Yesterday I was reading an article about “Elevator Pitch” and thinking how could I use this idea to promote my consultant skills, my blog and other things too. Then it came into my mind how cool would be doing this for BSD followed by a small list of things people should know about it.
Well, I suppose it’s more funny this way…
First I will give you some highlights about interesting features you find in BSD’s and a simple explanation about each item. Then, just at the end of this post, I show you what I think to be a “rocky” “Elevator Pitch” for BSD’s. 
- BSD stands for…
Berkeley Software Distribution! Yes, from California, USA.
- We call them flavours but we also have some distributions…
Because all major BSD (OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD) systems have different kernels, we can’t call them flavours. In our “world” a distribution is when a BSD is built upon some other BSD kernelland such m0n0wall, pfSense, FreeNAS, Askozia, FreeSBIE, PC-BSD, DesktopBSD, VirtualBSD all are based on FreeBSD kernel.
- MAC OS X is also FreeBSD Based!
“…Mac OS X Server includes the latest technological advances from the open source BSD community. Originally developed at the University of California, Berkeley, the BSD distribution is the foundation of most UNIX implementations today. Mac OS X Server is based largely on the FreeBSD distribution and includes the latest advances from this development community…” [http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/technology/unix.html]
- NetBSD has XEN 3.3 support
Today operating systems must have the power to handle as many types of virtualization as possible. Well of course if the license allows that. It is known that Xen still is a very important “player”. Almost any Linux distribution can load an hypervised kernel (Dom0) and run guests on it (DomU). Well, so it does NetBSD and hard work is being done also on FreeBSD-Current. [http://www.netbsd.org/ports/xen/howto.html | http://www.netbsd.org/ports/xen/]
- You can load multiple virtual kernels with DragonFly BSD
“…The idea behind the development of the vkernel architecture was to find an elegant solution to debugging of the kernel and its components. It eases debugging, as it allows for a virtual kernel being loaded in userland and hence debug it without affecting the real kernel itself. By being able to load it on a running system it also removes the need for reboots between kernel compiles…”
[http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/user/vKernelOverview/]
- You can install applications under PC-BSD as you do in Mac OS X
PBI stands for “Pc-Bsd Installer” or “Push-Button Installer”. As the name says, imagine you want to install Firefox with Flash plugin. Just fetch it via [http://www.pbidir.com/bt/category/web], et voi lá. Click to install.
- We call it install.cfg not ‘kickstart’
“Hi @include! So, can you mass deploy under BSD, remotely? Yes we can! [http://www.403forbidden.net/BSD/FBSD_Kickstart/fbsd_inst_4b_files.php] and better [http://www.daemonology.net/depenguinator/]
- Almost every UNIX (or UNIX based) and Linux based operating systems uses code from OpenBSD
This one was just for kidding! But next time you type ssh in your keyboard, think twice!
- ZFS is not loaded by FUSE. It’s a kernel module.
I think you can guess how many advantages we have by running this stressing feature near the kernel and not in the userland.
- LiveCD’s and VMware Images for test drives
Do you want to got for a test drive? Do you want to test your hardware or even Jails/other nice BSD feature? Fetch it, burn it, load it and you are done.
The official slogan:
“FreeBSD, the power to serve”
So the elevator pitch I found to be cool for BSD is:
“Having BOFH nightmares? Use BSD and sleep tight during system updates in your company!”
Do you like the “Elevator Pitch” and the all the BSD features? Well, the list goes on and on down here with some other nice topics that are blowing in my mind. In fact I would love to see if my BSD friends can help me build a bigger list
- Binary updates are a tremendous fast and secure way to update/upgrade your system
- FreeBSD has 3 Firewall flavours
- You can play with DTrace
- Mandatory Access Control is a Modular Security Framework
- GEOM is the Modular Disk transformation Framework
- Hierarchical Jails
- You can run Linux under FreeBSD via Linux compatible mode
- You can run FreeBSD kernel under Linux via Debian GNU/kFreeBSD
- …and the list goes on and on…
To end, 3 nice links for further reading
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BSD_operating_systems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BSD_operating_systems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_products_based_on_FreeBSD
Go figure! (Jails on asteroids 