FreeBSD

FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for x86 compatible (including Pentium® and Athlon™), amd64 compatible (including Opteron™, Athlon™64, and EM64T), ARM, IA-64, PC-98 and UltraSPARC® architectures. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX® developed at the University of California, Berkeley.

Origin – Home Page: USA – FreeBSD

Desktop: None by default, but you can install and configure any desktop that you like.

Price: Free and Open Source

Comments: Like OpenBSD and NetBSD, FreeBSD does not use a GUI installer. What it offers is a console-based installer. The option is available – during installation – to enable Linux binary compatibility, that is the capacity to run Linux programs on FreeBSD. It is, like the aforementiioned BSD distros, geared more towards a server installation than a desktop system, but the documentation to configure a friendly FreeBSD desktop is detailed enough for anyone to follow.

One of the more exciting features of the latest version of FreeBSD is experimental support for Sun Microsystems, Inc. Zone Zettabyte File System (ZFS), which offers “simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability”. It also provides for self-healing, built-in compression, RAID, snapshots, and volume management.

Download/Buy: The latest stable version is FreeBSD-7.0, and iso images are available for download here. You may also buy CD packages.

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