hey, help finding something plz

[cheese11]

Hi, they sent me here since bsd forums is getting it up the butt by spammers I have a desktop computer that I dont use and a inspiron 1521 laptop with 2gb ram and a 150gb hdd that dual boots ubuntu and vista.

I dont know much about bsd, but I wanted to try a unix OS out ( I guess macOS, bsd and solaris are the most used one?).Solaris was my first choice since I guess its the more "pure unix os?" out of the three, then I looked into mac os x and I guess its hard to install it enless you have a mac or mac hardware.So for a while I said forget it and then a friend told me to try bsd because its like a "cross between linux and unix?" and he said I might be able to run it live off a usb or cd.So is there a varient of bsd that I can install on a usb or cd/dvd to run live so I dont have to install anything?Either that or I could try to install it on my external hdd but I hear thats hard to do.I just want to explore what bsd is all about and perhaps one day Ill install it(Im actually looking into buying a eee pc or something just so Ill have a alternative computer).So what are my options here?You guys are the bsd experts.

[cajunman4life]

I'd recommend Freesbie (http://www.freesbie.org/). It's a FreeBSD-based LiveCD.

[J65nko]

Last year I played a little bit with Rofreesbie. I found it quite nice and seem to be more actively supported (based on more recent FBSD versions) . See http://www.rofreesbie.org./

For an OpenBSD based liveCD you could try one from daemonforums.org member Jggimi http://jggimi.homeip.net/ These are very up-to-date (based on latest OpenBSD 4.3 release).

[ocicat]

Originally Posted by cheese11

Solaris was my first choice since I guess its the more "pure unix os?" out of the three, then I looked into mac os x and I guess its hard to install it enless you have a mac or mac hardware.So for a while I said forget it and then a friend told me to try bsd because its like a "cross between linux and unix?"

"Pure UNIX" is a nebulous term as:

• Solaris descends from SunOS which in turn descended from 4.1BSD (& 4.2 & 4.3...).
• Apple's OS X is a hybrid beginning from splicing the FreeBSD userland onto Carnegie-Mellon's Mach kernel.
• FreeBSD descends from BSD Net/2 & 386BSD.

For more lineage information, see the following:

http://www.levenez.com/unix/history.html#12

Likewise note that UNIX itself is a registered trademark when is licensed by the Open Group:

http://www.opengroup.org/certification/unix-home.html

Both Sun & Apple have purchased certification, while the *BSD's have each decided that the fee required for certification is too high. This is the reason you will find the term "Unix-like" used to describe the *BSD family & Linux, although Linux has a completely different heritage by descending from Minix.