>> differences between the 3 flavors of BSD in the beginning, there was BSD4.4 which was the Berkley System Distribution version 4.4 from univ of california - I think free, open source and maintained and upgraded by the internet but regulated from Berkely. I think they gave it up though and I am not really sure what hardware it ran on (Vax 11/750 I know since I learnt unix there)
anyway, with that as a start point I think somebody made a 386BSD version that ran on 386 machines. This and the 4.4BSD evolved into FreeBSD on PC hardware, and has been optomised extensively for PC hardware, very fast, very stable. NetBSD was a different aim, they again went from 386BSD and BSD4.4 but spread out into different processors and now you can run NetBSD on really quite a lot of different hardware (inc PC) - apparently MaxOS X is based on a NetBSD kernel. OpenBSD came about when one guy was kicked off the NetBSD project for being rude to people. OpenBSD basically was an offshoot of NetBSD and has diverged with the emphasis on security. but they all take good ideas from each other. They all have similar package collections that you can install with a package manager. FreeBSD is trying to move to different architectures now. NetBSD is trying to be pure and do things the 'best' way. hope that helps iain http://www.netbsd.org/ http://www.openbsd.org/ http://www.freebsd.org/ -- Arachne V1.70;rev.3, NON-COMMERCIAL copy, http://arachne.cz/
