FreeBSD: It's Not Just for Servers Anymore "Well, that's all well and good," you might be saying. "But I don't need any of that stuff. I'm not setting up a server or anything." Well, don't put this book back on the shelf quite yet. There are plenty of workstation uses for FreeBSD that you might also be interested in: Developing and testing websites The days of web pages that display static HTML content are history. These days, websites that are competitive in the marketplace use server-side technologies such as CGI, embedded scripting, and database back-ends to display content that is dynamic and interactive. This means that locally testing your website by loading the pages into your browser from your hard drive are also long gone. To design a website of any complexity these days, you need to have a web server available for development and testing. Even if you will not be running a web server for public use, you can still use Apache, PHP, and one of the free SQL databases (MySQL or PostgreSQL) on a FreeBSD workstation to do website development and testing offline, without uploading any pages to your hosting service until they're ready. This can save you a lot of time and money in this world of zero tolerable downtime. Developing and testing databases offline Another benefit of local web development is local database construction. Use your local FreeBSD machine to build and test your database under MySQL or PostgreSQL and populate it with data. When you finish, export the content as an SQL script, upload the database to your hosting service, and import it into whatever SQL-compatible database the server supports, instantly bringing the live data store up to date. Learning software development or programming If you ever wanted to learn a programming language, you might be glad to know that using FreeBSD doesn't require you to spend hundreds of dollars on compilers and debuggers. Everything you need to learn programming and write powerful applications is available, waiting for you to dive in whenever you're ready. Learning OS design or UNIX If you are a computer science student and need to learn the ins and outs of operating system design, having access to all the source code for a real UNIX operating system can be a great help. Suppose that you need to learn UNIX for your job or for a course you are taking in college. Though you might be able to use the UNIX cluster on campus for programming and research, having FreeBSD on your own machine means you can experiment freely with administrator-level access without damaging critical data. Using free software to run an inexpensive workstation With so much free software available, and graphical user environments such as KDE or GNOME, FreeBSD can make a very powerful and inexpensive desktop workstation for just about anything you might want to do. Some of the free applications available for FreeBSD include email programs, web browsers, word processors, spreadsheets, databases, CAD programs, and image editors. There is even a Winamp clone for FreeBSD to support your MP3 collection!
You've probably already found one or two things in the preceding lists that have interested you in the potential usefulness of FreeBSD. Before you commit yourself to installing it, however, you'll probably want to know a little more about where FreeBSD comes from, how long it has been around, and whether it will still be there for you 5 or 10 years from now. This next section gives an overview of the history of UNIX and how FreeBSD fits into it, as well as describing the design philosophy that underlies the UNIX tradition, setting it apart from what you may be used to in Windows. |
