Many computer systems around the world have been possessed by penguins; some have even been possessed by dead rats. In light of this, it is desireable to exorcize these evil spirits, and replace them with a nice, friendly daemon.
(More to the point, there are a number of dedicated server hosting companies which only offer Linux (or, in some cases, Linux and Windows); being able to remotely replace Linux with FreeBSD makes the (typically very low cost) offerings from these companies available to those who want to run FreeBSD.

I've put together some code for building a FreeBSD disk image which will boot into memory, configure the network, set a root password, and enable SSH. This can be used to "depenguinate" a Linux box, without requiring any access beyond a network connection.

The remainder of this page relates to the original (December 2003) version of my depenguinator. For a more recent version (which works with FreeBSD 7.0) see my blog post about my depenguinator version 2.0.