On Wed, 3 Apr 2002, Ricardo Campos wrote:

Ok, a bit off topic, but I'm thinking of installing a *BSD (currently thinking of FreeBSD 4.5 which is cheap, or OpenBSD 3.0 which is more pricey). I'm wondering just HOW different I'll find it to linux, and I'm not too sure about which to get.

Erm, they are both cheap, as in you can get them for free. downloading OpenBSD is easy as i think it is about 100Megs and I am not so sure for FreeBSD. If you want a copy of OpenBSD and can't afford the modem time I am sure I could grab a copy and burn it to CD-R for you, I should most likely be able to do that for FreeBSD also.

Anyhow the differences are the same as the differences between GNU/Linux varients, just in different places (if that makes sense!) you will find BSD has a different style of init scripts and the default shell will be different (csh), of course it will have a BSD kernel. On the end user perspective it will appear to be much the same as Linux (you may never notice the differences) but from a sys-admin point of view things are radically different, from a developers point of view i am not so sure as I dont' write software ;)

Oh the biggest significant difference is my opinion is the licence, which is more/less restrictive depending on your opinion and which side of the fence you are sitting on!

You will most likely find it a bit trickier to setup than linux, but then YMMV.

Any hints, tips, suggestions, hideously biased opinions :-P, etc. offlist would be appreciated (or on list if it's Linux related enough). Again, sorry for being a little offtopic.

Erm this isn't offtopic, look at the Faq ;) so this can stay on list, it will be most interesting to me to hear other peoples experiences with the BSDs.

Adam