First look at FreeBSD 8.0

"The FreeBSD operating system is very flexible and well-suited to many different environments, including embedded systems and desktop machines. However, as the project's motto, "The Power To Serve," indicates, FreeBSD gains most of its strong reputation from running servers. Keeping that in mind, I borrowed an old desktop box with a 1 GHz CPU and 512 MB of RAM and installed the latest version of FreeBSD on it to see how it would function as a home server.

"One of the first things that stand out about the FreeBSD project is its web site. The layout is easy to read, the presentation is professional and there is more documentation than you can shake a USB stick at. It is wonderfully easy to find just about any information one needs on this site. When troubles arise or when advice is needed, there is a friendly community forum. The latest version of this operating system comes in several different flavours, including a CD edition, with the basic system, and a DVD edition with all the bells and whistles. The operating system will run on 32-bit and 64-bit x86 architectures, Sparc64 and PowerPC systems, among others. All in all, there's a wide variety to choose from and likely a download to suite just about everybody. I grabbed the CD image for i386 machines and got to work."

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