BSD on PPC

[bmbeeman]

I'm interested in running BSD on my iBook, but I don't know which BSD to run. Could anyone help me compare the BSDs to find out which one would be best. I really don't know what the diffeerent flavors or used for, and I don't know if they all have PPC ports, any help you can give me would be apperciated.

Thanks.

[sether]

For a comparison of the various BSD derivatives, look at Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD#BSD...Fdistributions

Also, every major BSD has a PPC page.

http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/ppc.html
http://openbsd.org/macppc.html
http://netbsd.org/Ports/macppc/

I would suggest using OpenBSD, NetBSD, or OpenDarwin, since the FreeBSD PPC port is only a Tier 2 platform at the moment. But look at the corresponding BSD articles on Wikipedia for a brief explanation of each BSD.

[bmbeeman]

Well, I'm using this computer to test the secuity of my other boxes, and learn more about security and it was recommended that I seek out a Unix operating system because they come with tools that would assist me in this, is NetBSD a good choice, because I heard OpenBSD doesn't make a very good desktop OS, it is more geared towards servers.

[sether]

Well, I'm using this computer to test the secuity of my other boxes, and learn more about security and it was recommended that I seek out a Unix operating system because they come with tools that would assist me in this, is NetBSD a good choice, because I heard OpenBSD doesn't make a very good desktop OS, it is more geared towards servers.

The obvious counterpoint to this is that OpenBSD is strongly security oriented. But I suppose it's more geared towards being secure itself rather than testing security of other machines. It still should be quite easy to test the security of your other machines with OpenBSD, or any other major BSD or GNU/Linux distribution for that matter. You should check out OpenBSD's page on security though:

http://openbsd.org/security.html

OpenBSD may or may not make a good desktop operating system depending on who you ask. While there is no support for 3D hardware acceleration or certain proprietary software applications such as Macromedia Flash, it is still quite capable of common tasks such as web browsing, e-mail, etc. OpenBSD also is great for laptops because of its good hardware support, especially for wireless networking cards.

FreeBSD is the better choice for desktop machines, but the PPC version is not fully supported by the security officer and isn't quite mature enough yet. If you're not satisfied with OpenBSD, NetBSD, or OpenDarwin, maybe you should just use a GNU/Linux distribution?

[bmbeeman]

Well, I'm going to be running this OS on an iBook, would you recommend giving OpenBSd a try?

[sether]

Well, I'm going to be running this OS on an iBook, would you recommend giving OpenBSd a try?

Sure, I've had some experience with OpenBSD and it's worked fine for me as a laptop operating system.

But see my post above. It depends on what you want to accomplish. Since all you've indicated is that you want a desktop operating system that is capable of testing machines for security holes, there's no specific answer I can give. All of the major BSDs and GNU/Linux distributions are capable of this.

[George Harrison]

I love OpenBSD, I have had it running on my test box ever since I built the computer and the software hasn't moved. Very secure, somewhat of a pain to add packages, but it does have ports and you can run X11 on it if you wish. I just like the fact that OpenBSD is one of the most secure operating systems that civilians can use (I'm sure the army, or government defense runs a more secure OS but meh). Try it out and see if you like it. Burn the cd iso (very small), fdisk, fetch files from ftp server, install, reboot, you're in. Very easy to configure, secure, stable, fun to use in CLI, etc. etc. I have nothing but good to say about OpenBSD

[alain_]

somewhat of a pain to add packages

If you like, i can give you a script for this.
I wrote a sort of "apt-get" script for OpenBSD.
Just give a yell or drop me a mail/pb/..