Linuxman's Ratings Guide
Required User Level: Intermediate
Installation: Ok - Text based, but easy to understand with good default choices and advice along the way. Took me about 35mins
Support: Excellent - forums & online documentation, very detailed to the extent it could confuse
No. of CD's or DVD's: 1
Media: DVD-R

More solid than a fallout shelter!!

FreeBSD is a UNIX-like operating system derived from BSD, the version of UNIX® developed at the University of California, Berkeley. FreeBSD a very powerful OS often used by companies such as Internet Service Providers, Researchers, Computer Professionals etc.. However because of it's renowned stability and robust build it is becoming very popular amongst students and home users as a daily workstation.

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE. This is the second release from the 8-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 8.0 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights:

• zfsloader added
• zpool version of ZFS subsystem updated to version 14
• BIND 9.6.2-P2
• Boot loader changes allow, among other things, booting from USB devices and booting from GPT-labeled devices.
• sendmail updated to 8.14.4
• OpenSSH updated to 5.4p1
• GNOME 2.30.1, KDE 4.4.5
• Much improved wireless (802.11) support
• Ground-up rewrite of USB, including USB target support.
• Firefox 3.6.4
• Thunderbird 3.0.5
• GCC 4.3.4.
• The GIMP 2.6.9
• OpenOffice.org 2.4.3

DVD Contains everything necessary to install the base FreeBSD operating system, a collection of pre-built packages, the documentation, and supports booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode. This should be all you need.