UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Greetings,

Newbie to 'nix here. I ran slackware 7.0 for a few months, but am more interested in the BSD flavors. The two I've been considering for my new box are FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I'm in the process of researching the two, but wanted to know if anyone in the crowd could give some advice. Is it merely a matter of taste, or is there certain pros and cons, weaknesses and strengths between the two os's? Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
networkz

<edited for spelling>

I use FreeBSD 4.5 at home and mandrake 8.2 work

bsd is used for work and play i hope you have a lot of time on your hands it took me 4 months t get where i'm at today you can goto www.freebsd.org
goto the manual page and take a look in it to see if you want to get in to it

you can also get all the unix oses at www.linuxiso.org you can downthem all but FreeBSD is very good and very stable 5.0 is still in devleploment stage all the games and etc: are free unlike mac and winblows 98,2000,me,xp

The first question that I would ask is what will you be using Free/OpenBSD for?

I use both at home but I tend toward FreeBSD over OpenBSD. There are more ports available for FreeBSD and the FreeBSD Handbook (link located on the www.freebsd.org website) is very well written.

I find that support for FreeBSD is more widely available than OpenBSD. However, the OpenBSD folks are a bit more paranoid than the FreeBSD folks when it comes to code audits (or so it would appear to the common person such as myself).

If you are going to be strictly security related work I would go with OpenBSD and you if you wanting a general server/desktop then I would suggest FreeBSD.

Thank you both auswipe and dercarcort for your feedback.

Although I will eventually be focusing on security issues down the road (one of my long term career paths), my general intentions at the present are to set up a server/desktop running nix and then install apache. I am leaning much more towards FreeBSD currently. One of the reasons for this decision, as both of you have pointed out, is the abundant amount of info available at www.freebsd.org. <rolling up me sleeves and getting ready for the work>

networkz

i would recommend NETbsd, it will install on your computer the easiest, it automatically detected my ethernet card that linux wouldnt detect.