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What Is It?

FreeBSD is an Open Source operating system that users can download free or purchase through a vendor. It comes with full source code to the entire operating system, including the kernel and all of the system daemons, programs, and utilities. You can modify any part of FreeBSD to suit your personal, organizational, or corporate needs.

FreeBSD makes an ideal Internet or Intranet server, as it provides robust network services under the heaviest loads. It also uses memory efficiently to maintain good response times for thousands of simultaneous user processes. FreeBSD 7.0, released February 2008, brings many new features and performance enhancements to this operating system. With its generous licensing policy, users can use FreeBSD as the basis for any number of free or commercial applications. The Berkeley open source license lets users decide how many of their local changes they want to contribute back.

Who Is it For?

FreeBSD can be installed from a variety of media including CD-ROM, DVD, or directly over the network using FTP or NFS. This system is so adaptable that users from Internet Service Providers (ISPs), X Window workstation users, networking users, software developers, surfers, educators and more have used FreeBSD for its services. FreeBSD can turn any PC into an Internet firewall, email host, print server and more. Ready-to-run software like the Apache Web server makes it easy to set up a business or community-centered ISP. The possibilities listed on the FreeBSD Web site are too numerous to list here.

Features

FreeBSD offers advanced networking, performance, security and compatibility features which are still missing in other operating systems today, even in some of the best commercial applications. With a special focus on storage and multiprocessing performance, FreeBSD 7.0 shipped with support for Sun’s ZFS file system and highly scalable multiprocessing performance. Benchmarks have shown that FreeBSD provides twice the MySQL and PostgreSQL performance as current Linux systems on 8-core servers.

FreeBSD brings advanced network operating system features to appliance and embedded platforms, from higher-end Intel-based appliances to Arm, PowerPC, and shortly MIPS hardware platforms. With over 17,000 ported libraries and applications, FreeBSD supports applications for desktop, server, appliance, and embedded environments. FreeBSD also has a worldwide group of programmers and writers who fix bugs, add new features and document the system constantly. Support for new devices and special features are an almost constant development process, and the team keeps a special eye out for problems which affect system stability.

Compatibility

FreeBSD® is an advanced operating system for x86 compatible (including Pentium® and Athlon™), amd64 compatible (including Opteron™, Athlon™64, and EM64T), UltraSPARC®, IA-64, PC-98 and ARM architectures. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX® developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It is developed and maintained by a large team of individuals. Additional platforms are in various stages of development.

Because FreeBSD is based on 4.4BSD, an industry-standard version of UNIX, it is easy for users to compile and run programs. FreeBSD includes an extensive packages and ports collection that brings pre-compiled and easy-to-build software right to a desktop or enterprise server.

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