Suitability question

[Chad Perrin]

On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 01:07:23PM +0200, Ott Köstner wrote:
> On Thursday 18 December 2008 11:25:51 pm Patrick Baldwin wrote:
> 
> > I'm thinking I might be best of trying to built him a really 
> > locked-down, high security
> > box, almost an Internet appliance.  All he really does is use the Web, 
> > and a little
> > light word processing.
> > 
> > What do people think of FreeBSD as the base OS for this idea?  
> 
> In this case, I would recommend to use PC-BSD.
> http://www.pcbsd.org/
> 
> PC-BSD is full FreeBSD 7.1, with nice grapical installer, pre-configured for desktop use. Xorg, KDE, Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office, flash, etc. -- all will work out of the box...
> 
> After installing PC-BSD, you can think of it as a standard FreeBSD -- Upgrade ports, build kernel, etc.

I think PC-BSD is a great recommendation for someone who wants an easy
introduction to FreeBSD on his/her own, but if you want to provide a
locked down system for someone else and that person isn't expected to
learn how to use FreeBSD (i.e., that person doesn't really know how to
use MS Windows, and just clicks on the blue E for Internet access),
you're better off using FreeBSD itself.  PC-BSD installs a whole lot of
stuff that it assumes everybody wants, whereas with FreeBSD you can
pretty much install nothing but the base system then add exactly the
software you want to be present.

Thus, you can much more easily get the system to the point where
everything you want is installed, and *only* what you want, and configure
it all to precise specifications, with a minimum of effort -- using
FreeBSD itself.  With PC-BSD, on the other hand, you won't even know what
all is installed, and will have to spend a lot of time crawling through
the system figuring out what to uninstall.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
Quoth Edmund Burke: "Your representative owes you, not his industry
only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he
sacrifices it to your opinion."
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