I'vd decided to try Freebsd, and made myself a dvd. I'm ok with linux but an absolute bsd newbie. My pc is a laptop (Samsung NP350C-A05UK), with UEFI disabled in the BIOS. The 250G ssd is partitioned thusly The security features of bsd attract me.
Ideally, I would like bsd on partition 6, using the swap on partition 2 & booting from lilo off partition 1. An alternative is a 32G usb drive which I could assign in it's entirety. A 3rd option is a free 29G on the partition housing VMs, if bsd runs under VirtualBox. There's also a 3.5" 500G mechanical USB drive (which doesn't fit in a laptop) or a 32G sdcard if the bsd kernel can boot off the thing What way would you tackle this, and what should I have read? The install dvd is painfully slow. The support docs on it seem to be like a "how to shine" workshop manual. I started an install, but didn't know what it was going to do, so aborted, because it was giving little feedback.

There isn't a "BSD" anymore nor a "BSD kernel". FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and DragonFly, et al, have diversified into completely different OS.

Partition 6 is a logical/extended drive of partition 4 of your DOS MBR. You can use an MBR but it should be a primary partition you install to. The MBR partition you select will use BSD disklabels and all of your FreeBSD slices will reside therein. You will need to avoid installing bootblocks in this case and use your existing bootloader.

Installation on a USB flash drive might be the best option, especially as it might help avoid you accidentally hosing your existing setup.

So Openbsd, Freebsd, NetBSD,& co. are all different operating systems, not just different distros. I did not know that.

I'll try an install to usb. Hosing my existing system would be an inconvenience rather than a disaster, as I have a recent backup, having just upgraded.

For completeness, I'll post an epilogue. No install was done in the end.

4 minutes into the bootup, I finally got the word "Install" as a select-able option. The install dvd was not able to see any usb drive. I know that sort of issue can be got around, but it's pain I can do without. I was also dismayed by the learning curve - all the devices and utilities seem similar but different enough to set me learning from scratch. I was impressed by the *BSD security features. I was also impressed that modern hardware is so well supported.

OTOH, I was also impressed by TAILS, the secure linux distro, and have gone through the pain of installing that on a usb key. So the reason to fight with this is not there at the moment, for what is a home use Laptop. I can put TAILS in, reboot, key in a wifi password in the gui & I'm away. Good for a client. And I know linux.

I will keep all bsd variants in mind for the evil day that I have to stick up a server and be a target.

Sometimes you have to replug or rescan the drive. Doing this should also show some messages relating to which device node it's been attached to. You can then tell the installer to use that device. USB attached storage will be treated no differently to SCSI, so da0 would normally be your first attached USB flash drive (unless you have a SCSI drive of course).

The *BSDs are not GNU/Linux. You're not the first Linux user to make wrong assumptions about a "BSD kernel" and "BSD distros". Linux mostly uses the GNU userland, whereas the *BSDs are complete operating systems descended from 386BSD/4.4BSD, etc. I wouldn't call it relearning from scratch, but there is some relearning yes.

From what I read about TAILS, it is all about anonymity and privacy. If you were looking for something of this sort - preconfigured - then it might have been the best starting point rather than FreeBSD, which is a completely different thing.

I don't think I presumed too much about the kernel - I thought they use the Linus kernel, which is probably the most developed unix kernel for pcs.

Yes, tails (The Amnesiac Incognito Linux System) is about anonymity & privacy but is also secure - spoofing IPs, going through Tor by default, encrypting the persistent storage on the usb key, etc. The updates are most often security updates. But it is definitely client only, and designed to be mobile.

If you need to stay still, e.g an online server/firewall, then some bsd variant seems essential. The more linux moves to GUI interfaces, the less it seems to pay heed to security. Increasingly there is package bloat where there are scores of scripts in perl/python or some such language. Things like Cups, NetworkManager, Pulse Audio & Alsa are run by everyone, but nobody has a clue what's actually happening.

TAILS does not seem to be about security and Tor is not a security feature, it's an anonymity network. You would not do your online banking via Tor... TAILS seems to be a dressed up private browsing liveCD. I feel you're confusing 'security' with this kind of thing.

Have a read up on OpenBSD if you want to know about secure OS.