Would anyone consider using FreeBSD? I attended a talk earlier about it and it sounds like an excellent system.
It has over 21,000 packages, more than any Linux distro, and they are all production packages (not dev packages).

It seems like a really cool ecosystem that they use too. Wherever I might use Linux in the future, I might try out FreeBSD.

There's a free copy on the front of this month's Linux Format

Might give it a try

downloading freeBSD now
will install it and have a look its a distro i have never tried or used before …

Please let us know how you get along. I'm half tempted to give it ago too.

Same here. FreeBSD doesn't come with a GUI does it? PC-BSD comes with KDE4.2/3 but isn't on FreeBSD 8 yet...

Debian has a BSD fork now too..

I'd have thought it has some sort of GUI (perhaps not Gnome or KDE)...I've not installed it yet...



Yup, I'm in that talk now...

Seems as though you can have Debian with the FreeBSD kernel...Which means that you'll get things like Jails, ZFS, DTrace, NDIS Drivers in the kernel, etc.
Unless you want those things with a GNU userland, I'm not sure why you would want to do it. It doesn't look like all FreeBSD packages are supported.

i downloaded the freeBSD CD and have failed to get it installed in VB
its worse then trying to install pure debian, good luck to anyone else that tries the install …

I installed PC-BSD a year or so ago, but there was no 64bit Nvidia driver, so I went back to Ubuntu. Apparently things have improved recently...

I also failed to install FreeBSD in VirtualBox. Or rather it installed, but then wouldn't load the kernel.
If I can get it to work it'll be really cool. If I get free time and learn C I might see about giving it a proper GUI installer...

PC-BSD based on FreeBSD 8 has just hit RC status, you might want to give that a try, it has a full GUI installed and KDE4.3.4...

Part of the problem seems to be that GNOME and KDE are licensed under the ruddy GPL, meaning that while FreeBSD can use it, it can't be part of their main branch, otherwise FreeBSD would have to be licensed under GPL too.

I gave it a bash after the FreeBSD talks at FOSDEM too, but frankly I've found it more of a PITA than Arch Linux, which wasn't a pleasant install at the time. The installation on my Dell (Failed Hackintosh) went fine, but literally just gave me a shell.. And pure X if I started it. Lots more googling and script writing first methinks.

I'd quite like to get it going on the HP netbook I've got, but so far I'd rather save Windows until I know I can install it right. :-/

Weasel