freebsd virgin....

deano · 15 Jul 2011 at 09:59

well i've got an old server from work IBM x225 zeon raid5

Was thinking about having a play with freebsd have used linux for many years but never done anything but seems to be gaining popularity. My TV even runs it :eek:

Any do's or dont's on a fresh install? was just going to download the DVD install and go from there.

Not sure what i'll use it for yet... DHCP,DNS samba apache

TIA

Ash-Lee · 15 Jul 2011 at 18:17

Have you checked out PC-BSD, seems to be more of a complete setup.

deano · 15 Jul 2011 at 22:36

yer i've looked at that seem more like a ubuntu than debian if that makes sense so going with just plain freebsd.

thanks though, could possibly run it on my desktop (shame it's KDE)

pingwing · 16 Jul 2011 at 00:32

Just get out the basic freebsd, a second computer to hand to read the manual, a couple of beers and get going to see what happens

As long as there is no way it can break anything critical you can learn in safety

that said bsd's tend to be more unix like than linux as a word of warning

Mpemba Effect · 16 Jul 2011 at 00:50

Freebsd was my first *nix distro back when it was version 4.4 or something. I jumped straight in the deep end, learning was fun since I had to reboot into windows whenever i ran into problems to use the 56k dial up modem to fix problems then boot back. Needless to say it took me weeks to setup dial up and months to get x-windows working on it

Taught me a lot and I wouldn't trade that knowledge for anything but really, theses days I see no reason to use freebsd over regular linux.

deano · 16 Jul 2011 at 09:15

well i prefer Linux cause I know it, but there are jobs where it asks for freebsd experience. So ill give it a go and see how I get on.

Dial up those were the days, downloading linux distros on dial up

deano · 16 Jul 2011 at 09:18

and welcome back not seen you on the boards for a while...

Chaos · 16 Jul 2011 at 11:26

Freebsd has good docs, start here -

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/book.html

inSilica · 16 Jul 2011 at 21:21

Plenty of guides out there, freebsd is awesome for servers. A while a go I tried to make a go of it as a workstation but settled with gentoo because everything works more nicely under linux and usually folks over at bsd wait for stuff on linux to get ported over, bit annoying if your always running cutting edge or more appropriately termed "unstable" tech ...

... and the main reason I went gentoo was because of portage ... which inherits a whole bunch from ports on freebsd