The History of LiveBSD

Inception
LiveBSD was founded by Scott Ullrich and Chris Buechler in January 2004. It started its life as an open source project, modifying FreeSBIE scripts to build FreeBSD-based live CD's. A name was decided on, and the domain registered on February 28, 2004.  The first LiveBSD Desktop CD was released at that time, a KDE desktop live CD based on FreeBSD 5.2, built using modified FreeSBIE scripts.

The Slashdotting
On March 3, merely three days after the domain was registered, we hit the front page of Slashdot. We had just made the iso available for download a couple days previously, and only had a direct download from our server. No mirrors, no torrent. With a 600+ MB iso for download. Site linked on the front page of Slashdot...  well you can guess how that went.

The ISP hosting our server is generous with the bandwidth, but not that generous. We quickly shot up to using 45 Mbps and they pulled the network plug on our server. We added a torrent later that day and removed the direct download link, and were able to get back online pretty quickly and stay online.

Project life
Some additional CD's were released, though the project was short lived.

Project rolled into FreeSBIE
Scott became a FreeSBIE committer, integrating what was LiveBSD into FreeSBIE. That marked the end of this project, and it was disbanded.

Life as a BSD Live CD Directory
The domain has been retained, and re-positioned as a directory of BSD live CD's.

Page written by Chris Buechler

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