[GLLUG] BSD Distro First-Try Recommendations

[Adam McDougall]

On Wed, Jul 07, 2004 at 01:01:47PM -0500, Clay Dowling wrote:

  Brian Hoort wrote:
  
  >Being frustrated with some GNU/Linux distros, I'm considering trying a 
  >BSD varient.  I'm mainly concerned with stability and ease through 
  >updates.  Do the BSD distros provide a APT/up2date style update 
  >mechanism, and which variety would be recommended for a first timer 
  >with no experience there?
  
  I'll also chime in for FreeBSD here.  It's pretty easy to install and 
  bone simple to maintain.  The only part that is really stinky is trying 
  to upgrade a major X windows system line Gnome or KDE. Wiping out all X 
  and starting fresh is the only practical way, unless you want to 
  dedicate a week to playing/fighting with it. I've never met an operating 
  system or distribution where upgrading the windowing system was easy, so 
  that's not a big flaw for FreeBSD.

Try portupgrade.  I also forgot to mention that netbsd has 
functionality similar or mostly equivalent to portupgrade also,
but I don't recall how it is invoked.
  
  That said, I'm running on OpenBSD right now, and couldn't be happier. 
  It's very similar to FreeBSD, except that the core developers are 
  security freaks. It's not for the faint of heart though. While modern 

s/security//  (running away :)

  installs are pretty easy, with my first install it was a good thing that 
  I was pretty familiar with UNIX already, or I would have been up a crick 
  without a paddle (those of you who read Pat McManus will recognize that 
  I did not misspell that).  Definitely don't try your first OpenBSD 
  install from a downloaded version though. Get a Distribution CD from 
  http://www.openbsd.org.  The cover doubles as a walk through for an 
  install, and you'll want it for your first time.

I have heard there are decent docs for setting some things up in
openbsd available online.
  
  So get FreeBSD and you'll be happy.  A CD is cool, but I've had very 
  good luck installing from the network.  I'd also advise staying with a 
  Stable release, which means 4.7 or 4.8.  My experience (and the 

Latest stable release is 4.10 now; using anything earlier on 
the internet (like most dists) is asking for security trouble.

  experience of the computer lab) has been that when the FreeBSD team says 
  something is stable, they mean it, and if they don't, they mean that too.

I generally agree with that too, but often any FreeBSD code you can
get your hands on is usable to some degree even if they claim 
it isn't done.  

  
  Clay
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