BSD & Darwin Archive

OS Alternatives – PCWorld on *BSD

"It's hard to browse the Web or read a computer magazine without finding a reference to Linux, the operating-system wunderkind created by Linus Torvalds and developed by a host of others. But although Linux steals the headlines, ISPs and system administrators often choose one of the BSDs - a group of operating systems based on code polished during more than 20 years of research at one of America's leading academic institutions. What are the BSDs? And why should you consider using them if you're looking for a non-Windows operating system?"

BSD’s Strength Lies in Devilish Details

"BSD is the established favorite of Internet service providers, which are attracted to BSD for its familiarity (many ISP techies cut their teeth on BSD-based SunOS) and its low cost. And BSD is well-entrenched as a general server OS, as well as serving a niche role as a provider of network security services such as packet filtering and authentication." InfoWorld analyzes *BSD and even compares it (briefly) with Linux.

GNU-Darwin Goes Beta

One step install. OSX.1 users can now install the GNU-Darwin base distribution automatically with one command (as root). Darwin-only users will have to take a few extra steps to fetch wget or curl to their computers. The beta sources are the first addition to the new BSD-style source tree. The team hopes to eventually mirror the Apple's Darwin source code there, but in BSD src tree format. In other news, they also have a new Fortran distribution for Darwin and OSX.1 users."

FINK 0.3.0 Offers 400 Unix Ports to MacOSX/Darwin

Fink is a distribution of ported Unix software for MacOSX and Darwin. Using a combination of a custom build engine and Debian's dpkg package manager and related tools, Fink can either build packages from source on your Mac, or download binary packages from the distribution site. Fink 0.3.0 was released this Saturday, and the process of updating the binary packages was finished today. Visit the Fink download area for the whole range of upgrade and fresh install options. Visit the package database for a list of available packages (400 packages up to now have been ported over).