New board for a newbie

[Brian Myers]

Hi all,

I've decided to get my first dual processor system, and would like to 
do a dual Opteron. I've run FreeBSD before and had mixed results with 
it. Everything ran well for a long time; the only trouble I had was 
upgrading software. I am a competent developer, but not a Unix guru. 
Eventually the port upgrade process broke and I couldn't upgrade ports 
any more, and the problems were way too complicated for me to figure 
out.

This is really bad since I have a production web site running on this 
machine. I was, however, really impressed by the fact that that box is 
so rock stable. The ports broke about 2 years ago and that box is still 
running strong today (FreeBSD 4.4). This year I purchased my first Mac 
and have been impressed in a big way with Mac OS/X. I've gotten almost 
all of the open source software I use installed on Darwin thru 
DarwinPorts which works much like FreeBSD ports. I also am stronger in 
my understanding of Unix, so I'm thinking about giving FreeBSD another 
try.

I'm definitely going with a 64 bit OS, so it's either FreeBSD AMD-64, 
or Debian - AMD 64. So I have two questions for the list members here:

1) What do you see as the pros/cons of FreeBSD AMD-64 over Debian for a 
dual Opteron system?

and

2) I've seen much conversation on which boards, memory, and SATA 
controllers were supported by FreeBSD. So much so that I have no idea 
what the current state of things is. So, if you were building a new 
dual Opteron from scratch, what would you get? For cost reasons, I'm 
going with 1.8 ghz processors and probably only 2GB of ram. I'll have 
two RAID 1 SATA hard drives, but should I use an onboard controller, or 
purchase a separate controller? Note that I may at some point upgrade 
to 4 RAID 0+1 disks. What about video cards? I don't need much so, are 
the onboard ones useable or not? Also, I, of course, would like the 
onboard LAN controller to be supported.

Hope this generates some interesting conversation.

Thanx to anyone who answers,

Brian