Slashdot Mirror
DesktopBSD 1.0 Final Released
Don Church writes "DesktopBSD is reporting that the 1.0 Final of DesktopBSD was released today for both 32-bit and 64-bit x86 architectures. This cutting edge FreeBSD derivative now includes KDE 3.5.1 and a host of tools designed to make the BSD experience more palatable to novices. The DVD release even includes Amarok, Firefox and other popular software ready to go. They are offering downloads via several mirrors or the official torrent."
heh... I guess this flavour of BSD can't quite take a slashdotting... ;)
RC3 screenshots
Torrent here: http://linuxtracker.org/download.php?id=1734&name= DesktopBSD-1.0-x86-DVD.iso.torrent
The sort of people who don't know the difference between Pentium and Intel probably aren't going to be installing this anyway, made for novices or not.
You're comparing apples to oranges. FreeBSD is a single, cohesive operating system. DesktopBSD is a single, cohesive operating system. They are two distinctly different operating systems.
/usr/ports/UPGRADING before I use portupgrade.
That would be like saying, "I installed Debian stable on my computer and I found that all of the software was out of date. Therefore Genoo must be out of date as well." We both know that's not accurate.
Having not installed DesktopBSD before, maybe they have some new tools for ports for "everyday" users. I have never had problems with ports on my FreeBSD servers, btw - but I also read
I don't know about you but all this stuff about HT Technology and stuff is very confusing. Do I have that?
This just proves that Vista is unready for the desktop. I guess that's why they cancelled it. Har har! Har har. Har, har. *sigh*
Seriously, what exactly is DesktopBSD's website supposed to say? The thing you quote seems reasonable to me, anyone who doesn't understand it is unlikely to find any way of wording it useful anyway, unless it was worded in such a way that'd make it useless to an actual computer professional.
It's not like they'll be installing it. They'll be asking us to do it, as usual.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Mirrordot cache: http://mirrordot.org/stories/e7cd62fa4b24ca2788721 1c05d686136/index.html
? id=43&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=15&tx_ttnews%5BbackPi d%5D=55&cHash=cddb1e432f
And Coral Cache:
http://www.desktopbsd.net.nyud.net:8080/index.php
When will slashcode be modified to automatically use the cached pages? Harumph! </SARCASM>
Muwahahaha
Having not installed DesktopBSD before, maybe they have some new tools for ports for "everyday" users. I have never had problems with ports on my FreeBSD servers, btw - but I also read /usr/ports/UPGRADING before I use portupgrade.
:-)
I've never had any problems with ports on my FreeBSD server, either. The problems I had were all desktop-related, e.g., the latest version of some Gnome library is required in order to run app A, but breaks app B. These are the kinds of rough edges that you don't see as a Linux user, because the developers themselves are all running Linux, and if something breaks, they know right away. Also, I think the level of testing and effort that goes into packaging desktop software on, say Ubuntu and Debian, is an order of magnitude greater than the effort that goes into the same stuff for FreeBSD -- simply because the size of the Linux desktop community is an order of magnitude greater. Of course I'd love to be proved wrong about DesktopBSD, and I admit to not even having RTFA, since it's slashdotted
Find free books.
This is just a baseless troll, without any real information.
WTF? I can't remember the last time I saw FreeBSD ports break. Not even a SINGLE package. They ALL compile and install perfectly every time. Hell, I've UPGRADED my system from FreeBSD version to version, never bothered uninstalling the old ports, and everything continues to work fine. I've never seen ANY other OS handle upgrades remotely as gracefully.
Besides, even if you did have a problem with compiling from ports (which I have a very hard time believing), why didn't you just install from the binary packages, instead?
I can't believe this is anything other than another anti-BSD troll.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
FreeBSD could still beat Linux to the desktop just because it's standardised on what comes with it, and you could release packages for it a lot more easily. What's lacking is hardware support (which is even more miserable than linux), and desktop performance. If they worked on desktop performance, I think they could easily get drivers by porting them from Linux. I wouldn't mind running FreeBSD on my laptop if only they'd get the performance right. I have actually dual booted FreeBSD and Linux on the same box, both running the same version of KDE, and FreeBSD is just dog slow compared to Linux, which isn't that fast to begin with. Sure KDE can be a hog, but it's either more of a hog on FreeBSD or FreeBSD just doesn't pay attention to a desktop user's needs.
Are you Faulkner's Mother?
Auron may be different, Cally, but on Earth it is considered ill-mannered to kill your friends while committing suicide.
I wonder how this differs from PC-BSD.
They managed to ship earlier despite a later start. I'm not sure if that's good or bad.
Before we get into the usual banter about BSD, Netcraft, or whatever they've confirmed recently, I have to say that I use BSD more now then ever.
It would never have dawned on me to bother with trying BSD as a desktop until I had some extra cash in the account and setup a system for network monitoring and packet scanning. With the bulk of the load being network-based, I figured this might as well be my desktop system too to garner more bang for the buck. This, mind you, after having used GNU/Linux and Windows for years and relegating BSD to beige server boxen only.
That was a about a year ago. Today every PC I own runs FreeBSD as the primary desktop.
It's not without it's issues when you install from the standard FreeBSD disks. I had to compile OOOrg from ports using flags (with cups, kde), and I had to install the linuxflashplayer-wrapper and tinker with it for a while to get it running...so yes, there are dozens of "little" things that keep this from desktop adoption.
If a distribution such as DesktopBSD can create prepackaged desktop installations with a preconfigured flash-player, OOOrg, etc...I don't see why many people wouldn't at least try it out. The package management from a desktop user perspective has been great (I prefer it over apt, yum or portage), I have no failed installations due to -cpio bad magic, checksig errors (when I know the keys are installed), etc...
Be prepared though, with this install you get a basic desktop. There is still much work to be done, but this is a nice start from a group of guys I can totally relate to.
If you're half as beautiful naked, you'd be 4 times as beautiful with twice as many clothes on.
*Wooosh*
If you take out Country Kitchen buffet, old people won't know what to do.
Sorry, that is just wrong. Free is a not bad system, but I have seen more than a few broken ports problems. One of the big issues is binary drivers and programs in the ports tree that require signing licence agreements. Installing OpenOffice I had to stop and download three different licences before it finally puked and just wouldn't install. Realplayer doesn't run nativly and has to use Linux Binary compatiblity mode, Flash is a program that just doesn't work. The alternatives cause Firefox to crash randomly. These are problems in ADDITION to the installer. It has been a while since I installed Free but we stopped using it a while ago due to one of the worst installers I have EVER seen. It wouldn't resolve DNS correctly and if you made a mistake, you are starting ALL over again. After 6 people (all OBSD people, so we are not talking n00bs) tried and failed to make the installer work correctly we took all our FreeBSD disks and threw them out the 18th floor of my friend's appartment building. Lastly, when I tried to boot up the computer behind my firewall without passing defining a local domain suffex it would hang on the sendmail script for 10 to 15 min before continueing on with the boot. While these issues may have been fixed, what I saw was a dev team more instrested in programing SMP into the kernel then fixing the existing problems with their installer or their OS. Until that attitude changes, I will not be using FreeBSD again anytime soon. Just my 2 cents, sorry about the spelling =P Peace
"WTF? I can't remember the last time I saw FreeBSD ports break. Not even a SINGLE package."
Ah come on now. I have run freebsd servers for years and I can tell you from direct experience that there have been numerous times I could not get one port or another to build. The one I remember being pissed off the most was net-snmp for a while. I waited for months and emailed the author but it still didn't get fixed so I had to compile from source (something I do not like to do as a matter of course).
With all those ports there are bound to be defects at some time or another. I also remember I had problems with sablotron for a while too.
evil is as evil does
That much is true, only because it has Java as a dependency. I can't see how that would cause it to fail to compile. Anyhow, you can always disable Java (hence the license agreements) with "-DWITHOUT_JAVA".
Yes it does, but it still works just fine (just takes a while to install all the Linux base libs). If you don't want to do that, you can always install MPlayer/Xine, which will run natively, and use the Win32 DLLs.
It had it working just fine back when I needed it. Then I got annoyed with all the ads and animations and uninstalled it all-together.
Yes, that much is true. The open source flash libraries are terribly unstable, but that has NOTHING to do with FreeBSD, as they exhibit the same behavior on Linux.
What the hell? The FreeBSD installer is basically a step-up from the Slackware installer, and a hell of a lot better than the limited and bare-bones OpenBSD installer. You can always abort whatever step you're on, go back to the main screen, and start that step again. I have no idea where you're getting the idea from that you are somehow stuck with your mistakes.
First legitimate complaint I've heard so far... Yes, that minor issue is very easily worked-around.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Oh please. I have used FreeBSD for about 6 years now, and I can recall numerous times where ports broke after a portupgrade. It happens--you just have to know to contact the port's maintainer.
Having said that, my first linux system was redhat 6.0. I didn't use linux for a number of years, and just started using gentoo a few months ago, so I don't know too much about it yet. But I do know this: FreeBSD doesn't buckle under load. During a port install, I/O is essentially unaffected. From what I have seen, this is nowhere near the case with Linux. The only reason that I switched to linux is that FreeBSD amd64 support has been lacking. If something has changed and this DesktopBSD thing is really nice, I might consider switching back.
you would know that
Modem refers to the actual computer
Computer refers to the monitor