The FreeBSD Foundation recently published an article titled 'Amateur Radio and FreeBSD' by Diane Bruce, VA3DB as an open article on the Foundation's web site. The article describes the varied aspects of Amateur Radio, as well as, the FreeBSD Unix like operating system. The article can be found at the following url: https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/HAMradioBruce.pdf
FreeBSD itself is really nice, although I've not been pleased with the reliability of some of the ports (such as Firefox, Thunderbird, etc). Despite the crashing apps, I couldn't see using Windows 10 or Linux anymore (due to that scourge called systemd ).
FreeBSD is a worthwhile and viable alternative to other operating systems. Well laid out and logical. Checkout GhostBSD for a nice all-in-one package. Highly recommended for those dissatisfied with the status quo. Oh, did I mention, documentation is first class in the FreeBSD Handbook.
I use FreeBSD in my professional and personal endeavors. I'm a big fan of the ZFS File System and boot environments. For a complete and easy desktop setup, I recommend the FreeBSD Derivative - TrueOS, formerly known as PCBSD. As mentioned in an earlier thread, GhostBSD is an nice all-in-one package/distribution of FreeBSD as well.
I haven't used it in ages, I'm mostly Linux now but I loved FreeBSD. It was always a joy to use. Nice to see that some people are using it for Amateur Radio.
I used to flip back and forth running my mail and web servers on FreeBSD and Linux, but ended up switching to Linux full time on the server for several reasons. My use case for desktop, FreeBSD was never really an option for me. Since around 1999, I've been 100% Linux for *nix OSes except for a short lived step into OpenSolaris for it's native ZFS support, but once it became clear that was a gonner. I dropped it. I toyed around with NexentaStor which is OpenSolaris, but dropped it also due to some issue it had. I currently have two TrueNAS NAS devices that are based on FreeBSD with ZFS. FreeBSD is awesome and I'm extremely happy it's still alive and in active use in the Enterprise.
Very Cool! FreeBSD is rock solid and a great alternative to Windows or Linux. Especially if you're working with high throughput networks. Some of the FreeBSD code made its way into Apples OSX. Must be partly why Apple products work so well. GO BEARS
I dumped winblows in 2003 -- could no longer stand it wanting to do what it wanted to along with loosing sensitive things you needed. Started out with Caldera, then to Redhat 8 then to 9, opensuse, fedoracore and debian. I liked Linux and still do but with the SELinux kernel it became kind of a pain to administer. Then dedicated a machine to FreeBSD.. I have worked on computers since 1969-1970. No mice no monitors just paper tape,cards and an ASR33 teletype. I love FreeBSD based on Unix code but had to change some things due to licensing is solid, always works. I noticed one person having problems with ports.. When compiling ports and should it fail look at what the compiler is telling you. More often then not you can correct the issue with a "#" in the right spot. I now have 3 machines and a laptop (all Dell by the way except one desktop--ASUS) running FreeBSD 10.2 -- and getting ready to migrate to 10.3. Keep up the good work DAEMON!!
It's nice to see FreeBSD get some introduction to the ham community. I've been using TrueOS (formerly PC-BSD) for several years now, the ZFS filesystem is the best by far, in my opinion. See the links on my QRZ page for more info. If you like Linux, there are still a lot of distros that do not use systemd. PClinuxOS, Puppy Linux, and Quirky Linux, are some examples. And if you absolutely MUST run Win-Doze aps, wine is available for BSD and Linux.
