We penguinistas sometimes believe we are having more fun than anybody. But then I lean over the fence and discover the FreeBSD folks are having a hell of a party, too. And their OS is as fast as I have seen. I have to ask myself why I don’t just switch my server to FreeBSD.

After five years I decided it was time to see if he was right. Let me be clear: I am a Linux evangelist and have been for years. I have preached to the uninitiated and shepherded them to the promised land. I have preached to the blunt minded masses, dispelling doubt and sewing hope. I have designed, implemented, and supported solutions built upon Linux and open source. I have converted enterprises from Windows to Linux. Through all of this, FreeBSD remained distant and unapproachable until a few months ago. My co-worker Dave, an avid supporter of FreeBSD, invited me to sit through a FreeBSD server build recently. Dave exhibits an energy when working with Unix that is only rivaled by his passion for Texas Hold `Em, Louis XIII, and date night with his wife. His skill at the console was impressive and his knowledge deep. In a few short hours he had sufficiently demonstrated software installation, configuration, and maintenance. I felt I was ready to try it for myself. Installation was straightforward: carve up your disk how you like, label partitions, format, install, and boot into a working system. Installing packages after the intial OS installation is a breeze. FreeBSD maintains a system of ports, over 14000 open source applications ready for you to utilize. Installation is simple, change into /usr/ports, locate the package you desire to install, and issue a make install clean. After a few downloads, configuration, and compilation your software is ready to use. System updates are cake: because the entire system is source based, a simple cvsup -g -L 2 supfile connects you to a FreeBSD cvsup mirror server to pull down the most up-to-date bits. I am so thoroughly impressed with FreeBSD that it has become my server OS of choice. We recently migrated our core business systems from Fedora Core to FreeBSD — the performance increase was notable and the ease of maintenance and patching with a well designed source based system saves me time. If you have the itch give FreeBSD a whirl you will not be disappointed. Moshe Bar is a regular contributor to BYTE maintaining the Serving Linux section and is also Project Manager of the openMosix Project.