FreeBSD 7/8 are really starting to feel like the decisions made in 5.x are starting the pay off. Between the ULE Scheduler, ZFS filesystem, DTrace (even if not as good as on Solaris) and the new Jails, Its a pretty sweet technology packed release.
Hopefully we will be upgrading some of the apache.org server soon :)
The big one is that there's a pretty good chance FBSD will run on your hardware, and there's a really slim chance that OpenSolaris will. Solaris just doesn't have the driver selection that BSDs or Linux have.
I can't confirm your observation. I have thrown OSol on many notebooks and it found stuff out-of-the-box my Linux installs didn't. Oddly enough, the Broadcom wireless one of them uses had problems, but that's about all the problems I had (and that Broadcom was a source of grief for a long time under Linux).
Because the FreeBSD userland enviroment and ports collection are sane, and there is a reasonable way to do upgrades, while with OpenSolaris you have... what?
A Synaptic-like package manager? It's really easy to use and self-updates the system every time there is something new without need to make the human attached to the computer go and check.
FreeBSD seems to make more sense to me than Solaris or OpenSolaris. I always have to go looking for HOWTOs on simple things. Plus, there is more available for it, and IMO it has a better community.
Both Fedora and Ubuntu include nginx. The reason Apache HTTPd is the default is because people know it (that said, I don't entirely agree with that reasoning).
Sometimes I think half the opensource advocats are offering me tweaks and utilities to make Windows and OS X more like {star}nix so everything can be The One True Way, and the other half are trying to convince me that all the {star}nix variants are life changingly different and charmingly unique.
POSIX message queues. SysV message queues. POSIX realtime signals. POSIX monotonic timers like clock_gettime(). POSIX semaphores living on shared memory for inter-process synchronization. Pthread spin locks.
Linux has them, OS X does not. These are just a few things that I encountered while developing on OS X. Where did you get the idea that OS X implements more POSIX than Linux?
Yeah, I've also found linux to be a better unix than OSX. Many OSX calls seem lacking compared to linux ones. Compare mmap and threads on both systems for example.
Which shouldn't be surprising considering how much work is going on with linux, compared to the OSX kernel. There's thousands of developers, many of whom work for much larger companies than apple(many of which work on their own Unix too... or have in the past).
You could use find, but it is easier to use the built in facilities to search for ports. If you are in the ports directory you can:
make search name=name_of_port
to search for a port by name and:
make search key=key_to_search_for
to search by key. You can also use quicksearch instead of search to reduce the verbosity of the results. If you read the ports man page, you will find a bunch of other nifty things you can do with the ports system.
FreeBSD also has a binary package management system, see http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/packages-using..... The ports take precedence, though, in that they can have newer versions and not all packages on all architectures may be available as binaries.
Post some recent instructions if you get it working? I had numerous problems with networking (which I solved) and swap/RAM overhead (which I didn't) when I tried installing to my Eee 900.
Hopefully we will be upgrading some of the apache.org server soon :)