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.”

Complete
Story