While a majority of the hardware available today is fully supported and works well with FreeBSD, it is worthwhile, before you install, to look through the hardware notes available with the various FreeBSD releases to make sure you will have no compatibility problems.

Since everybody else is doing it, there is also now a FreeBSD LiveCD project -- via which you can create a CD that you just install in your CD ROM drive and boot/run FreeBSD without installing anything on your hard disk.

The link points at the <a href="http://192.168.1.201/find/SourceForge">SourceForge</a> download page for the LiveCD project.

This is the first place to go to figure out where to get which installation packages for FreeBSD. It includes all supported platforms (including x86, alpha, amd64, sparc64, and pc98).

The current 5.x builds are provided, as well as maintenance releases of the 4.x series.