Subj : FreeBSD
To   : ALL
From : WILLIAM HURN
Date : Sun Nov 04 2001 05:42 pm

In the relatively recent past I've seen some interest here in running
MINIX, the small academic operating system written by Andrew Tanenbaum
for University training in Amsterdam.  It's available on CD in his book 
on operating systems and from other places, including the internet.  It's 
very small and has limited features.  "Out of the box", earlier versions
lacked any GUI capability or provision for internet operation.  It 
does come with modem capability and I understand it is not difficult
to add ppp and a text browser.  I understand it has run X successfully.

I much more exciting product, I think, is FreeBSD.  You can get it via
ftp on the internet also - - or on CD from CheapBytes, the LinuxMall or 
from www.freebsd.com.  The way I recommend (unless you're a super UNIX 
guru) is by ordering "FreeBSD - - An Open-Source Operating System for 
Your Personal Computer" by Annelise Anderson - The Bit Tree Press. It's
around $25 from Amazon.com and others, and includes FreeBSD 4.3 on CD.

It comes with X (Gnome and a super-slick KDE), provision for Package 
& Port updates, ppp and the capability to run Linux binaries.  The 
author mentions differences in BSD & Linux operation throughout the 
book. These differences are no problem, if you know about them but
can "eat your lunch" if you don't. 

The FIDO Linux guys tolerate FreeBSD topics and have helped me a lot
but this Echo would probably be the place.

.... MultiMail, the new multi-platform, multi-format offline reader!
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