In recent years the enormous public success of the Linux movement has overshadowed the availability of other equally powerful and freely available Unix operating systems. This presentation aims to introduce BSD as an alternative to Linux, to provide basic information, and to clear commonly encountered misconceptions.

Just what is BSD? I will give a short sketch of BSD's long history and an overview of the different flavors of BSD Unix available today. The subsequent discussion will concentrate on the free Free/Net/OpenBSD projects. The license and development model will be explained, and the key concept of integration, both as a process and a result, will be shown to constitute the main difference to Linux.

Finally, this talk is intended to proactively answer the questions most commonly asked by people with a Linux background at their first BSD installation. The ports and packages system will be presented and basic administration concepts introduced. I will give an overview of the differences between the ext2 and FFS file systems and explain the features of BSD's init(1) including secure levels. As time permits, miscellaneous further details of interest to system administrators may be covered.