Free Penguin Download - FreeBSD
32 bit:
CdLive Cd
64 bit:
CdLive Cd
ia64:
CdDvd
PC98:
CdLive Cd
Power pc:
CdLive Cd
Sparc 64:
CdDvd
Live Cd
FreeBSD is a Unix-like free operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) branch through the 386BSD and 4.4BSD operating systems.
It runs on Intel x86 family (IA-32) PC compatible systems including DEC Alpha, Sun UltraSPARC, IA-64, AMD64, PowerPC and NEC PC-98 architectures along with the Microsoft Xbox.
Support for the ARM and MIPS architectures is under development. FreeBSD has been characterized as
"the unknown giant among free operating systems."
It is not a clone of UNIX, but works like UNIX, with UNIX-compliant
internals and system APIs.
FreeBSD is generally regarded as reliable and robust.
Among all operating systems which can accurately report uptime remotely, FreeBSD is the free operating system listed most often in Netcraft's list of the 50 web servers with the longest uptime.
A long uptime also indicates no crashes have occurred and no kernel updates have been deemed needed, since installing a new kernel requires a reboot and resets the uptime counter of the system. FreeBSD is developed as a complete operating system.
The kernel, device drivers and all of the userland utilities, such as the shell, are held in the same source code revision tracking tree (CVS).
Whereas with Linux the kernel, userland utilities and applications are developed separately, then packaged together in sundry ways by other groups as Linux distributions. FreeBSD provides binary compatibility with several other Unix-like operating systems, including GNU/Linux.
Most Linux programs can be run on FreeBSD, including some commercial applications distributed only in binary form.
Applications which use the Linux compatibility layer include StarOffice, the Linux version of Firefox, Adobe Acrobat, RealPlayer, Oracle, Mathematica, Matlab, WordPerfect, Skype, Doom 3 and Quake 4.
No noticeable performance penalty over native FreeBSD programs has been noted when running Linux binaries and in some cases, these may even perform more smoothly than the same binaries running on Linux.
However, the layer is not altogether seamless and some Linux binaries are unusable on FreeBSD or possess limited functionality.
This is often because the compatibility layer only supports system calls available in the historical Linux kernel 2.4.2, although work
is ongoing to provide Linux 2.6 support. A wide variety of products are directly or indirectly based on FreeBSD.
These range from embedded devices such as Juniper Networks routers, Ironport network security appliances, Nokia's firewall operating system, NetApp's OnTap GX, Panasas's and Isilon Systems's cluster storage operating systems, NetASQ security appliances and St Bernard iPrism web filtering appliances, to portions of other operating systems including
Linux and the RTOS VxWorks.
Darwin, the core of Apple's Mac OS X, borrows heavily from FreeBSD, including its virtual file system, network stack and components of its userspace.
Apple continues to integrate new code from and
contribute changes back to FreeBSD.
The now-defunct OpenDarwin project, which was based on Apple's Darwin operating system, also included substantial FreeBSD code.
In addition, there are a number of operating systems originally forked from or based on FreeBSD including PC-BSD and DesktopBSD, which include enhancements aimed at home users and workstations, FreeSBIE and Frenzy live CD distributions, the m0n0wall and pfSense firewalls, FreeNAS network attached storage and DragonFly BSD, a fork from FreeBSD 4.8 aiming for a different multiprocessor synchronization strategy than the one chosen for FreeBSD 5 and development of some microkernel features.
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