Dangerous: FreeBSD will happily overwrite any existing data just like most Linux installs. Also FreeBSD 4.5 in particular has not had an
excellent history of stability. I think that's related to specific hardware though.

BSD doesn't use a dos-style partition setup like linux. you allocate a primary partition for BSD (called a slice), and divide that into 'partitions' that form your filesystems and swap (this applies to any bsd, and solaris under ia32 as well). Section2 of the aforementioned handbook has pretty good information on setting up disks.
devices under FreeBSD (and the other BSDs as well) are named according to driver, not device type. so while under linux your 3com 10/100 nic is eth0, under freebsd it's xl0.

I'd suggest, if you can, that you have a computer that you can install and mess with FreeBSD several times, until you get familiar with the differences. either having a printed copy of the FreeBSD handbook or another computer so you can access the online version while doing the install will be a good thing.... Any good book on 4.4BSD will be a great investment, since FreeBSD is a derivative. There's also a great book titled 'The Complete FreeBSD' that is all about FreeBSD, and helps someone familiar with SysV-based unices and unix clones (like linux) to adapt.

The boot manager is amazingly easy to use - virtually no-touch.

i've been using linux since 1994, and i switched over to FreeBSD about two years ago. Now, the only time i'll use linux is if i absolutely can't run the application under FreeBSD (FreeBSD will allow you to run linux applications pretty painlessly - if you're going to using FreeBSD on a workstation, or on a server install where the software only runs on linux, make sure you choose to install linux compatibility libraries (it's near the end of the installation). performance is as good or better than linux, and it's generally much more stable (esp. on a multiprocessor machine when comparing freebsd to any linux with 2.4.x kernel).

the best part of FreeBSD is probably the ports tree - the package manager is ok, but i prefer to build my own where possible, and the ports tree allows this. if you're familiar with dpkg or apt-get under debian, you won't have too many problems with the concepts of the freebsd package manager (or the ports tree). i generally don't install X unless it's on a workstation, and even then i build it from the ports tree - X is an amazingly complicated build (even more so than KDE or GNOME), but i can change the the appropriate directory in the ports tree (/usr/ports/x11/XFree86-4) and build the entire X suite by typing 'make install'. in the case of X, you'll be prompted for which servers to build, which fonts to install, etc. but for other packages, it's generally 'make install', and it takes off. any dependencies are automatically built along the way. it's easy to set up cvsup to keep your ports tree (or your kernel source tree or the entire OS source tree, if you so desire) up to date, and in the case of the source tree, a 'make world' will rebuild the installation to use the latest and greatest sources/versions. quite impressive.

if you like UNIX, i think you'll love FreeBSD, once you get used to the differences between it and the SysV derived OSes...
and, if you have questions, you can email me and i'll do my best to answer them...

since FreeBSD 4.5 has only been out since the end of january, how could it have built up a reputation for stability on anything?

quote:

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Originally posted by MrJ:
Quirky: FreeBSD wants its own primary partition and then has its own sub-partition structure. You can't install it on an extended partition. Some programs, particularly threaded ones, exhibit strange bugs that don't seem to exist when used on Linux. MySQL comes to mind.

Dangerous: FreeBSD will happily overwrite any existing data just like most Linux installs. Also FreeBSD 4.5 in particular has not had an
excellent history of stability. I think that's related to specific hardware though.

My laptop boots Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows using LILO. I had no trouble installing FreeBSD 4.5 from a CD (very simple, so simple that I don't remember much about it except that it reminded me of a slackware install a long time ago). Of course I had to tell it to stay away from my boot configuration and then went to Linux to configure the boot sector into LILO. LILO runs the boot sector and FreeBSD's boot loader finds its kernel automatically. You don't have to do anything if FreeBSD is the only thing you want to boot. After it gets all the base stuff on the system you can install ports from binary packages on the CD, over the network, or compile them from the network. You'll want cvsup installed if you want to compile things up to date between releases. FreeBSD's package management is flexible but I don't like how easily everything can get messed up (upgrading related packages, library versions that it accepts even though they aren't compatible) and how hard it is to keep track of everything. There are some new programs to solve the upgrading problem but I haven't tried them. If you're used to editing system config files and managing packages yourself, FreeBSD will not be too different.

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I'm going to try it this weekend and just install it on its own hard drive to get used to the system before I try to put it on a multi-boot machine. Plus I get to wear cool daemon swag too!

I'll let you know how it goes.

quote:

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Originally posted by rednecklinux:
I'm going to try it this weekend and just install it on its own hard drive to get used to the system before I try to put it on a multi-boot machine. Plus I get to wear cool daemon swag too!

I'll let you know how it goes.

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So, how did it go?

I'm actually going to try it sometime this coming week myself, but I will have a dedicated box for it. Planning on trying OpenBSD too. I've heard good things about it.