There is a close relation between BSD and Linux. They are both UNIX© clones, sort of like distant cousins. BSD stands for Berkeley Software Distribution because it was developed at University of California at Berkley in 1977.

Since 1970's, the source code for Unix operating system was included with the releases to allow further developing of the operating system. The changes done at Berkley became known as Berkeley Software Distribution. Although every version and adaptation Unix is important, the 1984 release of BSD known as 4.2BSD became popular and commonly used within universities.

In 1985, William Jolitz and Lynne Jolitz adapted the code of BSD to work on the 80386 microprocessor under the name 386BSD.

In 1991, Brad Grantham, Lawrence Kesteloot and Chris Caputo ported 386BSD to the Mac under the name MacBSD. In 1992, BSD was running on Mac II systems.

In May 1993, NetBSD 0.8 was first released. NetBSD was the first royalty-free Unix-like operating system. Around the same time, Allen Briggs and Michael Finch started to merge NetBSD 0.8 and MacBSD to avoid possible feuds. By the time NetBSD 1.0 came around, the NetBSD/mac68k project was established.

In December 1993, Nate Williams, Rod Grimes and Jordan Hubbard released FreeBSD 1.0 for x86 processors based on 4.4BSD-Lite with components of the Unofficial 386BSD Patchkit, which they had developed for William Jolitz's operating system.

In October 1995, Theo de Raadt (a former core team and co-founder of NetBSD, who asked to leave the organization) first released OpenBSD 2.0 as a fork of NetBSD.

In July 2003, Matthew Dillon started DragonFlyBSD, which is fork of the FreeBSD 4.x and belongs in the same class as Linux being based on Unix ideals and APIs.

BSD is also the base for Apple's Mac OS X, known as the Darwin Project. This has been Apple's best decision ever. Many new Mac users have found Apple as a new source of Unix or a clone.

Under the BSD umbrella, you can also get PicoBSD, PC-BSD and others. You can buy the disks for any BSD distribution from the developers or third party vendors or you can also download most versions of BSD from many sites legally, thanks to various open source licenses or you can buy them.

Installing BSD

Before trying to install BSD, get a full inventory of what your computer has. You might have to help the installer recognize the hardware. Also make sure that your hardware manufacturer supports the distribution of BSD of your choice.

There are many ways to install BSD (from a CD-ROM, FTP, HTTP, NFS, a DOS partition, etc). If you are a beginner or lazy (as I am), do the installation from a CD-ROM. Just put the disk in the CD-ROM drive, wait and boot. Do not forget that the installation will erase (format) the partition where you install the operating system. If you want to test BSD without doing any changes or erasing your hard drive, get a copy of any live disk like FreeSBIE.

A simple way to install BSD is to create two main disk partitions, a swap and a system native. As a rule of thumb, make the swap partition (virtual memory, written to disk) twice the RAM that your machine has. For example if the machine has 256 MB of RAM, assign 512 MB for swap. The rest of the disk should be partitioned as native (Unix File System or UFS). To create the partitions, refer to the manual included with the system that you are installing.

Some newer distributions have installers that do all the configuration for you. One of these distributions is PC-BSD 0.7.8, which basically does everything for you.

Some of the information mentioned in this page was taken from the developerWorks site.