The difference in BSD flavours?

[CyPHer_138]

What is the difference between the BSD's? Such as Free BSD, Net BSD, Open BSD, and Darwin. Now I'am a total nOob and I tried to do Free BSD as my first adventure into *nix. I did learn alot but I never did get it right. Currently I'am using Drake 9 to get the hang of the commands and file system. I plan to move on to Debian and BSD again. Should I try Deb before BSD? Wich BSD is more nOob freindly (if this is even a factor)? I have Free 4.7 and the book already.I'm just curious what defines each version.
I only want it for a desktop and apt sounds most apealing after dealing with many a tar. I do know that RH based distros are not for me at all.

[HighOrbit]

The BSDs each have a different focus and a slightly different kernel, although they share their developments freely with each other. They are all decended from the 4.4BSD-Lite release of the early 1990s, which was a release of BSD that had been stripped of the original AT&T Unix code after a bitter multi-year copyright lawsuit.

FreeBSD is the all purpose generalist BSD. Many years ago, it used to be know as 386BSD and is therefore mostly focused on the x86 PC/server but it also supports other architechures like sparc and alpha. Of the three, FreeBSD is the most likely to have support for PC hardware (like new video cards) and desktop applications. It is the most popular of the BSDs and has the most ported applications.

OpenBSD is focused on security. For this reason, their default install is minimal and has almost everything turned off. If you want a service (like ftp or http) to run on OpenBSD, you have to explicitly turn it on. This is very different from your normal linux distribution which will install everything including the kitchen sink and turn everything on by default. The OpenBSD project also has undertaken a complete 100 percent audit of their source code to weed out programming errors and sloppyness because those sort of things could be potenially exploited by hackers to compromise a system. This auditing process is continuous - when they finish, they start over and do it again. If I am not mistaken, the OpenBSD project also operates the OpenSSH project.

NetBSD's focus is making their stuff run on *everything*. In addition to running on common modern computers like an Intel PC or a Sun Sparc workstation, NetBSD will run on just about every conceivable type of obscure or obsolete computer that you could think of.

Darwin is an Apple modification of FreeBSD. Apple took FreeBSD 3.x, removed the FreeBSD kernel and substituted the Mach kernel. (I think this also was the basic setup of the now defunct NeXT OS). It is released under a different licence than the other BSDs.

BSD/OS is a commercial version of BSD and until the last year or so, it was the sponsor of FreeBSD. When BSD/OS was sold, it dropped its official support of FreeBSD, although some exchange still exists.

[CyPHer_138]

Thank you for your informative response. This answers most/if not all of the BSD questions I've been pondering.:D

[stiles]

I know one difference! FreeBSD for some freaky reason doesn't have useradd groupadd userdel groupdel commands, these programs are all together in the pw command (I think that's right, used like #pw useradd ....), while NetBSD and OpenBSD are sane and use these POSIX commands as intended.

[sasKuatch]

http://www.levenez.com/unix/

Really nice timeline map of unix history.

[iDxMan]

man adduser

.. yes, everything is schlumped into pw, but once you read the man page a few times its really handy.

-r

[JohnT]

Free BSD installs with everything off, but SMTP.

[El_Cu_Guy]

I know one difference! FreeBSD for some freaky reason doesn't have useradd groupadd userdel groupdel commands,

Haven't done your homework have you? Next time try the following commands:

adduser <username>
groupadd <group>
rmuser <username>
rmgroup <group>

If you use the adduser script without the -silent option you will be asked to provide additional information about the user such as full name, password, shell, group, etc.

Remember some unices use variations of common UNIX system commands. In AIX, for example, to add a user you would type mkuser .

[froggy3132000]

Cypher beat me to it. But FreeBSD does include most of those commands in the pw command, however if you type in adduser just by itself see what happens.

[El_Cu_Guy]

however if you type in adduser just by itself see what happens.
Or you could just go here (http://freebsd.ntu.edu.tw/~phantom/efreebsd/adduser.html) to see an example.

[stiles]

Originally posted by El_Cu_Guy
Haven't done your homework have you? Next time try the following commands:

adduser <username>
groupadd <group>
rmuser <username>
rmgroup <group>



Uhhhh where is the posix useradd, comeon now we know BSD is more unix than blaah blaah...

Simply put

pw useradd
is !=
useradd