Question for BSD'ers

[Austin Godber]

Adrian Mink wrote:

> Hello,
>
>  
>
> I know this is a linux list, but I know there are some BSD folks here 
> and hope I could get a question answerd. I've been thinking of playing 
> with BSD for a while and just put together a new box for it. I was 
> hoping someone could explain the differences between FreeBSD and 
> OpenBSD. Are they signifigant? Meant for a different audience? Thanks 
> for any help!
>
>  
>
> Adrian
>
Hello,
    My experiences with the BSDs are relatively limited.  I have used 
all three and only use OpenBSD regularly.  In my experience, I might use 
FreeBSD as a workstation/devel box, if I intended to make a server or 
gateway I would use OpenBSD (this I do often, except I haven't used 
anything higher than 2.9, I will soon though).  If you are trying to get 
an OS to run on some old or odd hardware NetBSD used to be the way to 
go, but I haven't followed them lately (it was the only thing I was able 
to get running on an old Sun machine I had years ago).

    I think my reasoning with the workstation business is that, OpenBSD 
tends not to have as good of hardware support as FreeBSD.  Granted, it 
could also be that I didn't try hard enough and was comfortable with 
Linux that I never really had the incentive to try.


Austin