Pick a flavour. Take a sip.

In 2004, I ran FreeOSZoo because I believed it was easier to show people than to explain things. That same idea lives on today at BSD Cafe.

Here you can try three BSD systems, right in your browser. Choose one below and give it a moment to boot. The machine runs on your device; its changes disappear when you stop it or close the page.

What would you like to try?

All three images use root / bsdcafe. These are public demo credentials. Please keep personal passwords and private data out of the guests.

FreeBSD 14.5

Stopped

Your console will appear here.

Choose a BSD, then press Start machine.

Click inside the console to type. Each guest has 512 MiB of RAM and starts offline.

A little room for experiments

FreeBSD comes with BastilleBSD installed and two test jails, lab1 and lab2, ready but stopped. Start one, create your own, and discover what makes jails such a lovely piece of technology.

After logging in, try bastille list, then bastille start lab1 and bastille console lab1. Type exit to leave the jail, and bastille stop lab1 to stop it.

To create another jail from the base already on disk:

bastille create --no-boot lab3 \
  14.5-RELEASE 10.17.89.12 bastille0
bastille console lab3

Creation starts lab3 straight away. When you are done exploring, type exit, then run bastille stop lab3. The --no-boot flag keeps it from starting automatically when FreeBSD reboots. Use a different name and IP address for each new jail.

A few things to know

These are installed i386 systems with text consoles. All three boot without extra commands. A desktop browser and a keyboard make this a much nicer experience.

Disk blocks load as needed: FreeBSD has a 3 GiB disk, OpenBSD and NetBSD have 4 GiB each. The browser needs memory beyond the guest's 512 MiB. Larger downloads and slower boots are normal on a first visit.

Speed depends on your computer's CPU and available memory, your browser, and how well each operating system fits the hardware emulated by v86. In this particular setup, FreeBSD is a closer fit and tends to feel faster than NetBSD. Results are specific to these images and settings, and may vary on your device.

There is no Internet connection inside the guests. New FreeBSD jails can use the base already on disk; extra packages need to be included in the image beforehand.