% now.  Seems like I recall seeing one of our Amiga group members (Oklahoma Amiga
% Comuter EnthusiastS - OACES) demoing BSD on his A3K at leat 4 yrs ago.  Linux in

That was most likely me... (I used to bring my NetBSD Amiga to the meetings 
on regular basis.)  

% other packages as well.  This would mean that the only support one could get for
% Linux would be a user based ML such as this one.

This is not really an issue with Linux, because the community itself is actually
the best tech support resource anyway. The same applies to *BSD.

%      Since BSD has a longer history with Amiga than the others, is there some
% flavor of official BSD tech support (other than this ML)?

Since NetBSD is a volunteer project, the support is via Web/newsgroup/mailing 
lists just like any other free Unix variant.

% 
%      Does BSD in it's various flavors use the Linux kernel?

No, this is the main difference between BSD distributions and Linux 
distributions.  Most everything else is identical, but the kernels are 
very different, based on completely different source code.  It is mostly
due to the different licenses that cover the kernels.... Linux is covered
by the GNU GPL (General Public License) while all  of the BSD variants are
covered by the Berkeley lincense.   Despite all this, both BSD and Linux
are largely compatible on the API level, and usually if something compiles
under Linux, it compiles under BSD as well.

%      Does BSD have multi-threaded capability?

I'm not sure if there is a pthreads package for the Amiga i
implementation of NetBSD, but since Amiga only has one processor, this
is not exactly a burning issue, since you can't take advnatage of SMP.

% 
%      Does FreeBSD have cfgs for diff platforms?

FreeBSD has now been ported to SPARC I think, but if you want cross-platform
capability in the BSD world, NetBSD is the king.  It runs on many architectures,
see www.netbsd.org for details.

%      How much overhead does BSD require (min RAM/HD space/cpu/speed)?


Without the X window system, you can run it on a 4 meg RAM system, but 8
makes it more comfortable.   If you want to run X, then you need 8 megs at
the very least, but it won't be comfortable until at least 16MB.  As far as
disk storage is concerned, I've had it installed in 200 megs before (everything
installed) but it was kind of cramped... currently I have it on a 1 gig drive
and I have tons of available space.   It really depends on what you install.
I think that absolute minimum is something like 50 megs or so.

% 
%      What major (or possibly minor) diffs are there to watch for between BSD
% and Linux in it's various incarnations?

Um, both are very good... I think on Amiga, the NetBSD is more mature than 
Linux, though Linux is catching up very fast.  The main difference is that
NetBSD supports more Amiga hardware than Linux does.  (Note that this is NOT
the case in the Intel PC environment, where Linux has much larger hardware 
support than the BSD's).

%      Thanx for any and all info/advice/assistance.
%         _rich_        AmigaLine BBS sysop       member Team *AMIGA*
% 
you're welcome, and say hello to the OACES folks... I'm sure they'll remember
me, since I was a president of the group a couple of times.   :-)

cheers,
   Bo
   bn@okcforum.org