Call me ignorant..

I'm a Windows guy. I've only played around with Linux a few times, so I'm not sure how the whole thing works. I'm trying to find out what files I need to download so I can get FreeBSD up and running. I'm just going to copy the files onto a blank HD and install it from there, but I can't even find the directory in the ftp server from which I should download FreeBSD, nonetheless what files to download.

I need a more stable and reliable platform for web development, and Win2k just doesn't cut it.

Thanks, I'd appreciate any help.

I suggest you buy a FreeBSD book or magazine, which will almost always come with a distribution or two on cd-rom. It'll save you a lot of effort in downloading all of the individual packages.

>>I need a more stable and reliable platform for web development

If you have high speed internet access plus a CD burner, download the FreeBSD's 4.1.1-STABLE snapshot from -> ftp://releng4.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/i386/ get everything except the symlink dir "4.1-2000102x-STABLE". Keep in mind, you DON'T need to download the 2GB+ files in the packages directory, they are precompiled and not flexible like RPM in Linux, fortunately, *BSD has the _port_ system which make compiling program alot easier.

If you wanna buy the CD instead, go to http://www.cheapbytes.com/

If you can't live without having a dual-boot with Windows, then FreeBSD is not for you. A reliable OS should never needs to reboot (except after install the first time) anyway, so don't even try to download FreeBSD to your DOS partition and install from there.

Keep in mind, if you are not comfortable with Linux, don't even try FreeBSD.

>>I suggest you buy a FreeBSD book

You don't really need to waste money on that. Just subscribe to the maillist and RTFM at -> http://www.freeBSD.org/handbook/index.html

I've successfuly setup a Linux Red Hat, was able to get apache/php/mysql working just fine, so I thought I'd tacke FreeBSD, as I hear it's much more secure than Red Hat. Plus I started my days using DOS, so I'm all too familiar with the command line.

So, should I stick with Red Hat? And then when I get more comfortable move onto FreeBSD?

>>So, should I stick with Red Hat? And then when I get more comfortable move onto FreeBSD?

Good approach. It's pretty difficult to migrate from win32 straight to FreeBSD. Most (almost 95%) FreeBSD users who migrate from Linux would never go back to Linux and ditching FreeBSD. The other 5% are those who are struggling.