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FreeBSD Based Live CDs
Newtonian_p writes "Now the BSD world has an answer to Knoppix. The FreeSBIE project have released a live FreeBSD based system on CD. There are also plans to develop a suite of programs to be used to create a personalized disk." If it offers a painless BSD install (the way Knoppix makes it easy to install Debian to a hard drive), this should be a popular project. Reader Cronopios links to a related effort called LiveBSD which "has heavily modified FreeSBIE's scripts to allow for apache mysql and many other programs to run."
IMHO the best thing to do is grab a spare computer, download a bunch of interesting distro's (Linux, BSD, whatever you want), install them and use them for a day or two.
:)
You're bound to come across a distro suited for your needs.
(server, router, desktop, multimedia system, whatever you want)
Every Linux distro has it's upsides and it's downsides (both are mostly about whether it's something for you).
As for the BSD's, I've never tried them, but afaik they're a bit more geared towards servers/security than Linux.
It still comes down to personal choice
The path I walk alone is endlessly long.
30 minutes by bike, 15 by bus.
If there's a remote root exploit, rebooting is merely going to make an attacker wait five minutes and then re-run the exploit. A better solution is a CD-RW disk in a CD-ROM drive -- you can always reboot into a clean system, but if there are security issues, you can remove the disk, fix the necessary bits, and then reboot.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Flash isn't blazing fast by any definition of the word fast, and it's a lot more expensive than CDs - for a 1GB flash drive you could go out and buy a copy of Windows or several copies of any Linux distro. Also remember that Flash has that whole re-writing problem - if the Flash inadvertently gets used for swap space or something, it'd die in no time. Lastly, not a lot of computers boot from USB without some CD to help them along (mine certainly wouldn't), so you'd probably need a CD anyway...
--- Bwah?
After a few months it will be a fairer comparison, if you can spare the time of course. You may find that most are good, none are perfect, and it depends which imperfections you want to tolerate. But, I'm sure you will find one that you like, and it will be of more use, in the long term, than the badly broken "competitive" products of the Convicted Monopolist, or the abominal violation of the GPL known as SCO Unix.