Yes, I know BSD stands for Berkley Software Distribution, but what is it?

please, try searching for it.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...=Google+Search

Well, I'll take a crack at this...

BSD is basicly a version on UNIX in the same way that LINUX is basicly a version of UNIX. In the 80's, it was called BSD UNIX. It lost the legal right to call itself UNIX sometime in the '90's. The UNIX trademark is owned by the Open Group and they now decide if an OS may officially call itself "UNIX". Neither BSD nor LINUX has been blessed by the Open Group. (See What is UNIX?.)

BSD has been around a long time. It is the source of the entire sockets interface, the TCP/IP protocol stack, reliable signals, vfork(), select(), syncronous I/O, and secondary group membership. And they originated some non-kernel stuff too, like csh, vi, and sendmail. Without BSD, Unix would be a very different OS.

My first unix system was a System III, but the the vendor prominently claimed "with Berkeley Extensions". I think that was roughly 1979.

There are 3 viable distributions of BSD: NETbsd, OPENbsd, and FREEbsd.

I have to say that I find the BSD's to be rather alien. In contrast, I feel quite at home on a Linux system. But that is just one man's opinion. We have all three in operation at work. I don't work closely with any of them, but here is my impression of each...

NETbsd will run on any platform. It may be the most portable real OS ever written. For many systems, it's the only game in town. And it has a reputation for being easy to install. It is very stable and very fast. It would be the a good choice for a very heavily used ftp server or web server.

OPENbsd is a very secure OS. The only OS's more secure are military grade and propietary. It is tough to install and does not run on many systems. But it can safely be directly connected to the Internet. So for systems that must be outside a firewall, like nameservers or ntp clients, OPENbsd is the best choice. And it also is a good choice for running a firewall.

FREEbsd also does not run on many systems. And it is not an easy install either. But it has a reputation for being easy on end users. Apple's OS X has a version of unix called "darwin" which is actually FREEbsd. FREEbsd would be a good choice for a workstation.

http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/BSD is a reasonable description of how BSD emerged. There are other better examples out there depending on how much reading you want to do.

I think it's important to point out that many of the current, freely available BSDs already mentioned are distributed under the BSD license which is free, as in beer. It is the most free license in oss currently. It places no restrictions on what you can do with software distributed under the BSD license. The GPL, in comparison, has a lot more restrictions. So this is an important thing to consider when using the BSDs.

Also, I don't agree with the previous poster about a couple points. OpenBSD is very easy to install and with the CDs (or with broadband) it takes me about 10-15 minutes to install. The hardest part of the install is the disklabel program, which is not intuitive the first couple times you run it, but it's extremely well documented (great documentation is another thing OpenBSD is famous for) in the FAQ, and once you've done it 2-3 times, it's a breeze.

Also, FreeBSD installs on many systems, but is certainly more finnicky than OpenBSD or NetBSD about what it installs on.

Another thing worth mentioning is that the BSD OSs have the majority of the market share in WWW servers in the world.

dkaplowitz,
guy, its great all the information that you are giving, but these threads are from last year. the string of posts you have answered in the BSD forums are old. for instance, that guy redvenim whos thread you responded to hasnt posted since 12-21-2003 01:17 PM, i doubt hes gonna see what you have posted ( though its possible)

id recomend sticking to recent posts, you your self will get more out of it.

Thanks, norsk hedensk, for the tip. Yes, I see how old all the posts I responded to are. I dredged those old posts up in a lame attempt to try and help bring the BSD forum back to life. Seemed like a sin to me to see the BSD forum languishing so. If that doesn't work, then I guess there's always the more populated forums.

By the way I did see it and thank You.
Though I probably forgot what it is all about now...