"Digital Nation" Radio Show

[Chuck Swiger]

josh at inthehouseshow.com wrote:
> My name is Josh Smith, I am the producer for the "Digital Nation," radio show,
> based out of Orlando, Fl.  "Digital Nation," is about everything electronic and
> I would like to know some things about FreeBSD.  Does a drive need to be
> partitioned to run it? Can it run on a partitioned drive, while the other
> portion runs Windows or Mac OSX?

It's common for one to set up two partitions if you want a machine to run both 
FreeBSD and some other OS, yes.  However, it's possible to run FreeBSD inside 
a machine emulator like VMWare, although doing so is not going to perform 
quite as well as running it on the hardware directly.

> How secure is it?  What kind of computer will ideally run it?  Ups and downs?

FreeBSD is very secure by most standards, although OpenBSD has a better 
security track record.  The potential security risks involved in running 
FreeBSD have more to do with which services a machine runs, rather than what 
your OS is.

FreeBSD runs on most Intel/AMD hardware out there, and also supports some 
other architectures like SPARC and PowerPC.  Something like a 486-grade 
machine with 24MB to 32MB of RAM is probably the minimal spec.  Having more 
memory will help, of course, if you are running a GUI or lots of services.

-- 
-Chuck