mandrake, Red Hat, and Debian) and found it more difficult than FreeBSD.

 

[Soybomb]

Yeah freebsd to me to easier than linux too because of documentation, standardization, etc