In the case of BSD and OpenSolaris, they're already in production deployments all around the world, so there's little to argue with there. HaikuOS, ReactOS, Darwin, and Singularity are entirely another story: they range from being minimally useful on the desktop to only useful as programming research projects.

The hardware we are using for benchmarking this time was a Lenovo ThinkPad T61 notebook with an Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 processor, 2GB of system memory, a 100GB Hitachi HTS72201 7200RPM SATA HDD, and a NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M graphics processor powering a 1680 x 1050 LVDS panel.

Getting FreeBSD to act as a wireless access point involves the following steps:

• Make sure your installation includes hostapd and named (BIND)
  
• Recompile your kernel for pf support
  
• pf is not the only way to do this, but I strongly prefer pf to the ipfw/ipfilter and have written the How-To to use it
  
• Configure NAT (and any firewall rules)
  
• Install isc-dhcp3-server
  
• Configure daemons and start them

The ZFS file system is included in FreeBSD 8.0 and from previous experience I've found it to work very well. However, my little server didn't really have the resources to properly experiment with it. For systems with enough RAM and disk to justify its use, I highly recommend taking a look at FreeBSD's ZFS implementation - for the snapshots feature, if nothing else. Being able to restore files without reaching for separate backup media can be a wonderful time saver.

As some of you may know, Linux is not the only Unix-like operating system available. There are other UNIX derivatives, and one of the most popular among them is called BSD. If you have been to Distrowatch, you will see different BSD distributions listed in there.

FreeBSD is back to its incredible performance and now can take advantage of multi-core/CPUs systems very well... so well that some benchmarks on both Intel and AMD systems showed release 7.0 being faster than Linux 2.6 when running PostreSQL or MySQL.

The most exciting new feature in OpenBSD/sparc64 is SMP support. All supported systems should work, with the exception of the Enterprise 10000 (for which support was added after the 4.3 release was made). The release has still some stability issues on systems with more than 4 CPUs (most of these are already fixed in -current), but in general the sparc64 SMP kernel is remarkably stable. Snapshots have been built on a dual UltraSPARC-IIIi machine since November, less than half a year after Theo complained that his shiny new Sun Fire V215 only "half" worked.

PC-BSD introduces a new type of installtion file with .pbi extension (Push Button Installer or PC BSD Installer). These are self-contained installers that has all the dependent packages included in them. This mimics the behavior of the setup.exe or the DMG files in Win XP and Mac OS X respectively. Double clicking on this file in KDE will launch a graphical installation wizard (root password is required) and guide you through the installation of the software.

PCBSD is a nice distribution for new users to the "alternative" operating systems as it is pointed towards new users, but advance users would not be disappointed. It is nice to see that PCBSD is progressing nicely, but there is still that issue of no 64 bit support as they have done it once in the past but strictly release their distribution for 32bit support only.

While casual users won't be making their own PBIs, you don't have to be a programmer to do so. If you have basic Unix skills, are comfortable with the FreeBSD packages collection, and have a meticulous nature, you can easily create your first PBI in the space of an afternoon. This article assumes that you are working on an existing PC-BSD system.

OpenBSD is an ultra-secure, freely available, multi-platform BSD-based UNIX-like operating system. And is arguably the most secure operating system in the world.

After using OpenBSD for over 9 years I decided to place online some useful information for first time users of OpenBSD.

The information here covers the current release of OpenBSD.