Submitted by PC-BSD 1.5 has been released. “System Updater tool: keeps system & PBIs up to date; sound detection program! Uses XML backend to identify and load modules; amd64 build of 1.5, including PBIs that are on our auto-build server; PBI icon preview library, now a PBI file shows the embedded icon on your desktop, not the generic ‘PBI’ format icon; Xorg 7.3; KDE 3.5.8; FreeBSD 6.3 Release.”
I got an email from Kris saying 1.6 will be out later in the summer, and that one will be based on FreeBSD 7. Personally, I hope they do not release until they can fully implement KDE 4.1 as the included desktop, so they can have a fully functional KDE4. I think Free 7 together with K4 will make PC one slammin release!
I thought PC-BSD 2.0 would be the first built on FreeBSD 7.
At the moment we’re considering an additional 1.x release (1.6) on a FreeBSD 7 base, yes.
PC-BSD 2.x will be based on FreeBSD 7 and KDE4. At the moment it’s looking like we won’t be ready for a KDE4 release in six months time, so 1.6 will come out to ensure people get to take advantage of the features FreeBSD 7 has to offer.
2.x will come when we believe KDE4 gives our users an advantage over KDE3 (which includes completion of the FreeBSD KDE4 port), and when we’ve finished porting our own toolset to Qt4, and kdelibs4 (something which is bound to introduce new bugs, so may take a little while).
I think PC-BSD 1.5 has the stability and features that PC-BSD 1.0 should have had.
I’ll have a look at it soon. In regards of proper internationalization, PC-BSD has had many chances to improve. ๐
What I like most: The announced NEW sound detection program! Uses XML backend to identify and load modules, and of course Xorg 7.3.
PC-BSD is great for “BSD illiterate” users who want a preconfigured system built upon KDE, along with the easy PBIs. It’s an excellent point to start when you don’t have the time to taylor a FreeBSD based system by yourself, and when you’re comfortable with the “mainstream software” that’s already included. Along with PC-BSD’s stuff, you can follow most of the “old fashioned ways” of doing things on BSD OSes.
Great work, PC-BSD team!
Yeah, what is this “sound detection program”? Is it a program that detects and sets up your sound board? I thought PC-BSD already supported sound.
Yes, it did. As far as I know, it included a “meta-driver” for sound in the kernel, i. e. all drivers had been included and the proper driver was loaded at boot time. I can imagine they changed this: Now, the proper module is going to be loaded, but as I said before, I didn’t take a look at it, but I’ll do this soon.
A common way to enable your sound card would be
# kldload /boot/kernel/snd_*
which would load all drivers, leaving the system working with the correct driver.
You could do
# pciconf -lv | less
to determine your sound card and load the proper driver by name, e. g.
# kldload /boot/kernel/snd_cmi.ko
and you have enabled your sound card:
# cat /dev/sndstat
FreeBSD Audio Driver (newpcm)
Installed devices:
pcm0: <CMedia CMI8738> at io 0xd400 irq 16 (1p/1r/0v channels duplex default)
Just for completenedd, I have do admit that I’m a “do it yourself FreeBSD guy” and I don’t use PC-BSD on a daily basis. But as far as I remember – yes, you’re right: PC-BSD supported sound already. So I’m interested in which benefits this new tool may bring (smaller kernel image?).
Edited 2008-03-12 22:57 UTC
Richtig. I also like to select myself the proper sound driver in FreeBSD. I assume PC-BSD loaded all possible sound drivers into RAM and then used only the one fitting the sound board. But now it loads only the one needed into RAM, freeing up some memory. This is great
Yeah about 100KB for all of the drivers ๐
100% accurate
On FreeBSD 6/7, you only need to use “kldload snd_driver” and it will load all the sound drivers, in the correct order, and select the one that best matches your kernel. “snd_driver” is a meta-driver that just depends on all the sound drivers.
Edited 2008-03-14 05:33 UTC
That’s correct. Additionally, if you want to compile a custom kernel, you could integrate just the sound driver that fits your sound card (e. g. snd_cmi) or do something similar using the modules. I think the GENERIC kernel includes snd_driver for maximum compatibility and support reasons, so every soundcard that is supported should work fine without any additional driver.
For the first time it is a real alternative to Linux.
I was offered to configure my screen resolution and the Nvidia driver. Sound started without my intervention, like the most mature Linux distros, Finally there is a pppoe module which works first attempt (it is a bit hidden).
The Flash issue has been solved with a brilliant solution: you are offered to download Firefox for Windows + Flash, running under Wine. Java and Thunderbird are also available.
All in all, congratulations to the team!
Hi,
Did anyone try the 64 bit version of it? Any advices? Thx
I don’t get how come PC-BSD doesn’t have a LiveCD to actually try the thing out .. or at least I fail to find it :S
DesktopBSD does have a LiveCD (and a LiveDVD for that matter) and it’s great to go carrying it around to show your friends and what not how friendly a BSD can be, how good it can do to replace their actual desktop (we are talking fully desktop oriented BSDs in this case after all) and what a good way to introduce themselves into the BSD world without going full steam with Open, Free, Dragonfly …
my 2 cents I guess …
the reason is because you didn’t take the time to make one
Still waiting for FreeSBIE 3.0 !!!!! (yeah, I didn’t take the time to make it, either…)
You could use Frenzy or FreeSBIE, in the end it’s all FreeBSD ๐
Reading the Frenzy update, it cannot be a replacement for anything on the desktop – it seems they want to remove that functionality.
It must be getting really popular, the servers are bogged down at the minute.
I wanted to download a copy before work, but it looks like I will have to wait.
Good work.
Now only if there was a good virtualization solution like KVM or Virtualbox. QEMU+KQEMU is good but is not fast enough.
How is wine? How is the development going there?
It doesn’t work if you want to virtualize other OSs on FreeBSD, but if you are just trying to separate out your mail server from your web server and plan to use FreeBSD for both, I actually like using jails a lot better than virtualization. Jails accomplish pretty much the same thing and run a lot faster.
My requirement for Virtualization is that I have to run Windows. I used to use a FreeBSD system for all of my lab work, but when I have to frequently get access to windows to do other stuff – like corp email and LiveMeeting. I use Linux now with KVM to run Windows for it now and would love to get back to FreeBSD. I have tried QEMU+KQEMU but it is far too slow. I would even buy a commercial product for FreeBSD if there was one but everything is for Linux.
You might want to consider Win4BSD (www.win4bsd.com).
They even provide a PC-BSD PBI package!
Virtualization is certainly one of the hurdless that PC-BSD and FreeBSD need to overcome to better compete in the desktop market.
In a, soon to be, quadcore world it is very likely mor e and more people will use virtualization.
Edited 2008-03-13 23:28 UTC
It looks good, but switching to root isn’t like in Linux is it? I remeber seeing something about going to root that I didn’t like. Oh ya it is Root cannot be directly logged onto by default, but you can use “su -” in konsole.
Root cannot be logged into via X11 by default on PC-BSD, no.
Running all of your applications as root is simply bad security practice (for reasons that are heavily documented on the web). More importantly perhaps, by not running as root you’re protecting yourself from bugged applications which may accidentally alter your filesystem in an unforeseen way.
I’m fully aware of the argument about having to enter your root password all the time being annoying. But once you’ve done your basic device configuration, it’s a very rare occasion indeed that you’ll need to be root to do anything.
You are of course free to change this configuration yourself if you disagree with it, and it’s trivial to do so. Information on how to make this change can be easily found on the PC-BSD forum.
Thgis is well intended.
You can, of course, bypass this means of system (and individual) security by setting automatic login for root plus X startup. It is not advised to run X as root, or run “ordinary stuff” as root.
You can, without any problem, login as root at the text mode console and run startx with your desired settings (see .xinitrc), or use “su -” from Konsole within X.
Final note: You can use the sudo command (pkg_add -r sudo if needed) to prefix your commands that you wish to run as root. But please note that there are very very few settings where something needs to be done as root – usually system setup procedures and maintenance require these privileges, and, maybe, excessive network monitoring. ๐
And I may repeat: It is intended this way. Bypassing means of security to increase individual feelings of comfortability is not the default way of doing things in BSD world.
“Switching to root” is the same on pretty much every Unix-like system: su –
On BSD systems, you have to be in the “wheel” group to run su. On most Linux systems, anyone can run su.
On FreeBSD systems, root uses the tcsh. On Linux systems, everyone uses bash (poor buggers). *DO NOT* change root’s shell. If you must use something other than tcsh, enable the toor account and set whatever shell you want there. If you find yourself logged in to root so often you need to change the shell, though, you really need to think about how you are using the computer.
On FreeBSD systems, you can’t login as root via ssh. On some Linux systems you can (poor buggers).
On any Unix-like system, you should *NEVER*, under any circumstances, run X as root. Period. No exceptions. If you are doing this, you need to stop.
Run X as a normal user. Do everything as a normal user. Use “sudo” or “su” sparingly to do those few things that need to be done as root. But get out of the habit of logging in and working as root all the time.
Root cannot be directly logged onto by default, but you can use “su -” in konsole.
If somebody is interested, I’d like to share my first impressions of PC-BSD 1.5, which I have installed on a testing machine (AMD Athlon 1200 MHz, 256 MB RAM, S3 GPU, VIA chipcrap, erm, chipset).
Attention, complaining starts in … three … two … one … zero. =^_^=
The installation process was easy and didn’t require much interaction. After first selecting “german” as language, everything went german. While installing, no overall process indicator was shown, just one for the package actually being installed, combined with an output of the processed file names. A progress bar for the entire installation set would have been good. There’s enough space for it, which is instead covered by “PC-BSD advertising”. At least, the advertising messages are in german, too, but sadly with mistakes.
For those who don’t already know: I’m very picky about correct german translation and punctuation. KDE has never been good enough for me in these regards, so I always decided to use english as the native language of all the programs instead a sloppy translation.
Examples: “Entwickler-Freundliche Plattform” should be “entwicklerfreundliche Plattform” (concatenated adjective involving a noun). “Geniessen Sie Ihre Musik.” shoud be “Genieรลธen” (ss that cannot be devided are set to ligature รลธ). Furthermore, many commata were missing.
But don’t mind. Except me, nobody in Germany will notice this. ๐
The progress status “setting up kernel” has not been translated. Hey, this confuses Germans! ๐
After installation succeeded, system and KDE startup were working without problems, sound worked out of the box. Regarding the GPU, I was requested to confirm the autodetection, wich worked, too (“savage” driver). If you selected a wrong driver, the respective error message was in english, too, not in german, as it should be.
Additional installation of “freaky software” via pkg_add worked. Neccessary essentially: pkg_add -r mc.
Allthough my test setting is not a very fast system, KDE is usable and responsive, allthough you have to wait for the applications to start, but this doesn’t block your system. Music CDs are identified correctly (CDDB) and played via Amarok, but it takes you three clicks though the Settings and another doubleclick to start CD playback. MP3 and OGG playback are realized via Amarok, works, but I’d prefer a much more simple solution like xmms where you find your playing controls at the first sight. AVI and MPEG videos are played via Kaffeine without problems, allthough fullscreen and motion control are not as easy and obvious as in MPlayer, which one plays WMV by default. I’m glad KMplayer is in german now. Good improvement!
And suddenly an error, frightening the average german user: “aRts: sound server fatal error, cpu overloaded, aborting” – hey, what’s this?! First, why is it not in german, and furthermore, CPU overload? Hmm…
Then I played with varous digital cameras. No one of them (Canon S3, Logitech webcam, AEG Snap, HP Photosmart, Kodak Easyshare) did do anything. Note: All of them usually work on FreeBSD.
And more confusing stuff: KWord and Krita are still in english. The same for Opera (my favourite browser). Printing works without problems (HP Laserjet 4000-D), locally and via LAN.
I’ve used a three button standard USB mouse. The middle mouse button did work as a paste button when clicked, but it didn’t emulare the mouse wheel when pressed and moved vertically.
The csh lacks nice preconfiguration, such as
set promptchars = “%#”
set prompt = “%n@%m:%~%# ”
set autolist
that could be integrated into /etc/csh.cshrc.
Then I portscanned the running system: Open ports were 137/udp (netbios-ns), 138/udp (netbios-dgm), 139/tcp (netbios-ssn) and 445/tcp (microsoft-ds). This looks to me as the system would serve as a Samba server? (I don’t know exacly what these ports could be needed for and why they are open by default, maybe it has something to do with MICROS~1 networking, it keeps sending “local master announcement” datagrams to *.255.) Networking stuff like DHCP and NTP did work excellent. Another change I noticed: The system does not send 228 bye IP packets to 0.0.0.0 anymore like PC-BSD 1.3 (or 1.4?) did.
Finally, I didn’t find a way to get rid of this ugly white mouse pointer. (I need to add that I’m not a daily KDE user, so it maybe that it’s simple, I just don’t find the corresponding setting.) And the default desktop looks to me like a mix of “XP”‘s colours and “Vista”‘s control elements… ๐
And don’t take my complaining to seriously. ๐ PC-BSD 1.5 is a promising release which offers a BSD based system with an acceptable preconfiguration and preinstallation, fitting the needs of the average home user. I’m inpressed, and I will surely give the CDs to others.
Ok, I downloaded it and installed it, very nice.
However, it installed its own boot loader without prompting and I have lost the ability to dual boot.
Any hints and tips would be most appreciated as the pc-bsd site is down again.
raver31, at the screen where you selected the disk and slice there was a small box with a check mark for installing the FreeBSD loader or not. If that box is unchecked the bootloader will not be installed. Then it is just a matter of using a bootloader from Windows or Linux to tell it how to find PC-BSD. I use GAG 4.9 which works very well will loading Windows, Linux, Unix and many other OSes. There are many ways to skin that cat.
Good Luck on your next try
Thank you…
GAG 4.9 is excellent.
Just because I want direct root access through the GUI doesn’t mean I don’t know what I am doing. I have been a Linux (SuSE 8-OpenSuSE 10). This is the prob. with lots of stuff, companies do things like this to protect their customers from dumb mistakes. In SuSE-OpenSuSE I never had to do a su at CLI to get to root.
Edited 2008-03-14 16:42 UTC
It’s about *security* not dumb users.