BSD has the reputation of being the most geeky OS, simply because it' s rarely used by average users. The reason is that the average think its too complicated, which IMHO is far from the truth. The only thing with any OS is, that if you want to use all of its power, it takes some learning curve, no exclusions.Once upon a time GNU/Linux was considered a strictly Geek OS to, but times have changed. BSD however remained to be as such. Well, not quite!
Last week the 1.4 release of PC-BSD was announced and things have changed pretty much.
I downloaded the 2 CD-ROM set, installed it and my conclusion is: thanks to the great work of the PC-BSD team, BSD is ready for Joe Sixpack!
Installation.
The install
ation is pretty straight forward. Just pop in the first CD and boot from it. After waiting a couple of seconds, the installation GUI will fire up. Also that' s pretty straight forward for someone who has installed a GNU/Linux distribution before. Choose your preferred language, timezone, choose the type of installation (new or update), set the superuser password, add a new user, edit your partition table to suit your needs, click on next and enjoy the slick slide show :-)The installer also gives you the ability to install some frequently used apps. For this purpose you need the second CD. If you prefer to install these apps afterwards, using the PBI system and your native language is English, you don' t even require the second CD.
First boot, the Ooooooh wow! effect.
As written above the installation went without a glitch, this - to
some extend - also counts for the hardware detection. The system only installed the wrong nVIDIA driver. However it recognized my Geoforce 2 MX400 without a glitch. Anyway it was very easy to choose an older version of the nVIDIA driver and set up the X.org system without a pain. The rest of the hardware worked without any interaction of my self, even the DVD-ROM I entered into the drive was mounted automatically.Eyecandy for lusers.
One of the reaso
ns that made me exited about PC-BSD is that Compiz-Fusion is enabled by default and beside that Superkaramba is also installed by default. Now Ive been fooling around with Compiz and Beryl for quite some time and it was always a pain (pretty confusing) to properly set it up. Not anymore! The first time you fire up Compiz-Fusion, PC-BSD asks you whether you want to start it by default after bootstrap. This is a great feature, because until now, I always had to fire up Beryl manually, which is pretty weird, because all Unices that I know of, support so called symlinks (symbolic links == shortcuts in Windows), you simply create a symlink to to the Beryl binary in the "automatically start up stuff" directory (folder) of KDE and it should work. Well unfortunately it did not! Anyway this problem is solved in PC-BSD 1.4.PBI: the package system.
Now every OS needs a platform to install and remove apps. Here
comes PC-BSD' s great strength to exposure. PC-BSD supports FreeBSD' s port system and even provides a KDE based GUI for that purpose, but more interesting is PC-BSD's PBI system, which is comparable with Linspire' s "CNR == Click 'n Run". A shortcut to the PBI Directory, using Konquerror is presented at your desktop by default (don' t remove it, you' ll need it - trust me!).Spoiled GNU/Linux
users will find this system pretty much disturbing and maybe even somewhat clumsy, because every package has to be installed separately. Unlike most GNU/Linux package managers, you can' t install a "batch" of packages. Windows users however will feel very comfortable with this approach. All you have to do is browse the package list, click on a package of your choice and eventually read the package' s description. Choose the closest download mirror and a Install Shield alike wizard will guide you trough the installation process.Conclusion.
PC-BSD is an extremely user friendly and secure BSD, based on the rock solid FreeBSD 6.2 stable core, with a easy to use package management system, a friendly installation GUI and great hardware recognition. It is easy enough for average users and interesting enough for advanced users. It' s a easy pathway to the world of BSD *a must have*!
Update on request of a reader:
The icon set is simoo's OS-K.
The color scheme is 5er's 53dark Blue.
A screenshot tour is available here.
17 comments:
Oh, PC-BSD 1.4 is based on FreeBSD 6.2, not 6.1 :)
Thank you for correcting my mistake. I've changed it by now ;)
what is your theme?
hmmm... I wonder how it does with wireless detection on laptops?!?
@ anonymous 11:03:00:
[quote]what is your theme?[/quote]
I will edit the article and provide the required link on bottom of it. Just a few minutes please :-)
@ anonymous 12:39:00
[quote]hmmm... I wonder how it does with wireless detection on laptops?!?[/quote]
This question has been answered on the wiki and forum of:
http://www.pcbsd.org
Check it out!
i'm bummed that cpu scaling isn't implemented automatically. This is critical for us laptoppers. Who wants to hear the fans whirring away (and sucking up electricity) when PCBSD is just sitting idle?
I've used PCBSD 1.2 a year and half, than I had to switch to another OS, due to some other reasons, but PCBSD has always been my personal favorite. They have great and friendly community, lots of docs and explanations, forum and wiki. Someone before me mentioned CPU scaling isn't implemented ? Just log a bug or feature request - it's gonna be very easy for you to make the update, when available, they are doing frequent updates of the OS. The Update itself is also painless :) I'm planning to wipe out the current Linux, since I don't need it anymore, and install 1.4. The thing I like most about PCBSD is the KDE, combined with the "power to serve" of FreeBSD in the core. Previously, I had 3 months of uptime on a PC, running AMP, Perl, CGI, LDAP, with no single crash of the system :) My recommendation : try it and you won't regret it, you'll become huge fan, thus not being scared anymore of BSD legends.
Nice review! Did you install Wine through PBI or FreeBSD ports/packages?
@ Anonymous, who wrote: "I've used PCBSD 1.2 a year and half..."
Thanks for the positive comment, very interesting indeed ;-)
@ Sandro Rip:
Why are you asking this, is there a difference?
I am a GNU/Linux user for almost a decade and prefer native apps. So in fact I don't have a use for Wine. Since I've got used to the native GNU/Linux apps, of which many are ported to BSD.
Thank you for your comment. It inspired me to write another article: "Why I'm such a Unixnut" :-)
Reading through your article and then looking at the screen shots. The PC-BSD group has done a great job on the installation program. This really is pretty non-geek user friendly.
Comments:
It would be nice to have a short note for non-geeks as to why or why not to have a root account/password and when this should be used.
As for installing apps.
From what you described this is a good --first step-- but needs to made better for non-geeks. There should be a simple and advanced list of apps. This would help them as to which app/apps they should start with.
I know you can't do this is LoseDoze, but being able to select multiple programs at one time and let it run in the back ground would be HUGE plus for this OS. Anything to make it less of a hassle to install apps is a plug.
That should say, "plus" at the end, not "plug".
Now that PCBSD uses FreeBSD 6.2 it has become impossible to mount FAT32 hard drived bigger than 128 Gb. Both "-o large" mount option and "MSDOSFS_LARGE" kernel option are unavailible. Also it doesn't correctly recognize nVidia ethernet interface. It uses nfe drivers instead of nve (as it was stated that nfe is working fune for nVidia while original nve has some troubles) but the fun is that nfe is the one that doesn't work. So only after replacing it with nve I managed to fire up my built-in ethernet. PBI installation is, of course, a great thing too but it still has many problems as apps that do not work or have installation issues. When downloading apps from PBIdir remember to browse PCBSD forum for a list of approved apps.
Summarising my PCBSD expirience I can say it's a beautiful, user-friendly and easy to use OS. And in the same time it's just another BSD clone with KDE and lack of qualified support.
That's what PCBSD team should develop further.
Hi, this is not so related to your page, but it is the site you asked me 1 month ago about the abs diet. I tried it, worked well. Well here is the site
actually, that's brilliant. Thank you. I'm going to pass that on to a couple of people.
Hi All,
Would anybody tell if PC-BSD will work on my compaq presario c702tu notebook? it has intel gma965 graphics card and intel HD audio.
Thanks in advance
@ Manmath Sahu:
This is only a weblog. The best place to go, for having your question answered is the PCBSD forum:
http://forums.pcbsd.org/
Cheers ;)
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