The BSDI / Walnut Creek merger has raised quite a few questions from people within the BSD community wondering how it will affect them and their favorite operating system developers. We decided to ask them.

So why exactly is BSD, or any other open source project, better than competing commercial developments? The answer to this, as to all of the important questions in life, is so complicated it's simple.

As Linux and FreeBSD often run side by side, Linux administrators would do well to learn how to configure FreeBSD to meet their needs. Michael Lucas presents a guide to customizing the FreeBSD kernel, written for the Linux oriented.

If you've ever toyed around with one of the many Unix-based operating systems, chances are that you've encountered source code that would not compile on your system maybe because your system is missing other programs the compile depends on. The FreeBSD ports/packages system attempts to address all of these issues and make third party application installation a breeze.

In this release, NFS has been immensely improved with bug fixes and performance tuning, Numerous security enhancements and fixes have been applied during the course of development of FreeBSD 4.0 and many more important changes have been made.

Two of the largest developers and suppliers of the Unix-like Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) operating system have merged. Berkeley Software Design Inc. (BSDI), distributor of the BSD/OS operating system announced Friday that it has merged with Walnut Creek CDROM, distributor of the FreeBSD operating system.

The biggest news concerned BSDi (Berkeley Systems Design, Inc.) and Walnut Creek CD-ROM, which is the primary backer of FreeBSD. The two entities will merge, forming a company called BSD Inc. The end result will be a combination of FreeBSD and BSD/OS, available in both commercial and freely available versions.

I recieved a copy of FreeBSD 3.2 a couple of months back for review and in a small conspiracy of idiocies, errors and emergencies wound up putting off the review until after the release of 3.4. Since it has taken me a month to get around to ordering a copy of 3.4 from Walnut Creek, I thought the fair thing would be to write an extended review of two or three installments and report on what I see as the "big picture", if you will. But first a little history....

Well it's been a few months, and a new release of OpenBSD is out (since December 1st 1999 actually) and I thought it was high time I covered some of the new features and improvements. For those of you unfamiliar with OpenBSD it is a flavor of UNIX based on BSD, with one main goal in mind. Security. The entire purpose of OpenBSD is to provide a fast, stable, and above all, secure computing platform.

As a network consultant, my clients often ask me which operating system they should run on their servers. I start by telling them why NT should be avoided. The big decision lies in choosing which Unix to use.