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PCBSD - I'm fairly impressed

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toadlife:
So I have this old Athlon 1GZ box with 384 RAM and a 40Gb hard drive that's been sitting at my mom's house for ages. The power supply died on it about a year ago, and she used a laptop from work, so she didn't care about getting it fixed. I recently bought  a new case, so I had an extra PS and offered to put it in her PC.

Just for kicks, I installed PCBSD 1.0-rc1 on the machine to see how far it has progressed. It's pretty good - though there are a few things I would change. The installer was all graphical and everything installed with minimal input. It's based on FreeBSD 6.0 and starts up with a graphical login to KDE 3.4.3. You install software on it at PCBSD.ORG via a custom package system where you download a package file, double click on it, and you're done. It also has an auto-update systems that download and install both OS and package updates.

A couple of stupid issues so far...

* K3B requires root password to run. It can and should be made to run as non-root by default. Damn the security issues!
* The default regular user is allowed to su to root, but any users you create afterward with their built in user manager can't. The built in user manager does not give you an option to change this.
* The setup program set up my monitor with a max resolution of 1024x768. It's a 19" screen, and can go to 1600x1200. I would have to edit my Xorg config manually to change this.


All of these issues, *I* know how to fix, but the average Joe trying out a non windows OS for the first time would be out of luck.

You guys should give it a whirl.

There is also another Desktop FreeBSD disro called desktopBSD which I might try too.


http://pcbsd.org
http://desktopbsd.net

Aloone_Jonez:
How does it compare with some of nube Linux distro's as far as ease of use and power?

I hope that the BSD community will decide on a standard package format if binary disrtibution is going to become the norm - they don't want to end up in the same mess as Linux.

toadlife:

--- Quote from: Aloone_Jonez ---How does it compare with some of nube Linux distro's as far as ease of use and power?

I hope that the BSD community will decide on a standard package format if binary disrtibution is going to become the norm - they don't want to end up in the same mess as Linux.
--- End quote ---

I wouldn't know - I havn't used linux in a couple of years. It's ten times easier than FreeBSD though!

Judging by what I've read about the n00bish linux distros today, I would guess that it doesn't even compare, the reason being that this is a fairly new phenomenon (The drive to make an easy Desktop BSD) and there has not yet a been large body of work put into making BSD easy. The little problems I ran into seem like they would be fairly easy to fix though.

It's a very good start though, and if they get some more developers that can invest some time in the custom KDE apps (like the PCBSD admin/update tools), I think it could be really great.

ReggieMicheals:
I gotta to agree with you...

WMD:
I'm gonna try this in VMware.  I'll get back to you with the results later.

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