IN THIS CHAPTER
FreeBSD is, simply put, UNIX. It's a full-featured operating system based on the original, highly robust UNIX software developed at the University of California at Berkeley. It is designed to run on the widely available Intel x86 PC architecture, as well as on several other hardware platforms such as AMD's 64-bit Opteron, Intel's Athlon 64 and Alpha, and Sun's UltraSPARC. You can install FreeBSD for free on any garden-variety PC you might have lying around. Volunteers from all over the world develop FreeBSD, and the source code for the system is available free of charge to anyone who wants it. This chapter introduces some of FreeBSD's most important features and some of the benefits of using the FreeBSD system. From this chapter, you gain a basic understanding of what FreeBSD is, and what you can do with it. You also learn a bit of the history of FreeBSD and how it got to be where it is today. Finally, the chapter looks at some other operating systems and how they compare with FreeBSD. |