The second release candidate of PC-BSD 1.0 has been released. From the announcement: “The latest cut of PC-BSD, version 1.0RC2 is now available! This update adds KDE 3.5 support, as well as some additional features/bugfixes. ISO’s may now be downloaded from our main download page. Users currently running under PC-BSD 1.0RC1 can also download a self-installing system update, which upgrades the system to 1.0RC2. This file is available on our Updates page, as Patch #6.”
Possibly it is the best Unix Desktop OS after removing OSX from the equation. for OSX you pay money, for Free-BSD you don’t. Linux distros should learn the simplicity of their packaging technology PBI, and try to mimic if they want to be user friendly. Besides, the OS is much more stable than 10 linux latest distros I examined on at least 8 systems (if you ignore RHEL 4.2).
I wish them the best.
PBI is cool, but I would rather stick with APT on Ubuntu (Or any other Debian Distro)
I don’t feel like going back to see when updates to the OS or applications come out. Yea there are shortcomings but I LOVE just working away and getting the little bubble that tells me a new version of an application or patches for the OS. No worries, no waiting for the application to download and then doing the install etc. Just click on the bubble and say install, then let it go. It will download and install no input for me!
That is the way to go!
Thank you. Yes, I think PC-BSD need to reach a critical mass. Once PC-BSD is among the top 10 distros, and people really talk about by words of mouth, PC-BSD will really skyrocket. We’re solving problems one after the other. PC-BSD is a layer on top of FreeBSD 6, and indeed, FreeBSD is quite rough around the corners, but each new release is easier to the end user.
Hardware detection is now very good, fonts are also at the same level of quality as OS X or Windows. System Installation is easier that Windows, and software installation also is as easy as on Windows (double-click a .pbi file), but faster. The system itself is very stable and performant (Thanks, FreeBSD!).
And best of all, we have a handfull of Linux software available for PC-BSD (Opera, Flash Player, Java, DB Designer, Zend Studio, games, etc…) that runs very fast, and can be downloaded from http://www.pbidir.com
I think 2006 will be a good for PC-BSD because we will still enhance some functionalities, to make it even easier to use and to install. Then 2007 may be the year of PC-BSD
Congrats people for the most user friendly OS, it beats any Linux distro any day. Also rock solid foundation FreeBSD 6. Still I prefer to keep myself with FreeBSD and not pcbsd but, for the n00bs it is the best OS I have used. I love this project.
I think all effort should be centralized on pcbsd, DesktopBSD needs to be removed since the only good thig about it is the GUI to ports system. A join of forces is a most but desktopbsd people need to go pcbsd goals way.
I’ve tried it at v0.9 or so. It works quite well, boot time is good and PBI installers roxxxx. FreeBSD also shuts down very quickly
Once I had 5 minutes of battery power left while using SuSE 10.0, when I began shutdown, that moron started rebuilding /etc/preload.d. Who the hell “invented” this ?
I still can’t find out how to set up performance throttling, though
(powernow k7)
Isn’t powerd working? Put something like this in your rc.conf:
powerd_enable=”YES”
powerd_flags=”-a adaptive -i 80 -r 65″
see man powerd
See if your cpu is actually supported – my desktop sempron’s c&q is supported. Check if you see something like this in your dmesg:
acpi_throttle0: <ACPI CPU Throttling> on cpu0
The question is when it reaches the point where I will switch. Probably more a matter of Gentoo letting me down rather than PC-BSD becoming even better, I guess. Or perhaps a different standard DE
I’m keeping an eye on it, yet.
I set up RC1 in a virtual pc a little while ago, and I must say that what FreeBSD is to the experienced user, PC-BSD is to the newbie. Easy to install and use. Next pc upgrade for my mom will have PC-BSD running on it. 🙂
Why would Gentoo let you down?
On PC-BSD you can do virtually all you do on Gentoo because you can play with the ports, just like Portage.
PC-BSD is easier to use as a desktop than Gentoo though, but if you want to use ports, you’ll have to learn the FreeBSD synthax (pkg_add, make install clean, etc…), but it’s not complicated at all
Oh well. Sometimes you’re forced to use ‘unstable’ to get the applications/packages you need. Theoretically this could blow up big time.
I don’t think it will happen (since I’ve got some rather conservative settings), but who knows? It’s just a matter of screwing up
Learning a ‘new’ syntax doesn’t scare me at all. That’s the fun part of a new system
I prefer saying that:
– FreeBSD is for power users
– PC-BSD is for regular user and power users alike
PC-BSD has everything you can find on FreeBSD
tab completion for FreeBSD, like on linux, because that is the ONLY thing keeping me from switching?
Before ever trying linux or freebsd, I was obsessed with learning FreeBSD. I am going to try this and give some support.
You mean tab completion on Linux as in bash?
Yes FreeBSD supports it, but not by default.
You can install several shells that support tab completion on FreeBSD, the most popular of these are bash, tcsh, and zsh.
To install bash on FreeBSD, type pkg_add -r bash as root.
Hope this helps. Give FreeBSD a try, you’ll probably like it, and if you don’t, what do have to lose?
You needn’t install any additional software to enable tab-completion. Just set autocomplete and you’re done (you’ll probably want that line in your .cshrc so you don’t have to type it in all the time).
Heck, tcsh had tab completion long before Linus ever even touched a computer or RMS began to pen his manifesto.
You also need to set csh as the default shell for non-root users.
Yes, I’m using tcsh on PC-BSD and it has tab completion.
I’m curious about it and would like to try it out, but reluctant to download it, unless I know that there is a chance to get it working with my fairly simple HW, namely Intel BLKD915GAVL mobo (onboard video and sound are used) and Seagate SATA hard disk.
Also, does anybody know if I can run Jack sound server on it in absence of ALSA?
The Jack sound server has a port so most likely yes you can run it.
On a side note, FreeBSD doesn’t have ALSA but has OSS.
i tried to install this on my spare box (compaq deskpro 300mhz p2 celeron) and it installed fine but when i go to beet my graphics are all screwed up then it hard locks, tryed a few different times.
the older versions of pcbsd didn’t do this.
does it work well with OS X? because I have no problem with using OS X and windows, but FC 4 and Ubuntu are a hell to get to connect.
What do you mean work well with OS X? Connect with which protocol?
I have Arch Linux on Thinkpad and am of the openion that it is the best distro for Laptops. Hope PC-BSD will be equally fast and have all the required drivers.
On Desktop I have just shifted from gentoo to Kubuntu and love the user friendliness of kubuntu, all my extra hardware were detected and configured including my bluetooth card.
Reading the info about PC-BSD looks like it is a combination of Kubuntu ( ease of use) and Arch ( fast speed and configurability – gifted by FreeBSD). Will make another partetion in my hard disk and install PC-BSD once 1.0 is released
I loved FreeBSD when I used it a few years ago, and no doubt would love PC-BSD, but I won’t install either again until that geometry bug gets fixed. It’s been a problem for years and years, and only exists on FreeBSD (not NetBSD or OpenBSD). Is it really impossible to fix?
For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, your hard disk’s geometry table easily gets messed up when you try to install FreeBSD on a drive with other OSs. If you devote the entire drive to FreeBSD, it’s a non-issue. But I’m not willing to run FreeBSD only – it’s got to co-exist with my other operating systems. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do that well.
Yes, I know that some people will come back with the comment that they have FreeBSD installed on their hard disk along with Windows and Linux, and it’s “no problem.” Unfortunately, it is a problem. Some Linux installers, for example, will detect the geometry problem and exit with an error message. The possibility of losing data also cannot be ignored.
I just wish the FreeBSD developers would deal with this. Then it really would be my favorite operating system.
until that geometry bug gets fixed. It’s been a problem for years and years, and only exists on FreeBSD (not NetBSD or OpenBSD). Is it really impossible to fix?
Oh! so it is a bug? I thought something was wrong with my partitioning. I tried installing FreeBSD on my machine containing windowsXP and Linux and it said the partition info was all screwed up and listed the partition tables all wrong.
I’ve setup win2k/freebsd dual-boot before with no issues… Maybe it’s only like that on specific hardware?
Yeah I know of the geometry bug that you speak of. Accedentally I happened to fix the error on mine. It was using Partition Magic on the windows installation to do some partitioning and it detected the error and ask if I wanted to correct it, I when ahead with it and was still able to boot into FreeBSD.
It’s good to know they already have BB available in their ports system </sarcasm>. Seriously, that demo is 1997-era. There oughtta be something better.
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=18342
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=13027
Ok, they would probably both suck up CPU like nobody’s business…
Anyway, in all seriousness I note that while their list of software available seems small, they’ve somehow got all the software I use normally- KDE, amaroK, OpenOffice 2, Firefox, Opera (trying to switch), Flash, Gaim, The Gimp, RAR, BASH, K3b, nVidia drivers…
Is there a LiveCD planned?
http://www.pbidir.com/
I’d love to give it a try, replace one of my less used Linux distros with it. Unfortunately, all those distros (save Debian, my main distro) are on extended partitions on a couple HDs. My hard drives are pretty well carved up already, and I just don’t feel like moving gigabytes of data around so I can create another primary partition.
I haven’t researched why that limitation (primary partition only) exists for BSD so I don’t know what sort of effort would be required for the devs to fix it, but that is the only thing keeping me from trying it, and I’d like to.
***edit: added “for the devs” so it didn’t look like I was planning to fix it myself. I’m sure it’s beyond me at this point
Edited 2006-01-22 06:24
I’m not quite sure how this could be done either, however I do know that every UFS2 freebsd-partition/freebsd-slice acts like an extended partition – it contains lots of FFS-partitions, so I gues they might not have implemented it because they didn’t need it.
Going to try this one out, but I hope they corrected the forced graphic issue. On the last RC, I could not set my own video modes. Changing the X config files had no effect on how the X server operated, which I found extremely strange. If I am smoking crack, someone tell me, but I have never seen that on any of the BSD’s or Linux prior, and only on PC-BSD. I’ll see what happens with this one, though am going to use an old monitor since the above issue fried the VGA input to a LCD panel.
I am telling you, this OS is the best thing I have ever seen after Windows and Mac OS X. No Linux distro is even close to PC-BSD! The installation of new programs is piece of cake, point and click! No dependency hell, it works, creates shortcuts for you just like in Windows. Hardware detection is awesome. The fonts are also greatly improved with the latest release RC2.
Especially if you get the Windows fonts and turn off anti-aliasing, the fonts look as good as in Windows literally. This does not happen in Linux UNLESS you start messing up with config files and start re-compiling free type config files.
Edited 2006-01-22 08:16
This does not happen in Linux UNLESS you start messing up with config files and start re-compiling free type config files.
Hmm… you don’t have to mess around with config files at all. Not in KDE, not in Gnome.
It’s a matter of clicking on a different radiobutton. That’s all there is to it.
Installing windows corefonts are a non issue as well.
Whether or not fonts look good without antialiasing is a personal preference. But true, without antialiasing it looks close to old school windows fonts (without antialiasing – at least for small fontsizes). Whether it’s good or bad must depend on the eye beholding it, as well as the monitor/graphics card combo used.
I have tried the trick on a few Linux distributions and it looks nothing like Windows. I had to modify freetype-2.1.9/include/freetype/config/ftoption.h by commenting line 439 and re-compile freetype2. However, in PC-BSD all I need to do is just turn off anti-aliasing and restart KDE and you get the same result, exact look as in Windows. Of course using fonts such as Tahoma, Arial, Verdana, Timew New Roman, the good old Windows fonts. These fonts are used by many web sites so the web sites display correctly.
Edited 2006-01-22 11:43
I know the fonts. Have them as well, including Tahoma which isn’t a part of the corefonts-package. But I just drag’n’drop the font from /mnt/c/windows/fonts to fonts:///
I wonder what linux distributions you used. It doesn’t sound like distributions I would touch of my own free will.
When you modify ftoption.h are you removing antialiasing or adding support for BCI (or both)? Fonts look like crap without antialiasing, no matter the platform, unless you’re using a low resolution. Fonts without antialiazing looks bad on Windows XP/2K3 and they look ugly too on Mac (deemed from screenshots) and GNU/Linux. I prefer the way from Windows 2000-way with antialiazing off for small font sizes and on for large font sizes.
You don’t have to make such modifications anymore with FreeType – not on *BSD, nor on linux. This is btw. for all platforms using a new version of FT2. In earlier days you had to make such modifications – true for all platforms. It’s FT2 specific and not system specific AFAICT.
I don’t like these type of initiatives using a *BSD base because at any instant the developers can close the system. The PC-BSD website has .com domain…
Edited 2006-01-22 13:03
i’ll be honest I didn’t know PCBSD had a .com domain, i always use the .org one http://www.pcbsd.org
We trust FreeBSD and we don’t think they’ll stop development because it is more than 10 years old, and it is a growing OS. Large companies use FreeBSD (Yahoo, Sony, Rackspace, etc…) and they finance FreeBSD.
PC-BSD has a .com extension because this is the web site of PC-BSD software (company, not a foundation). But the OS has a BSD license (free to redistribute, change and resell).
Thanks. I didn’t know about .org site.
I trust in FreeBSD project but I don’t trust in PC-BSD project. This project is new and I don’t see any constitution to guarantees that the project will remain open, like Gentoo, Ubuntu and Debian have.
Correct me if I am wrong, please.
If PC-BSD closed its development, I can nearly guarantee that someone will fork it from the last open sources for it and continue its open source development. It is a useful and promising project. Once source code is available in any form, it is impossible to take it back.
GPL products can close their sources as well, as long as they get approval from all copyright holders. I don’t honestly see what the difference is here.
Well, they still have to ship code to those who required the application while it was GPL’ed. But of course only the code which was GPL’ed at that time.
Besides that, it’s virtually impossible to get the approval of all copyright holders. And you don’t need approval from any one to close down BSD-licensed source.
But of course this is a non issue as long as reasonably new sources are still available.
Hmm… you don’t have to mess around with config files at all. Not in KDE, not in Gnome.
It’s a matter of clicking on a different radiobutton. That’s all there is to it.
When I used Linux, either it antialiased all fonts, or none of them. So, I created a large configuration file for the fonts in PC-BSD, and here’s how it looks like now
http://img29.imageshack.us/img29/9339/pcbsd2yh.png
Yes, Tahoma is part of the webcore fonts package in PC-BSD. It is nice to use Tahoma for toolbars, and buttons for instance.
I had the problem of fonts in just about every Linux distro I used (Gentoo, Debian, Kurumim, Mandriva and Ubuntu), and also on FreeBSD. Fonts are either aliased or anti-aliased, and the only tradeoff is excluding a size range from being anti-aliased
PC-BSD has Bytecode Interpreter on, fonts are aliased for most of them on this screenshot, and I this it looks good. What do you think? I think it looks nicer than if everything were antialiased and hardly readable. These are the same rules as those of Windows actually.
http://img29.imageshack.us/img29/9339/pcbsd2yh.png
PC-BSD has Bytecode Interpreter on, fonts are aliased for most of them on this screenshot, and I this it looks good. What do you think? I think it looks nicer than if everything were antialiased and hardly readable. These are the same rules as those of Windows actually.
I think it looks very good. That’s what I meant, I’ve got them like that too except that I use size 10 which is equvilient to size 8 in Windows. To give people an idea how it looks, change your font to Tahoma size 8 on Windows and have a look. It looks exactly the same.
Edited 2006-01-22 19:34
Yup, the old Windows 2000 look to some extent. Quite efficient. I still prefer antialiasing for larger font sizes, but in small font sizes it can become problematic.
This is easy to change though. Just exclude a certain range, which is what was done on older Windows versions.
With my 17″ monitor and a resolution of 1600*1200 antialiazing is better when scaling the fonts and widgets. But it all depends on monitor, resolution, your eyes, distance to monitor and etc.
With my 17″ monitor and a resolution of 1600*1200
Gosh… A 17″ monitor with a resolution of 1600×1200, that must be VERY VERY small. I have a 19″ monitor, and a resolution of 1600×1200 is already almost unreadable. I use 1200×1024.
Ohh nooo… that’s the crazy one
.. On a good old 17″CRT-monitor i stick to 4:3 resolutions.
1600*1200 is small. That’s why I’m using a slightly higher nominal DPI. This means text gets large enough to be easy readable, while being made out of a lot more pixels, thereby looking even better (except when I’m really tired – then everything is a blur) :p
EDIT: Fixed a typo in fouth line. “I” became “I’m”.
Edited 2006-01-23 14:12
It depends on your monitor – on my LCD, I achieved the best results using this howto:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/answers/Hardware/LCD_TFT_Monito…
When I was done with ~/.fonts.conf, I had to make it readable only, because KDE kept overwriting the settings. For LCD, I think these are the best settings.
It should be easy to provide various profiles in an easy to use config dialog. All you need is to change (or if it does not exist, create) a .fonts.conf file in the user’s home directory.
This is my file:
ftp://hatvani.unideb.hu/pub/personal/vegyes/fonts.conf (made with the help of the howto)
You can download the PC-BSD source code here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=136076
I wouldn’t worry about PC-BSD going closed anytime soon. The only reason I setup .com and PC-BSD Software is so we can sell support and services for businesses. The OS itself will always be available for free (and open source), but we can’t offer business phone support for nothing. This is a critical component to being taken seriously in the business world.
I believe 4front (the makers of commercial OSS) are making an alsa layer, so that you can use alsa apps with their drivers. They have the professional sound card drivers available as well, which I actually use. You can use them for free for 6 months at a time, then you just need to download and reinstall again (not too much to ask) or buy it for a reasonable price. I use them myself (the free version) for my maudio 1010lt card, it works beutifully. I was going to check out the latest ardour.
does anybody know how to install vmware tools with a linux host and pc-bsd guest? FreeBSD is supported, but i have not been successful in getting the vmware tools to install on pcbsd.
Well it still doesn’t work for me. Maybe if they allowed me to select my own video card driver at the set up screen I might be able to actually start the graphic installer – but after trying with every release so far right from the first anouncement on OS news, and despite making a formal request on the forum, they still haven’t got round to fixing it yet.
I mean how hard can it be? It’s either ATI or Nvidia, Nvidia or ATI – cover that and you will have covered at least 80% of the video cards that are out there.
Or how about including some of Xorgs own native set up tools, or even a basic text editor (like pico, or nano) that will allow the user to at least edit their configs so that they can write their own xorg.config files?
GJ
On *BSD you don’t find nano out of the box, but instead you have either ee (easy) or vi.
Kris and friends:
Any idea when PC-BSD might have 64-bit support, especially AMD?
IIRC, when the geometry warning appears, all you have to do is press ‘G’ and it will insert the right geometry.
I hope to have an x64 version available sometime after 1.0-Release is out. However, there are still technical difficulties to overcome with it. It appears that despite the hype, it is next to impossible to run 32 bit binaries on an x64 system. Only the simplest “c” programs will run, anything that uses several dynamic libs do not seem to work. This may change in the future, but for now it means that the x64 version will have to use special x64 PBI’s / binaries as well. I don’t want to start supporting a seperate version like that, until the 32 bit version is all finished