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From: Mark Warner on 20 Jun 2010 15:34

Just got me a new (to me) toy -- Vaio PCG-K13 2.8GHz P4/512MB. It's got
enough room for me to play with multibooting to a greater extent than I
have with my old lapper.

Which desktop BSD is the one you would recommend for the barely Linux
competent and totally BSD ignorant? And am I correct in remembering that
it has to go on a basic/primary partition, not a logical within an
extended?

--
Mark Warner
MEPIS Linux
Registered Linux User #415318
....lose .inhibitions when replying
From: Craig on 20 Jun 2010 16:44
On 06/20/2010 12:34 PM, Mark Warner wrote:
>
> Which desktop BSD is the one you would recommend for the barely Linux
> competent and totally BSD ignorant? And am I correct in remembering that
> it has to go on a basic/primary partition, not a logical within an
> extended?

Hey Mark;

Congratz on the new-to-you lappy. As far as bsd & partitions... Your
memory serves you well. As far as distributions...


A. DesktopBSD
=============
The one I favor(ed) is DesktopBSD <http://desktopbsd.net/>. It hews
most closely to the overall *bsd ecosystem (app installation, upgrading,
updating). Two caveats regarding this disto:

1) Development went dormant after v1.7 (Sep 09) and was only recently
restarted again by a new group (May '10).
2) IIRC, there is no flash (might be a good thing, right?)


B. PC-BSD
=============
The *other* variant is PCBSD <http://www.pcbsd.org/>. It has been
plugging away for years now, with a team salaried by iXSystems here in
San Jose, CA. This is the same company that has started providing
engineering & hosting services to the BSD-powered FreeNAS project. A
good company, good group of people. PC-BSD is probably the easiest one
to test-drive but...

1) It is also the most resource-hungry and
2) It doesn't follow the "bsd-way" for adding apps, updates & the like.
For example, PC-BSD packages its own apps and each app has its own
copy of any "common" libraries.


C. Roll-Your-Own
=============
This isn't nearly as difficult as it may sound. And, depending on your
patience-level, I recommend it. It will quickly illustrate some basic
differences stemming from BSD's different development strategy ("release
when ready," as opposed to Linux's "release early, release often.")

For the roll-your-own approach, the best starting point is the bsd
forum: <http://forums.freebsd.org/>

Thar ya go. Lemme know if there's anything else I can do to help.

--
-Craig
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