*BSD

 General Information

Introduction

What is BSD?

NetBSD

NetBSD is the highly portable flavour of BSD - if a box can't run BSD; it's not a computer. Okay, this is not really true, but concerning 32bit and better hardware this is almost true. NetBSD often is the only possibility of getting some piece of hardware to work when you don't have the original OS.

Have a look at the impressive list of supported hardware architectures.

OpenBSD

OpenBSD is another flavour of BSD with its main focus set to security. The distributions are really well chosen pieces of software and there are really only few security holes if any at all in the standard installation (according to their webpage, only one remote hole in the default install, in more than 7 years). So this might be your best choice for setting up a server.

OpenBSD is also available on various hardware platforms, but the list of supported architectures is not that long as in NetBSD

FreeBSD

FreeBSD is the third flavour in the BSD family with its focus set to usability and current software versions. This would be the best choice for installing BSD on a desktop.

FreeBSD has the smallest list of supported platforms, but the most important ones are supported.

 Links