An updated release of PC-BSD is out. From the changelog: “PC-BSD 0.8.1. Fixes many issues with boot-up after installation; fixed problems with Online Update Manager; updated UserManager; added Russian and Bulgarian support; activates hard disk swap space during installation for lower memory systems; slimmed down KDE 3.4.2 by removing games/graphics/PIM ports, which can be optionally installed via PBI.” See also the release notes for further information. Download from here.
The homepage’s here
http://www.pcbsd.org/
Kudos to Kris Moore and the PC-BSD people!
i never experienced any problems with PC-BSD but lots of people (some of them valuable community developers) have been unable to install it. I just hope Kris can fix the problems those people are experiencing so pcbsd can really develop some work.
Anyone with technical skills is invited!
Yes I was / I am personally involved with the PC-BSD project, I wrote the How-to on PBI creation that most PBI creators now follow, I was one of the few who had install problems, hopefully this update will rectify those problems.
This does seem like a promising project, although, you can do all of the things they are doing with a base FreeBSD install. I can see this used in the enterprise to roll out client machines quickly but why move away from the ports tree? What are the benefits of creating a package manager from the ground up when there is already a solid base to work with?
To give themselves more control and to make things difficult for everyone else.
To give themselves more control and to make things difficult for everyone else.
Don’t be ignorant. PBI tries to make everything more accesible, and I can tell you that they’ve succeeded in doing so. A .pbi can simply be downloaded, double-clicked, and done. No need for difficult, unfamiliar package managers, command lines or whatever.
And you know what? You can still use ports on PC-BSD, because PC-BSD is still 100% compatible with FreeBSD.
PC-BSD follows a route totally different from traditional package managers. Instead of tackeling the dependency problem by automatically install packages required by what you try to install, each PBI includes everything needed to run that/those program(s). This way the user downloads a single file, which the author of the program can distribute as a simple download on the project’s homepage, and is able to install it just by double-clicking the file (which has a head consisting of a shell script).
The only real concern i have with this approach is the duplication of installed libraries. Because a library used by many apps will be installed as part of each of them, they will be loaded multiple times into memory when the apps run simultaneously, plus instead of all apps taking adventage of a library being updated (which is the case when they depend on the same package containing the library), libraries are not likely to get updated at all (even for security reasons) until a new version of the app itself is released (and if they are, the whole app has to be downloaded just for the sake of a tiny lib).
I don’t have much experience with PC-BSD, though, and I guess it will be quite normal to have a few dependencies between PBIs after all. I mean, a program depending on Gnome, might be packaged seperately and expect the user to install the Gnome PBI manually. Also remember that what is already installed as part of the base system, doesn’t have to be part of the PBIs, and PC-BSDs base system is more “feature packed” than most distros.
gnome version please… im sick of kde… or an xfce version….
I was working on a GNOME PBI until PC-BSD wouldnt work on my system, as I said in my previous comment, hopefully this rectifies the problems so I can continue working on PBI’s.
I would love to see this OS replace over-hyped Linux as the premiere open source alternative.
I’ve been unable to install PC-BBSD on any computer I’ve tried. I’m thinking the PC programming on top of Free is seriously badly flawed, or they need to wait for the offical stable release of Free 6.0 and try building on that. Although from my experiance, every single BSD is not loadable, unbootable, they all error out before I get any kind of menus or options for anything, but every single Linux installs with no problem
Which other projects are there creating a simple, basic (not bloated), free desktop OS based on BSD/Linux? It should not be bigger than 650MB.
I still want to try Zenwalk Linux (there are just too many distributions, to try all of them out), but that is not exactly what I mean. Something in the direction of Symphony or Mockup is what I am searching for. Does anyone know of more such projects?
Thank you.
Although from my experiance, every single BSD is not loadable, unbootable, they all error out before I get any kind of menus or options for anything, but every single Linux installs with no problem
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Oh, yes. That is believeable, indeed.
I am one of the people who have been unable to get far into the PC-BSD install before it errors out. And yes, I have installed plain-jane FreeBSD a few times over the years, and the installs have gone quite well except for X autoconfiguration which broke somewhere between the 3.x and 4.x versions.
I use several different Linux distros (Gentoo at home, Kubuntu on my laptop, Vector and Morphix on old hardware at work, Slackware on a server at work). But over the years I have also encountered quite a few Linux distros that would not even boot.. Dyne:bolix and ByzantineOS are the first two to come to mind, there have been several others.
-Gnobuddy
I installed PCBSD without issues and everything works correctly. I think they’ve done a great work with the installer. Great job !
My doubts are about the underlying FreeBSD system. When I once installed FreeBSD itself, I realised it required twice as much memory than the average Linux distro. I thought I might have done something wrong during install. But with PCBSD it’s the same (and here it’s impossible to go wrong). As it behaves in my box, it would be impossible to run it with 256MB of RAM. I have 512 and really need all of it for simple things.
The system is not too slow, but quite slower than any linux I’ve tried. Also it seems to crash frequently (I installed The Gimp from ports and when I try to close it it freezes and I have to kill it).
Another thing, it took really long to copy the CD contents to the hard drive during install. Like 2 hours (when it only comes with a slim KDE version). Is this related to UFS compared to Reiserfs (which I use in Linux)? Generally in Linux it takes 5-10 minutes to do so.
As I said, great job for PCBSD team. But I can’t see the advantage of using FreeBSD as a base. Maybe my very Linux friendly computer is just very FreeBSD hostile, but it doesn’t seem a hardware problem since everything works right. Wouldn’t NetBSD be a better option (if you want to stick to BSD, that is). Or would it be the same? If so, they could use their ideas on Linux to have a good distro.
Very curious, your experience with FreeBSD is very different from mine.
It’s been a couple of years since I last installed FreeBSD, but in the years before that I tried out just about every point release in the 3.x and 4.x stable releases. None of the machines I installed on had more than 128 MB of memory, as I ususally tested on older hardware I had lying around.
I do not recall memory usage, but my experience was that a fresh, untweaked FreeBSD install, in every case, booted faster, ran faster, and shut down faster on the same hardware than any Linux distribution I had tried. I was running KDE on both Linux and FreeBSD, somewhere in the KDE 2.x series at the time IIRC.
I wonder if your hardware has some incompatibility with FreeBSD. At one time I experienced molasses-slow network speeds after installing FreeBSD, eventually tracked down to an Ethernet card that worked very badly with FreeBSD. Replacing that card with a cheap Realtek 8139 based card fixed the problem.
-Gnobuddy