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 9.0-RELEASE. This is the first release from the 9-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 8.0 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights:

• A new installer, bsdinstall(8) has been added and is the installer used by the ISO images provided as part of this release
• The Fast Filesystem now supports softupdates journaling
• ZFS updated to version 28
• Updated ATA/SATA drivers support AHCI, moved into updated CAM framework
• Highly Available Storage (HAST) framework
• Kernel support for Capsicum Capability Mode, an experimental set of features for sandboxing support
• The TCP/IP stack now supports pluggable congestion control framework and five congestion control algorithm implementations available
• NFS subsystem updated, new implementation supports NFSv4 in addition to NFSv3 and NFSv2
• Flattened device tree (FDT), simplifying FreeBSD configuration for embedded platforms
• High Performance SSH (HPN-SSH)
• The powerpc architecture now supports Sony Playstation 3
• The LLVM compiler infrastructure and clang have been imported
• Gnome version 2.32.1, KDE version 4.7.3
• Many misc. improvements and bugfixes

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.