One of the oldest Unix-like operating systems, FreeBSD, continues its advancement with the sixth release in the FreeBSD-5 series. Its developers have added nothing major, but have made many modifications, fixing a number of problems introduced in previous releases. FreeBSD 5.4 is the best release since 5.1, but it still may not be ready for prime time.

FreeBSD is a complete, multi-platform, Unix-like operating system developed by a large community of developers. As with GNU/Linux, you can make FreeBSD into a server or a desktop operating system. FreeBSD handles software management through two frameworks: the package database, which contains precompiled software packages, and the Ports tree, which contains metadata that allows you to automatically download and compile programs from source code. There are more than 12,000 programs in the Ports tree. Users can install packages easily from the command line, from an ncurses-based utility called sysinstall, or through "distribution sets" designed to install several packages together.

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