Some machines I've played with FreeBSD on:
You might find the information here interesting (although it is primarily to remind myself of what I did before senility sets in about 40 years from now). I know, this reeks of geek-showing-off-his-toys, but be honest - that's why you're here.
- Compaq EVO 500 desktop (1.6GHz P4, 256MB RAM, 20GB HD)
- Toshiba Portege 7020CT (333MHz PII, 192MB RAM, 20GB HD)
- Intel CA810E-based server (600Mhz Celeron, 128MB RAM, 60GB HD)
- Dell Dimension XPST450 (450Mhz PIII, 384MB RAM, 2 x 30GB HD)
- Dell Dimension 8100/Limited (1.3GHz P4, 128MB RDRAM, 40GB HD)
- IBM ThinkPad 600 (233MHz Pentium, 160MB RAM, 6GB HD)
- Compaq Deskpro 4100 (66MHz i486DX4, 36MB RAM, 408MB HD)
- Compaq Prolinea 4/66 (66Mhz i486DX2, 20MB RAM, 327MB HD)
- Digital Celebris GL5100 (100Mhz Pentium, 16MB RAM, 814MB HD)
Why FreeBSD?
- Back in 2000 I figured out that:
- FreeBSD has one distro,
- The installer was clean and functional,
- The FreeBSD 'packages' and 'ports' system provided a versatile and simple mechanism for installing a huge range of useful software.
- You can do big and friendly installations on modern machines, or rejuvinate old 486-class machines as network servers and gateways.
- In spirit the BSD license has a lot of similarity to the traditional academic publishing model (aka, "Acknowledge me, and use my code how you like....")
- I've been playing with FreeBSD ever since.
- In recent years I've become rather pleased with PC-BSD, a ready-to-go desktop system built on FreeBSD and KDE.
- True, it isn't Linux. If you need to run Linux-only binaries, many Linux binaries execute alongside native FreeBSD binaries under FreeBSD.
- So hey, what's stopping you from doing this too :-)