Although I have moved on further in my professional life, I still love tinkering with hardware, electronics, circuitry and work on various software pet projects.
For my software projects, I use FreeBSD operating system (a.k.a. Free UNIX).

My FreeBSD Projects

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FreeBSD is a stable, mature, high-performance, advanced operating system with an active development community free from licensing questions and concerns. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX® developed at the University of California, Berkeley.

FreeBSD makes is an ideal OS for running an Internet Web server. It provides robust network services under the heaviest loads and uses memory efficiently to maintain good response times for thousands of simultaneous user processes.

Among numerous features of FreeBSD, I especially like the following:

  • FreeBSD is stable and robust - crashes and hangs are never an issue for me. Heavily loaded system can run for years without a reboot.
  • Fine-tuned SMP (Symmetric Multiprocessing) support (especially starting from FreeBSD v7.1) - it outperforms other operating systems under heavy loads on a multiprocessor server, in particular as Web + Database + Application Server (Apache + MySQL/PostgreSQL + PHP, etc.). In my case it's FAMP.
  • Advanced file system support - file and directory corruption is extremely rare, even when system unexpectedly loses power.
  • One of the most stable and mature network stack implementations around - extremely flexible high-performance networking is one of the strongest points on the FreeBSD.
  • Security - many Internet firewall, proxy and gateways solutions and appliances are based on FreeBSD, including most secure operating systems like OpenBSD.
  • Application support - currently there are about 18,000 software "ports" the can be installed on a FreeBSD system. Also, the ports and packages system allows for easy maintenance, update and security audit of the installed software.
  • Free - most liberal form of licensing.

Although Linux has a lead with desktop applications, for server deployments my choice is FreeBSD.
This website is hosted on a FreeBSD web server.

For those who interested, here are couple "Why FreeBSD" links that summarize main points:

Text-based vs. Graphical UI:
Since I use my FreeBSD system as a Server to run web applications, I don't really need the Graphical UI to run it. So I stick with text-based administration. This also makes remote administration using Secure Shell (SSH) much easier.
All development I do on other PC which has all GUI tools I need, and then just transfer files to my FreeBSD Web Server.

Below is my small (b)log of FreeBSD related entries.
Don't consider these as a comprehensive manual on the subject - theses are just notes mainly for my own reference. Hopefully this will assist someone to learn about FreeBSD and other UNIX/LINUX operating system basics, or when stuck with some problem.

Feel free to comment on any topic covered here.

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