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FreeBSD

FreeBSD is a Unix-like operating system descended from Unix via the BSD branch through 386BSD and 4.4BSD. It runs on processors compatible with the Intel x86 family, as well as on the DEC Alpha, the UltraSPARC processors by Sun Microsystems, the Itanium (IA-64) and AMD64 processors. Support for the PowerPC architecture is in development. It is generally regarded as being quite reliable and robust.

Table of contents
1 History and development
2 License
3 Derivatives
4 Books about FreeBSD
5 See also
6 External links

History and development

Initial development of FreeBSD was started in 1993, and took its sources from 386BSD. However, due to concerns about the legality of all the sources used in 386BSD, FreeBSD re-engineered much of the system with the FreeBSD 2.0 release in January of 1995 using the 4.4BSD-Lite release from the University of California, Berkeley. The FreeBSD Handbook includes more historical information about the genesis of FreeBSD. The current (February 2004) FreeBSD release is FreeBSD 5.2.1.[1]\nFreeBSD developers maintain (at least) two branches of simultaneous\ndevelopment: a -STABLE version of FreeBSD, which produces releases\nabout once every 4-6 months. The latest STABLE release of FreeBSD\nis 4.10. The other development branch, -CURRENT, contains aggressive new\nkernel and userspace features. At the time of writing, the 5.x release\nseries is cut from the 5-CURRENT branch, but has already produced 5.2-RELEASE.\nThe FreeBSD development team has announced that the 5-CURRENT branch will become\n5-STABLE around 5.3-RELEASE, at which point a 6-CURRENT branch will be\ncreated. FreeBSD 5 includes a number of new features, including many that are security related. The TrustedBSD project was formed for the express purpose of adding trusted operating system functionality to the FreeBSD operating system. An extensible Mandatory Access Control framework (the TrustedBSD MAC Framework), filesystem Access Control Lists (ACLs) and the new UFS2 filesystem all came from TrustedBSD. Some of the TrustedBSD functionality has been integrated into the NetBSD and OpenBSD operating systems as well. FreeBSD 5 also has support for encrypted filesystems, through the GDBE system written by Poul-Henning Kamp. [1]\n

License

FreeBSD is released under the BSD License, which allows everyone to use and redistribute FreeBSD as they wish, as long as they do not remove the copyright notice and the BSD license itself (which does not prohibit re-distribution under another license).

Derivatives

  • A derivative version based on the GNU toolset is currently being developed by Debian as Debian GNU/FreeBSD.\n* DragonFly BSD is a fork from FreeBSD 4.8 that is intended to be the logical continuation of the FreeBSD 4 series. It will feature a threaded message passing system similar to that found in microkernels.\n* The FreeSBIE project is producing live CD distributions of FreeBSD, similar to the Knoppix distribution of Linux.\n* Frenzy is another FreeBSD based live CD, mainly oriented towards Russian speaking users.\n* BSDeviant is a live FreeBSD distribution that can fit on one Mini CD-R.\n* PicoBSD is a one-floppy version of FreeBSD.\n* Darwin borrows heavily from FreeBSD.

Books about FreeBSD

See also

\n* 386BSD\n* DragonFly BSD\n* NetBSD\n* OpenBSD\n* BSD descendants\n* FreeBSD vs. Linux\n* FreeBSD Documentation License

External links

\n* FreeBSD Documentation\n* FreeBSD website\n* Defcon1\n* BSDVault\n* BSDForums.org\n* Dæmon News\n* Debian GNU/FreeBSD\n* The DragonFly BSD Project\n* The FreeBSD tutorials Project\n* Unix documentation directory\n* The FreeSBIE Project\n* The Frenzy project\n* UnixCities.com\n* TrustedBSD\n* BSDeviant\n* bsdux (Portuguese)\n* FreeBSD FAQ (Portuguese) \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Category:Free software\nCategory:BSD

"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." - Voltaire (1694-1778)