h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

As of writing, FreeBSD is up to version 5.3. It is a superb system. Although potentially daunting at first as there are no nice graphics for installation and startup (once installed you are presented with a simle "login:" on a text-only screen), the system is laid out in a much more logical way than Linux. Linux comes in various flavours, known as distributions. Each has the same core, but is surrounded by different utilities and applications. Unfortunately, this makes Linux confusing in comparison to FreeBSD as there are complications with compatibility due to the same files being placed in different places in different distributions.

Documentation on http://www.freebsd.org is superb and can get you up and running in no time. And the amount you will learn from installing and configuring FreeBSD is phenomenal. Once you have your system finished, it will do anything that Linux can do in a more stable and speddier manner.