Submitted by “Not all user-friendly desktop operating systems are based on Linux; as demonstrated by PC-BSD, it is entirely feasible to turn a “geek” project into a piece of software that can be installed and used by even less technical computer users. Distrowatch talks to Kris Moore, PC-BSD lead developer, about his love affair with FreeBSD and the upcoming PC-BSD 7.0.”
Highlights:
- KDE 4.1 as default desktop for PC-BSD 7
- ZFS is introduced and it can be enabled during installation
The package installation was something that piqued my interest. Download a single .pbi file and double-click to install the package, no dependencies or repositories to worry about. This is something that Windows and OS X users will be familiar with.
I am looking forward to the release of the new version, and I am definitely giving it a try.
PBI Builder is a tool to build your own PBI file if you can’t find the .pbi file for your favorite program.
http://www.pcbsd.org/content/view/45/30/
Now if there was just a great, easy to install, open sourced internet hosting panel, this would be on my personal server at home instead of Ubuntu. I’d make the switch in a heartbeat.
I have not tried it, but the Alpha7 versions have a server installation option as well as a desktop install.
Virtualmin (http://www.virtualmin.org) is in the ports tree (sysutils/virtualmin), or you can just download the tarball and install it to /usr/local/virtualmin-<version> and have it auto-update itself.
Thanks for the heads up. Once I get some time on a Saturday afternoon, with a couple beers, I’ll build a box up and see how it goes!
I laughed when I read this:
“Not all user-friendly desktop operating systems are based on Linux”
Nope. Not all indeed.
I laughed too because all of them are clearly based on either Linux OR FreeBSD. Duh!
Slick willy, is that you?
That depends…
Do you want me to be?
I tried using FreeBSD for desktop, in form of pure FreeBSD, DesktopBSD and PCBSD. They are all great, but, off course, FreeBSD in pure form needs a little extra. PC-BSD seems very polished but I’m not really impressed by the PBI system. Here I’ll take the DekstopBSD ports approach to me much more “orthodox”. Unfortunatelly, DesktopBSD team is, I gueess, much smaller than PCBSD team and the project is not that dynamic, though DesktopBSD as it is, it’s a great OS.
Anyway, FreeBSD and it’s variants would be a great Linux alternative for my desktop users if they only have some kind of free (not OSS necesarely) virtualization, in form of VMWare or VirtualBox, because sometimes I just have to run MSOffice products and I can’t 100% trust wine for this. And off course, excellent hardware support is a must.
If you just want to virtualize several instances of FreeBSD to have a virtualized web server, mail server, and database server, for instance, then FreeBSD jails are a great alternative to virtualization, I think.
If you’re looking to run Windows on FreeBSD, then I can see your point; although work is being done to get VirtualBox running on FreeBSD.
One other comment…
I don’t mind the PBI mechanism. It reminds me a little of OS X’s install packages. It may not be the most efficient use of space, but who cares when a) they are easier to install, b) you won’t run into dependency nightmares, and c) hard drive space is cheap and plentiful? I think this departure from tradition is acceptable for the sake of ease.
I’ve never tried PC-BSD before, but I was intrigued for some reason by this interview and looked into it further. I was impressed by the ease that PC-BSD offers and also the friendliness of the pbiDIR website, which not only lists all the PBI files available, but also sorts them into categories and allows users to rank them; making it easy for new users to not only find software, but find software that will probably work well for them.
This is true, but once you’re willing to invest some time, you end up with a taylored system exactly fitting your seeds. I know it, I’ve done it – using FreeBSD since 4.0 exclusively on servers and, yes, on the desktop, from a 150 MHz P1, a 500 MHz AMD up to a 2000 MHz P4, and I’ve never missed anything. I never found any preconfigured system that fitted my needs.
Now people may scream about “Flash” stuff, but this has never been of any interest to me. 🙂
I’ve tried several versions of PC-BSD, too, and I was impressed. But NB: You need to have a computer that’s up to date. Running PC-BSD on older hardware is not a good idea. I won’t say that there are things that don’t work, no no, all things do work, but sloooowwww. This is nothing bad per se, but KDE 3 (and 4, I think) are ressource hungry. The most impressive thing using PC-BSD was that if you’re only using the GUI tools, everything works completely fine. Even the “most wanted” applications are present from startup, and nearly everything you need can be installed via PBI. Under the hood you still have the power of the FreeBSD OS, so you can do all the “tricks” that a GUI only solution can’t. And that’s great.
They invented something new, something users insist on having. From my point of view, surfing a web page, manually download things and be present during the installation is something retarded, but that seems to be what users want. So the PBI system perfectly fits their needs.
As you mentioned further, PBI doesn’t interact with ports or packages. Still ports and packages can be installed on a PC-BSD system, but it’s recommended to be very careful here.
DesktopBSD keeps things more traditional, keeping as much compatibility as possible.
Well, this depends on the hardware. FreeBSD doesn’t talk to my microwave oven, do I complain? No. 🙂
But you’re right, FreeBSD’s hardware support is a bit like Solaris’ one. The suppported hardware is well selected, you can’t hook every crappy piece of electronic garbage into the system and expect it to work. On the other hand, FreeBSD supprts everything that is compliant to existing standards. The support for wireless is not as good as in OpenBSD, I think, but it becomes better.
They should have gone even further in the easy install of applications and do something similar to OSX IMHO. i.e.: no install, a drag and drop of a special directory containing everything. Not orthodox, not the most efficient space wise (but who cares?) but very easy and clean (you don’t add anything to the system)
Even after having used OS X for years I’m still not convinced that drag and drop to a special folder is a better solution than a self contained installer you double click on. Installers offer much more flexibility, like adding shortcuts to menus and connecting mime types to the app etc. Sure you could have a setup program that runs the first time you run the program, but I’m not convince you win anything.
As for uninstalling you could simply have something like right click the apps menu shortcut and select uninstall. Quick, easy and just as intuitive.
Well, I noticed in OSX you just have to d’n’d an application for it to become associated automatically with its file type. I didn’t analyze this too much but it’s certainly some parameters in one of the .app dir doing that. Very clever but could generate conflict when more than on .app want a file type.
Most OSs have problems/conflicts when more than one app ones to link to the same file extension. So installing applications they way OS X does it doesn’t change anything. Windows, Linux, etc., will also have that issue.
Note that you can Right click on any data file and choose “open with” and open with any program that has associated itself with this file extension. The first time you open up an application it tells the OS what extensions it recognizes.
“Even after having used OS X for years I’m still not convinced that drag and drop to a special folder is a better solution than a self contained installer you double click on.”
Based on many years of using Windows and some use of Linux, I DEFINITELY am convinced. Trying to clean up after Windows or Linux is a pain compared to Mac OS X.
Yes there is still some stuff left behind on OS X but it is a far cry less than what is left over from uninstalling programs on Windows or Linux. Being a Desktop Analyst I’m constantly cleaning up Registry BLEEP in Windows from applications that get corrupted Registry settings and straight uninstalls, reboots, and re-installs don’t fix.
With Mac OS X. Usually all you have to do is delete the corresponding plist file from root/library/preferences and all app preferences are deleted. You open it back up, set your preferences again and most times everything is good. Sometimes you have to do more. But the vast majority of the few times I have to fix apps on Mac OS X this fixes it. Sure is a lot faster than fixing Windows computers.
isn’t that an application-problem instead of an os-problem?
drag&drop-installs are possible even on windows (e.g.: mIRC and Guildwars)
I’m still not convinced that that’s a feature of drag and drop installation. That seems more of an effect of shitty uninstall routines. On linux at at least I find that purging (rather than just uninstalling) does pretty good job of cleaning up.
Agreed. Windows is badly designed in this aspect. But simply adding drag and drop installer wouldn’t stop these programs from causing any of the above problems.
The worst thing is that native Flash for FreeBSD is ready and working but Adobe just do not want to release it for some strange reason :ASD
source:
http://daemonforums.org/showpost.php?p=13239&postcount=60
I ran PCBSD for a while on my previous computer and used FreeBSD Port a lot too, you are not forced to use PBI.
There’s a few GUI for Port which simplify everything.
PC-BSD is one of the more exciting projects out there right now. I love their PBI system, even my grandma can instal software using it. I think PC-BSD shows tons of promise and I really like the OS. Through them i found out about iXsystems which i now use one of their servers at work, over all really good stuff.
“DW: Will it be possible to upgrade an older PC-BSD version to PC-BSD 7.0 or do you recommend a clean installation?
KM: I’m still working on the upgrade system and hope to have it allow upgrades from PC-BSD 1.5.x -> 7. However, I would strongly recommend a clean install, since this is a very large jump forward, and most programs installed on PC-BSD 1.x (based on FreeBSD 6) will most likely not be binary compatible with 7.”
I sure hope they get an upgrade install created. Having to do a clean install when I’ve setup a desktop or server with all my little preferences changed I would really not want to have to do that all over from scratch.
As you can probably tell from my previous I’m a Mac user that is an Systems Analyst that supports Windows too. My favorite OS of all time though is OS/2. It’s a long story as to why I don’t use that anymore. As a hobby I love playing with OSs. So far I’ve played with 12. [Multiple distributions or version of an OS don’t count as multiple OSs.]
Edited 2008-08-27 17:48 UTC
I’ve always wanted to see how those SMP optimizations to the FreeBSD 7 kernel workout for everyday computing.