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PC-BSD 0.5a Beta: BSD For Dummies
linuxbeta writes "PC-BSD 0.5a beta has now been released! You can download the 670Mb ISO file from our download page. This version fixes some minor bugs, and now has fully automatic network support. Screenshots available." So what's it all about? From the PC-BSD FAQ: "This OS has as its goals to be user-friendly, especially in the area of software installation and management, something that many of the *nix based distros have not yet mastered."
I have been using BSDs for a while now. They really aren't all that bad to use in the first place. They simply have a steep learning curve if you've never used them before.
Personally I don't think a "User Friendly" flavor of BSD is needed. What is needed is trained admins.
BSD is not meant at all for average joe; and selling it as such is misrepresenting the collective BSD OS. BSDs are powerful, stable, secure server and workstation OSes. NetBSD also runs good on your toaster.
FreeBSD: The Power to Serve!
It would appear that this is the first BSD with a fully-graphical installer. Kudos! When will we see this installer backported and available as an option during the CD-build process? :)
What's the point? To me and many others *BSD is about 1) a different license and 2) a different philosophy of development - that is, centralised development of an entire operating system, not just a kernel. Of course, this has never really been true as X11 has always been a seperate project to all *BSD machines, so the "whole OS" concept really doesn't fly - but at least the licenses were similar. Then you go plop KDE into the mix.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Well, where's the torrent? It seems like that should be part of any article involving new *nix releases.
I haven't tried BSD before, and this sounds like a good first timer's distro.
"PC-BSD 0.5a Beta"
It just rolls off the tongue. Even my grandma could remember that!
This sounds interesting, a dummy that runs *BSD. I guess it is rather appropriate, given that a dummy is still and lifeless. I'm surprised it took someone this long to think of it.
Next up: Windows for Japanese commuter trains, MacOS for Spongebob Squarepants, and PalmOS for the San Fernando Valley.
The philosophy is interesting. It's also the first instance of something that sounds cheesey but I'd love to tack on to XP when I tortured with that: The Eye Candy Meter
But, the question is what's it for? The key thing seems to be a great sense of integration, etc. But, as far as I can tell, most of the things that someone who wants a *nix with a gui are not there. I may have missed some included alternatives, but you'll do without:
Ouch! I suspect you won't be using this to do office, web or database work for now. Complete package list/release notes here
the clock on the wall says 4 til 7
What's the point of showing off PC-BSD by using screenshots of KDE? They could have been taken right off of KDE's page. I can understand screenshots of the graphical installer, as this is PC-BSD specific, but if I'm not mistaking, KDE looks like KDE on virtually any platform.
I write code.
While it could be useful if successful and reintegrated into FreeBSD, but all of their code is under the GPL. I doubt any of the BSD projects would touch any of their work.
under a somewhat ugly (GPL'ed) QT wizard. The text is the same, the steps are the same... not much to see here.
Let's see that package manager they're going to come up with and maybe then we can get impressed.
I seem to be having trouble installing the BSD bootloader to load BSD on the second drive (IDE 1 is Windows, SATA (IDE2) is BSD), I just can't seem to get it to install on the first Drive, I select it and it goes to Disklabeler on the wrong disc. :D
Anyway, I hope they release a AMD64 version, that'd be great
"Sweet llamas of the Bahamas !"
Why is this being launched as "PC-BSD"? This is just the standard FreeBSD installer redone (word for word) with a GUI interface. And by standard this I mean straight out of the box, without any tweaks. KDE doesn't even have font smoothing turned on!
Let's not pretend that "PC-BSD" is something new or exciting. It doesn't fill a new niche (Free / Open / Net) or take the OS in a new direction (Dragonfly). As it stands, other than the GUI installer this is strictly "Look mom, I made me a distro!" However, if done as part of the FreeBSD effort this could be valuable.
I'm sure the FreeBSD team would welcome these folks' effort at building a GUI installer (not that the text one is difficult to use...it is very straightforward), and instructions on contributing to FreeBSD are available at www.freebsd.org.
GNU/Linux for Cubans and pot smokers.
--
Requiem for the FUD
I use Mandriva LInux 2005 (it got faster than past Mandrakes). I know BSD is a better system than Linux. It's development is more centralized, better tested, more secure. However, I installed FreeBSD and I got the X server running. I had to do EVERYTHING that Mandrake does for me. I had to load my sound card by editing loader.conf. I had to load my windows partitions by editing the fstab file. I had to tinker around with the Xorg.conf file to get my NVIDIA driver to run. And then, to top it off, my XMMS was crackling and popping with every MP3 (running on OSS driver), and I couldn't figure out the damned Ports system. Too much editing, supfiles, etc. etc. etc.
Compare all that hassle, with one time installation of mandrake, going into their GUI application, EASY URPMI my sources, updating my distro to latest packages, and installing selected packages. BIG DIFFERENCE.
I believe in the BSD coherent philosophy as opposed to Linux' anarchism. But...customizing the PC shouldn't be a hell. Somethings SHOULD be automated...customize your window manager and its themes. customize the speed or kernel...but don't make people have to work for simply recognizing a windows partitition! OR having to add people's names to the "group file" so that you can SU from their account! These are the things that the BSDs have ignored, which turn off many potential BSDers, and which make it hard for us open-source advocates to spread the Gospel to other savvy Windows users who can turn to open-source.
I customized my BSD and got EVERYTHING running. I had problems with the Ports System and keeping my entire system up to date. Those are the things that the BSD groups need to prioritize to make the system more accessible. And doing so doesn't mean we have to lose out on the stability, highly secure basis of the OS.
If PC-BSD can focus on that, and keep the FreeBSD qualities, I'll switch from Mandriva to it any day. If PC-BSD can do what VidaLinux' GUI emerge functions did for Gentoo Linux (meaning, make the whole updating from source easy), then you got yourself the perfect OS. Easy to use, secure, easy to update, and stable.
BSDs are the most advanced OSes in the world...but they are lacking in installation, management, and upgrading. It's not easy...and I've used 8 different Linux Distros (Mandrake, Suse, Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, VidaLinux, Yoper Linux, Vector Linux), and attempted FreeBSD 3 times (the third was the charm).
Firstly, not one BSD distro I've ever put to a machine has worked with the ethernet and dhcp right off the bat. Much fiddling and farking was required and accompanied by much cursing of my fellow geeks for still resisting ease of use as if making too much sense, such as it should work the first time as advertised, was an affront against nature.
Secondly, whereas BSD makes itself as hard to use as possible seemingly on purpose (BSDM lifestyle and all), Linux does it through inane obfuscation and willful ignorance of Occam's Razor.
Need the entirety of the Unix would be so oblivious as to why Windows is where it is and Unix isn't?
There's probably new ground in the area of irony being charted by the fact that it took Steve Jobs and Apple to do something easy to use and pleasing to use with BSD in the form of OSX, not the Open Source community, not closed source Unix community, but Steve "I am you Macintosh Overlord" Jobs.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
I have a little network card that isnt supported in other BSDs. So I'll fork the entire BSD OS, and put my card's driver into it.
Maybe Linus should fork the kernel, to have a special kernel just to run his new bitkeeper replacement.
A brand new OS sounds great, both for a kid developer, and for a major country like China. But really what they do is copy over most of the (free) code and rebrand it, adding their few improvements. Ideally people would release their packages as projects under sourceforge or something, but everyone likes to sound big. China would love to say they have an OS rather than creating locales for their language; and a kid in a garage would love to say he's programmed up an OS. Puts him in the same league as Linus, Tannenbaum and K&R, even though those guys didnt program up their whole OSes.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
http://blackbox02.cs.washington.edu:11223/PCBSD-0. 5a-x86.iso.torrent
http://blackbox02.cs.washington.edu:11223/PCBSD-0. 5a-x86.iso.torrent
Firstly, not one BSD distro I've ever put to a machine has worked with the ethernet and dhcp right off the bat.
Unless you're using a proprietary wifi card, getting your network setup under FreeBSD is nearly effortless. I don't know what you're doing wrong, but doing it wrong you certainly are.
There are certainly areas where FreeBSD is unsuited to the casual newbie exploring his alternatives, but setting up a network is not one of them. Unless of course you have a proprietary Windows-only uncontaminated-by-specifications wifi card...
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
FreeBSD:
rc.conf - ifconfig_if0="DHCP"
NetBSD:
ifconfig.if0 - !dhclient $int
Not much fiddling and farking required, and it shouldn't be accompanied by much cursing of you and your companions for still resisting the reading of the manual as if learning how to operate your system was an affront to nature. Market cornering is hardly a related to this argument. That's how Windows got where it is. IF ease of use == market share, then Windows certainly wouldn't be the king right now, MacOS would. Microsoft scored lucrative deals with vendors to include exclusively their products on cheap hardware in the days of DOS (which was hardly user-friendly - want to run an app? change your emm config first amigo! Memory doesn't allocate itself you know!)
In seriousness, I'd like to counter your argument by saying that quickly hacking on a config file is much easier to do (and more independent of interactivity) than munging through a GUI tool hoping to find the right menu with the right option for what you want (if it's even available). Configuration is a one-step process of opening a text file and explicitly stating what configuration options the user wants. This is easy.
I have a hunch that by ease of use, you are actually referring to obviousness of use. While editing a text file really is not hard to do, it isn't necessarily obvious to the novice user. Personally, I think that users who want obvious should stick to something simple like Windows. It fits their purpose, which is probably surfing the web and writing emails to grandma. But for more serious users that want a serious system, there is BSD.
I am not opposed, however, to providing simple tools for simple users. I just do not want to sacrifice the power of the system to them.
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
You aren't the target market.
People complaining about server installs and power user installs shouldn't use this: they are not the target market, and they should quit complaining and simply not use it: no loss.
Complaining about the desktop choice is another self-defeating proposition: he had to pick *something*, and it had to be one thing to start with, not "pick one of 1000". It also has the benefit of giving a platform target ABI to developers who want to do desktop applications: one of the biggest reasons UNIX systems don't end up with a lot of applications is lack of a uniform target ABI. Even if the API was the same across multiple look-and-feel values, it's not enough to attract developers: requiring a recompilation means doubling their support and testing burdens, as well as their SKU count (if they don't ship all versions on the same CD/DVD).
One of the best things MacOS X did, from this perspective, is *not* open up the GUI code, so that people have a hard time making a zillion incompatible versions and shipping them around, fragmenting the market. I hope he does not cave in to pressure to "pull a RedHat" with a "KDE or Gnome" option.
For the average user, it's a step in the right direction, and one that all of the BSD's, save MacOS X, have been too snobby to take on their own (or too caught up in the myth of the server being the only market space that's a valid target for a BSD based OS).
There are a couple of things that could be changed to make it better, but it's miles above the fear-inspiring raw text prompt and ASCII graphics of the normal FreeBSD installer.
Instead of a hierarchical relationship between things you have to fill out, as in sysinstall, where it's an exercise for the student to traverse the installation/configuration tree, it's a simple linear progression.
Instead of dropping you to a raw login prompt, it drops you to a KDE login.
All in all, it removes much of the "fear barrier" that keeps people from even considering installing a BSD operating system on their machine in the first place.
I dislike the use of the GPL, but given that it's written against a GPL'ed toolkit, it's excusable in the face of what it provides.
Here's what else I think it needs to really polish it off:
o Graphical partition editor
It currently assumes you have a free partition lying around, and it doesn't really permit editing it. I know this is a very hard nut to crack, and that Partition Magic has an entire product dedicated to the task (AFAIK, it's the only product that can safely resize NTFS partitions); I'm not sure how doable this is, but it's near the top of the list.
NB: The only reasonably way I have ever come up with to deal with this, short of contracting the work out the the P.M. people, is a Window NT install program that allocated a chunk of disk space *inside* the NTFS, and then a booter program that is an icon on the NT desktop, and let FreeBSD use the existing allocated NTFS file as a fielsystem, after hacking the block driver to make it appear virtually contiguous. I expect that this will be the last thing on my list implemented, if ever.
o Creation of an "admin" account, rather than root
This would just be the initial user's account, with rights to "sudo"; they could name it anything they wanted to name it. The root account would be disabled by default; you could always enable it via "sudo passwd" later, if you wanted to be able to login as root instead of the user.
o Automatic walk-through for the configuration
If you have an initial account other than the root account, you can walk the user immediately through the account-specific configuration. This would be a smoother transition, rather than stopping, requiring a login, and then continuing.
o Automatic login as the admin user
I realize that this may seem much less anal than a typical UNIX appraoch to things, but it's possible to do this relatively safely, simpy by enabling a screen saver
Where would you like to install BSD?
Uh.. a bit everywhere. A good guess is, wherever there happens to be Linux.
What type of mouse do you use?
I kinda like this one. (this is not BSD-specific).
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Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.
First off, a disclaimer:
/. The rest of the Mac world is different.
All the Linux/OSX/Windows users will pull the "stodgy bsd user/you just want to seem l337" card. FWIW i've used fbsd for 1 year, linux for 7, windows for 3 and OSX for 2, and my opinion has been the same forever.
Just as someone noted early on, we need to make smarter users, not dumber computers. "Dumbing down" an OS, program or anything doesn't really make it more simple. It's just a facade over the real complexity underneath.
What's more, the user outgrows this crutch quickly, and then all the "simplification" stuff gets in their way from there on out.
Secondly, we don't need to introduce non-geeky people to geek-oriented OSes. They won't really get anything out of it, no differently than geeky people won't get anything out of a "user-friendly" os such as MacOS9 or Windows95.
Yeah, i know that there is OSX, which is claiming to "bridge the gap", but 99% of Mac users are actually using Aqua and all it's iStuff, not puttering around the underlying *BSD bits. Some folks here will pipe up and say they spend loads of time in the guts, sure, but this is the BSD section on
Thirdly, if something great comes of this, well... great. More power to them. But watch for the OSX zealots* to cry foul and say "It's just another PC-Folks ripping of the Mac-Folks thing" and "Copycat OSX/BSD for the PC!" and stuff.
Fourthly, though i will say that BSD is a much better foundation that Linux (for a lot of reasons) to base an OS on, I don't expect it to reach wide popularity, no differently than some of the more "user friendly" Linux distros (Lycoris, Lindows, et al).
* by "zealots", i mean the loud, vocal segment of Mac users that Just Don't Get It(tm), not ALL Mac users.
do() || do_not();
I'm surprised that this has been your experience, troll. I've found that dhcp and ethernet typically work without any manual configuration. The only time I've had to do any manual changes was when I added a second network card. It didn't automatically add it for me, and I had to load the module myself.
There are a lot of benefits to FreeBSD and other BSDs, but ease of setting up isn't one of them. But the only hardware I really have had trouble with was sound cards and ACPI. Video cards were about the same to set up as Linux (it's all about X, not BSD or Linux). This new BSD may eventually turn into something that's easy to configure, which would bring the benefits of BSD to some who find it too difficult to setup.
-Dan
I had never used a BSD before OSX came around. It really isn't that bad to use in the first place, and has a fairly shallow learning curve if you've ever used a computer before.
Personally, I don't think that a "User Friendly" flavor of BSD is needed by trained admins. What is needed is one that can be used without them.
The current BSDs are not meant at all for the average joe. BSDs are powerful, stable and secure server and workstation OSes. Why not make it as easy to install and use as bread into the toaster?
or, on netbsd:
/etc/rc.d/dhclient start
dhclient=YES
dhclient_flags="fxp0"
(or leave this one out to config all available interfaces".
So, if I get this straight, this is just FreeBSD with a graphical installer that also installs some GUI apps when it's done to save you time? Good, good. Let's turn *BSD into Linux; let's create a million pretty much identical BSDs.
I'm not trying to insult its developers or goals or anything. It's just that, as pointed out in earlier comments, each BSD should have its own, distinct, goals (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD). PC-BSD doesn't fit in.
... facts are facts. ;)
FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."
NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)
OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.
*BSD in general:
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
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Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.
Well, they got *something* right: *BSD *IS* for dummies!
Here's my review of it from way back when if you need more info on it.
Enjoy!
I think you're comparing oranges to apples.
Kinda like saying "You know those semi trucks? Why the hell do they have 18 gears?! You DO realize that that is why the consumer will never want to drive one, right? I mean, who can operate a triple shifter system?!"
Windows is where it is because it works well for the desktop. UNIX is where it is because its an incredibly stable, reliable server. The only people who use windows for their servers are Microsoft, or Windows-users-turned-admin.
That said, I agree. Everyone should in the unix-like crowd need to stop bickering, and set down some standardized interfaces/options/etc. It really really sucks to move from GNU to BSD tools or vice versa because NOTHING IS THE SAME. Its all totally different arguments/options/output.