Today I tested out FreeBSD for the first time, and at the moment I’d say my install was successful. The system I’m installing will be used for a simple Apache server to run Cacti to monitor my LAN traffic at work.
There was a little bit of a learning curve, especially in regards to the differences in directory structure. Some of the usual suspects were definitely there, such as /dev, /etc, and /usr, however once you started digging things weren’t quite in the same places. One significant difference to note is the heavy use of /local for anything that isn’t considered to be part of the base install.
So apache, php, mysql, and cacti all ended up under /usr/local. Even configuration files, which really thew me for a loop. A typical Linux user isn’t going to look under /usr/local/etc/rc.d for init scripts with out some kind of heads up. Either way, with less than 15 additional packages from the base system, I was able to get my system up and running. I just logged in a few minutes ago and cacti seems to be running beautifully. I still need to take some time to understand the package management and update system (including the CVSup method of synchronizing all of it). We’ll have to see how I feel after a few months, but my initial impressions are quite good. The system is extremely light-weight while running exactly the services I need. So far I can understand why Distrowatch.com migrated to FreeBSD as opposed to Linux for their web server.