[Joshua Tinnin]

On Saturday 17 July 2004 12:48 pm, Arun Swarup <arunswarup at yahoo.com> wrote:
> hi,
>
> i am considering moving over to FreeBSD from Linux (its too hot
> out there.... esp the M$ bashing)

Eh ... well, I tend to ignore that when making a decision to use an OS or 
other software. My concerns are: does it work? can I hack it for my own 
purposes? does it suit my needs? etc. The politics aside from the basics 
about open source can distract from the practical uses of the technology. For 
instance, Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman tend to disagree on some 
fundamental philosophical issues, but it's not as if they haven't helped 
create some very useful stuff in the meantime (even if Richard still insists 
people call it GNU/Linux).

> i have a few questions/concerns
>
> 1. I want a usable workstation   &   i want to prevent
> script-kiddies ripping thru my system.   Is OpenBSD necessary?

Not necessarily. FreeBSD is already very secure, but if you're that concerned, 
then I recommend setting up a separate box with OpenBSD to act as a firewall. 
Are you in a situation where you need very high security? This is where 
OpenBSD excels: security, and your network will be more secure by design if 
you do firewalling on its own dedicated machine. Also, OpenBSD's excellent 
firewall, pf, has been ported to FreeBSD 5.x. FreeBSD is not as picky about 
code improvements (the team at OpenBSD analyzes every line of code before 
committing, which does take some time), therefore you're more likely to get a 
better all-around workstation with a FreeBSD system than an OpenBSD system, 
depending on what you want to do on it. For example, FreeBSD can work on more 
hardware than OpenBSD, and you can still use XFree86 or X.org, and whatever 
window manager you like (sometimes I prefer using IceWM, and other times I 
prefer KDE, so they're both installed and used on my system, and I just 
switched from XFree86 to X.org today). Generally, FreeBSD is a server 
platform, but its stability and compatibility with Linux makes it a good 
workstation choice, as well. I was originally going to set up this box to be 
an OpenBSD workstation, not having used *BSD before but wanting a secure 
system, but it wouldn't recognize my network card (it's fairly new, but it's 
very common). The choice was made for me, but I'm happier for it. In time, 
I'm planning on setting up another box to be used as a firewall with OpenBSD.

> 2. What if x86 goes out-of-fashion?    what happens then?
> Should i move to NetBSD?

What happens? Good question ... However, in such a situation, I doubt that 
FreeBSD would just sit on x86 and let it go at that. NetBSD is known for its 
wide hardware compatibility, but it trades off stability to accomplish this. 
It's great for tricky/odd/old hardware and embedded systems, but it's not so 
great as a workstation or for webserving where stability is crucial, IMO. You 
should also know that FreeBSD supports SMP and 64-bit CPUs.

> 3. Will i get a job  if i learn FreeBSD  &  neglect the
> inner-workings of Linux?

Another good question. Something you might want to consider is that FreeBSD is 
very popular as a webserver. It's consistently and often profusely listed in 
Netcraft's longest uptime list: 
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html

Hotmail used FreeBSD for a long time, and they may still use it. They don't 
like to talk about it much, but it's not a rumor ...

Anyway, I would consider using FreeBSD to be extending your skillset (but you 
should know I've become enamored with FreeBSD since installing it, and so 
sometimes I evangelize about it). Since you're coming from Linux, you'll 
probably still use a lot of Linux apps on your FreeBSD system, and you'll 
likely learn a thing or two about both systems because of it. It's not all 
that different - they are, after all, both *nix systems. And you can easily 
do a multi-boot system ... well, it depends on some factors, but it's not 
difficult. Mine is tri-boot: FreeBSD, Slackware and Win2k. No need to dump 
what you have, but I would recommend giving FreeBSD a shot. It may not be the 
right workstation OS for you, but there's a good chance you'll come to like 
it more than anything you've used so far ... ah, see, there's that 
evangelizing coming through ;)

- jt