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DragonFlyBSD 1.2 Released
vsarunas writes "The DragonFlyBSD Team is
pleased to announce
the official release of
DragonFly 1.2.0! Get it
here,
or here,
or as a torrent.
DragonFlyBSD is a continuation of the stable and high-performance FreeBSD
4 branch of FreeBSD with acpica5 and updated drivers so it runs on more
and newer machines. DragonFlyBSD can execute FreeBSD 4 and Linux binaries
and uses the FreeBSD ports collection. In addition, DragonFlyBSD is also
officially supported by pkgsrc. This release represents a significant milestone in efforts to improve
the kernel infrastructure. It features a standards-conformant
SACK implementation, improvements to the VFS layer, and a multithreaded
networking stack that utilizes the DragonFly lightweight message
passing system to communicate among processors. More information can
be found on Matt Dillon's journal and the
Status page
of the DragonFly wiki."
It's my understanding that this is currently on-par with FreeBSD 4.x (which I believe is faster than 5.x). The real performance imporvements are (supposedly) to come after everything has been ported over to use the messaging infrastructure (mainly the buffer cache). If the design holds true to its promise, then it should be a good step faster than FreeBSD 4.x in a few years. Especially in the area of SMP.
"which BSD is the one to cut your teeth on?"
That implies he doesn't know much about BSD. Advocating Open as a first install then, might not be the best of ideas...
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
The common mantra has always been:
For security, choose OpenBSD.
For portability, choose NetBSD.
For usability, choose FreeBSD.
About the only thing keeping me from playing with BSD is the lack of a single "entry point".
That's also the biggest strength -- different (*cough*) "distros" have different strengths and weaknesses. (You said it yourself, Linux has become "beige".)
If you want to breathe new life into an old Alpha you picked up online, NetBSD is the way to go. (Or if you have a handful of different architectures you would like to keep synced to a common source tree.)
If you want a lean, mean, server machine, you should opt for OpenBSD. [My preference.]
If you're looking to build a box to use on your desktop and start "fiddling" with, go with FreeBSD -- this is the likely first choice for 80% of the BSD population, and it sounds like what you're looking for.
(My other criteria is "If you need to run X, run FreeBSD" because it supports the most graphics cards & monitors.)