Hello, everybody. I'm somewhat new here, and I have a few questions. I hope that some of yu can help me with them. **This is not really a windows question.** I have Windows XP Pro on my HD. It's partition is 5gig. That leaves me roughly 95 gig of unformatted hd space. I am very interested in web site creation, and would like to use my pc as a server for my own site. I have been looking at a few of the free operating systems, and some of the not so free operating systems. The ones I am looking at now with seriousness are: Red Hat Linux, Unix, and FreeBsd. I am wondering...(1)which is the most secure for use on a server, and (2) is it possible to install any of these OSs on the unformatted portion of my hd, or do I have to reformat my whole hd, in effect discarding my Windows XP and saved files? I apologize for my ignorance. This is all so new to me. I am glad for any help. This is a wonderful site, and I promise to share what I learn with those seeking help in the future, when I become competent :) . Thanks. --HG

Unix!!! What's that? Linux is a Unix; FreeBSD is a Unix; Solaris is a Unix, etc. But please be careful how you use the word Unix because SCO may sue the heck out of you as they have claimed that they own the rights to Unix!!! If you want to run secure server on your PC, FreeBSD is probably the best but RedHat Linux is not bad either. Either way, you can't go wrong as long as you don't use Windows... taurus

Dont buy Unix from Sco They are SCOX they suck. now Partition magic can convert the free space to a linux file system. I am not sure what kind of file system unix or bsd uses but I would assumme that it would be able to convert a fat or ext2(Linux) file system. I have a laptop that came with XP Pro. I split the hardrive down the middle with Partition Magic and put RedHat on the other half and use Grub to boot . I have a dual boot enviorment. I am fairly sure that Grub will let you boot as many OSs as you wish. Good Luck Ron PS Remember to stay away from SCO

well i suppose answers are already there but just to make few things clear if you are using linux its really easy im saying because i dont have much idea of free bsd however run apache over linux it would be secure and easy to manage i suppose u can create linux partitions(ext3)assuming that you use redhat and you can use Grub to enable multiboot options so you can use windows as well and any other operaing systems try bsd unix id encourage that too but most of all apache that comes free in linux cd only will be easy to be configured and run in collaboration with windows.

BSD is good (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, SecureBSD etc) and runs pretty much bug free although the flavours are not quite as cutting edge as some of the newer Linux distros around. Most *nix OSs are only as secure as how they have been configured....check out TrinityOS on how to secure a system (although it may be getting a little out of date now...I haven't had a look at it for ages). Pretty much all of them will do for webserving. Being new, for you I would probably suggest RedHat as it has a very large userbase and you should be able to get help easily. If you don't mind older versions of programs (but ones that have been thoroughly tested and proven to work well) go for a BSD, perhaps NetBSD would be more up your street. I tried out FreeBSD v5 not that long ago and quite liked it....until I tried Debian and Slackware!=o) If you have the time (and bandwidth), download a few and see which one you get along with the best.

If you go with FreeBSD, make sure you get a release from the stable branch (4.x), and not the current branch (5.x). The latest stable release is 4.8, although they are due to release 4.9 soon. Just my opinion: FreeBSD is hands-down superior to any of the Linux distros I have used (Mandrake, RedHat, Slackware, SuSE, Peanut, Debian). FreeBSD can also run over 90% of Linux programs. Additionally, you will not have to worry about dependecies; FreeBSD finds them for you. Plus, you will learn more about your system. Okay, I'm showing my bias. But interestingly, Debian has a project dedicated to the FreeBSD kernel, although under development: http://www.debian.org/ports/freebsd/