PC-BSD: The Most Beginner Friendly OS

soniyea writes "OSWeekly.com reviews PC-BSD and considers it the most beginner friendly OS in the market. 'From PC-BSD's roadmap to their default installation, I honestly feel good about where these guys are headed with their take on FreeBSD. This operating system has it all: support both from the professional level as well as that of the community, the ability to install Linux software, thanks to the binary compatibility layer, and of course — speed. Understand for most people, the speed factor is more or less a matter of opinion. But I have found that in some areas, it felt faster at the core level. Maybe I just had too much coffee that day? Either way, I totally recommend PC-BSD for anyone wanting to take a step into the wild side. FreeBSD, it's not just for geeks anymore.'"

Comments

PC-BSOD?

[nodnarb1978]

I *know* BSD is quite stable, I've used it in production environments in the past.

But...am I the only one that sees "BSD" and reads "BSOD"....every time??

Always nice to see serious efforts to bring *nix to the desktop, though. :)

6502

[Anonymous Coward]

The most beginner friendly assembly language.

Re:6502

[spike1]

6502?

Rubbish. OK. Most computer users with 6502 based systems were FORCED to resort to assembler because their basic was so abominable (commode 64/vic20). But even the CPU's instruction set wasn't that "easy" or "good" for beginners.

What with all that zero page nonsense. Limited 8 bit registers. Etc.

Z80 and MC68000 were by far the nicer cpus.

Re:6502

[ajs318]

The 6502's "zero page" instructions were a timesaver. Most instructions had a "shorthand" form which accessed a byte in the address space $0000-$00FF, using only one byte for the operand address, so saving a clock cycle and a byte of RAM. You could use zero page memory as an extended register set. If you were very clever, you could pull stunts with mapping different 256-byte chunks of memory into that space. Or you could use those addresses for faster-than-usual I/O {like the Atari 2600}. {The 6502 did not have separate I/O and memory buses.}

The BBC microcomputer used the 6502 {actually the 65C102 in its later incarnations} and that had an absolutely amazing BASIC. Even ran faster than some rival computers' machine code {thanks mostly to the use of hardware rather than software to generate the bitmapped display, which required up to 20KB of the 32KB for the framebuffer}.

The 6502, and the way the BBC used it, was also the inspiration for the ARM processor. SWIs were based on the BBC's MOS {kind of a BIOS on steroids; a full abstraction layer}. Basically, in order to access the BBC's hardware, you would set up a parameter block in memory; load its address into the X and Y registers and an instruction code into the accumulator; and call a fixed address in ROM {which pointed to an indirect jump instruction deriving its address from RAM, allowing user code to intercept MOS calls if necessary. You could have hours of fun with this}. If you only needed to pass two bytes and an instruction code then you could use the X and Y registers and call a different address. {I know, nowadays we pass parameters on the stack. This was the 1980s. Also, the 6502's hardware stack can only ever be 256 bytes big due to the S register -- the stack pointer -- being only 8 bits wide.} The whole display subsystem {including text, graphics, user-defined characters, display windows and colour/palette selection} was controlled by non-printable characters {and the graphics display was organised as 1280x1024, even though in real life it was only 160/320/640x256}. There was, of course, a MOS call to print a character. Every other piece of hardware -- the sound system, the keyboard, the printer, the serial port, the A-to-D converter, the cassette and disc file systems -- could be accessed through MOS calls. You didn't have to touch the hardware directly at all; in fact, as long as you didn't, the same programs {in BASIC or machine code} would work without modification on a plain Model B, a B with a 6502 second processor, a Master Series or a RISC-based machine with 6502 emulation. BBC BASIC was merely a layer on top of the MOS. For instance, the Beeb's sound chip had a programmable envelope generator controlled by 14 parameters. There was a MOS call which took a block of 14 parameters and loaded these into the sound chip's registers. The ENVELOPE statement in BASIC took 14 parameters, and merely made the MOS call for you.

Re:6502

[iangoldby]

The wonderful beginners' feature of the 6502 command set was that it was so limited.

As AJS said, the 6502 was the inspiration for the ARM family, and RISC processors in general. The philosophy is why encumber a CPU with complex instructions that take several CPU cycles to execute, when a decent compiler can get the same work done with an optimised set of small instructions that execute in just one or two CPU cycles?

ARM was in fact an off-shoot from Acorn, the company that made the BBC Micro. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture It continues to amaze me that the first ARM prototype CPU back from the fabrication plant worked perfectly first time!

Re:6502

[MichaelSmith]

Thanks for posting. I taught myself 6502 machine code when I was 12 years old. My computer came with a photocopied sheet with the instruction set documented on it, one instruction per line.

The instruction set design made sense, and my first program was 16 bytes long. I can't imagine doing that with a Z80.

Re:6502

[tomstdenis]

In terms of raw MIPS ARM is a loser to the "evil CISC" designs like the AMD64 and Conroe. Maybe in terms of MIPS/watt it wins though. I guess different problems. Of course it's hard to say if that's a result of CISC vs RISC or that most CISC processors are much larger.

Maybe if ARM had 9 pipelines like AMD64 it'd be hella fast too :-)

Tom

Re:6502

[Spit]

The 6502's "zero page" instructions were a timesaver.

That's a feature that designer Chuck Peddle lifted from the 6809 (which he also worked on). The 6809 allows you to relocate this page as well as the stack.

Re:6502

[iangoldby]

I read somewhere (though I can't remember where) that most CPUs are now RISC designs under the skin. Even CPUs that have complex instruction sets only implement those as a thin layer on top of a fundamentally RISC architecture. Of course this raises the question of just how do you define RISC?

Anyone who knows more about this??

Re:6502

[tomstdenis]

Yes, they are but they also benefit from the CISC opcodes. I-Cache polution is a serious threat to inlining/unrolling and branch prediction.

With ARM style RISC opcodes operations heavy on memory [for example] are less dense than those of x86. e.g.

x86:
add eax,[ebx+ecx]

ARM: [map them to r0,r1,r2]
add r3,r1,r2 ; ebx + ecx
ldr r3,[r3] ; [ebx+ecx]
add r0,r0,r3

So the x86 world takes 3 bytes to do what ARM takes 12 [or 6 in THUMB mode]. Multiply this by a few hundred if not thousand for any given algorithm and you get the point.

Effectively the opcode decoders act like decompressors for x86 opcodes. Done on the fly for most opcodes. Of course in the case of AMD64 [and most likely the Core 2 stuff] most opcodes map to 1 or 2 RISC operations. The RISC engines are not as trivial as those in the ARM processor alone. So even if you scrapped the x86 side and exposed the internal engine it'd still be way cooler than ARM.

Tom

Re:6502

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it's only 14 bytes to load a screen as a headeless block: 221,33,0,64,17,0,27,62,255,55,205,86,5,201

ld ix,16384
ld de,6912
ld a,255
scf
call 1366
ret

(written entirely from memory, and posted anonymously to avoid revealing my sad bastard identity)

The article is a little too quick to praise

[insulanus_hailstorm]

From the article:

This is the single most flawless installation method for software that I have seen for software since, well, Windows to be completely honest.

Fine praise. Fine praise, indeed.

Beginner friendly?

[the_humeister]

In terms of what? Exposure to a unix-like system? The only thing they mention that would seem to be remotely beginner friendly is the installation of new software. Some screen shots would help in clarifying this.

Nowadays, does it really matter what type of unix-like system is being run for home use? Once a desktop management environment (KDE, GNOME, etc.) is installed there's really no difference to the casual user. Hell, with that pretty KDE interface, I can't tell the difference between Linux, BSD, Darwin, Solaris, etc until I open a terminal and type "uname -a"

Re:Beginner friendly?

[evilviper]

Reading the article before spouting off isn't so much to ask of you, is it? I mean, this wasn't some highly technical, 20-page review.

He explained his position, in no uncertain terms:

I see this as becoming a spectacular alternative to Windows for any Windows user. Why? Because the software management is so familiar for any semi-experienced Windows user.

BSD's new signs of life

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps BSD's time has finally come? With Lunix Torvald's increasingly tyrannical stance regarding GPLv3, maybe it's time for a switch to a BSD. Real freedom, stability, and no binary blobs sounds pretty damn good.

Re:BSD's new signs of life

[byolinux]

The GPL has nothing to do with preventing commercial usage. The GPL has everything to do with preventing proprietary usage. Big difference.

Re:BSD's new signs of life

[tengwar]

If RMS had followed the normal scientific model (aka the BSD model) in allowing research to be used by anyone, at any time, for the overall good of humanity, then proprietory software would be dead now.

You do know that M$ used BSD-licenced code for their IP stack and Internet Explorer, don't you?

The article is of very poor quality.

[Futurepower(R)]

The article is of very poor quality. It doesn't even provide a link to the PC-BSD website.

Hardware Support

[rf0]

How well does it support hardware? Will my scanner work out of the box like Ubuntu? A "friendly" OS will just work with all your hardware without having to recompile the kernel. As others have said its not the worlds best article

Re:Hardware Support

[evilviper]

How well does it support hardware?

You can expect FreeBSD to support 99% of the hardware that works under Linux. And actually, it will generally be more stable under FreeBSD than under Linux.

A "friendly" OS will just work with all your hardware without having to recompile the kernel.

The BSDs practically never even SUGGEST recompiling the kernel, even though it's quicker and easier than in Linux land. Everything is always compiled-in, and very much unlike Linux, the system is fully Plug-and-Play. Everything from hard drives to your soundcard and all necesarry setting are detected by the kernel on boot-up (not with something flaky like kudzu, after boot-up) and it will either automatically work, or just isn't supported. Almost never any manual twisting and tweaking of options, let alone hours of it, as Linux users are very accustomed to.

This is a bit over-simplistic, mind you, but basically true.

It is a very superficial article

[Budenny]

Yes, true. But if you look at PC BSD, its interesting, and the enthusiasm expressed is probably valid. There seem to be three distributions that are roughly comparable in terms of the end user experience, PCLinux, PCBSD and DesktopBSD. Its not a Windows look and feel experience, but it is Windows-like in the sense of shipping with a controlled set of applications. Not like say Mandriva, where the naive user will often stare in disbelief and wonder why they have abiword, KOffice and Open Office, not to mention half a dozen text editors.

If you're looking for a stable non-MS distribution for people who are basically looking for Office, photo management, Internet, one of these is probably the simplest fastest and most user friendly way to get there.

Benefits of BSD?

[miyako]

I don't intend this to be a troll, I'm honestly curious. I've been using Linux since around 1998, and I've always found that it works well for me. I have a friend who swears by FreeBSD, but his zelotry makes it hard to get a strait answer about what's so great about BSD (hmm, now I know how all of my Windows using friends feel when I talk...).
So to all of you who might use this, or some other flavor of BSD as a desktop, what advantages does it offer over Linux? What are the disadvantages (other than the momentum that Linux has as a desktop OS compared to BSD)?

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[TheRaven64]

It's difficult to really explain. I used Linux for a few years, but bits of it always bugged me. I never found a Linux system that really felt like all the bits were designed to work together (in an abstract, hand waving, way). I tried using FreeBSD out of curiosity and was very impressed by the system as a whole. The thing that really persuaded me at the time was something quite small; the sound driver did mixing in software if the hardware didn't support it. This meant I could have KDE apps, GNOME apps, and apps that wrote to /dev/dsp all making noises without breaking each other, something that had bugged me about Linux for a while. I believe ALSA has this ability now.

One thing you will notice is that the BSD documentation is a lot better. When I am working on a Linux box, I usually have an SSH session open to a BSD box for checking man pages. OpenBSD tends to be the best in this regard; any code commit must include a documentation update if it changes anything user-visible, and any discrepancy between the code and the documentation is regarded as a bug in the code.

Overall, I think I prefer OpenBSD these days, but it doesn't support DRI yet so I'd recommend FreeBSD for the desktop (or SMP systems, since OpenBSD's SMP support is about where FreeBSD was with the 4.x series).

Basically, you should try it and see if you like it. Give it a while; I've seen Linux users give up on *BSD because 'it doesn't work right' meaning 'it isn't exactly the same as Linux.'

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[mobby_6kl]

>what's so great about BSD

You don't have to deal with the linux fans ;-)

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[Neil]

So to all of you who might use this, or some other flavor of BSD as a desktop, what advantages does it offer over Linux?

• Unity and coherence of the system: A "Linux" distribution is an integration of many different packages from different groups of developers (the Linux kernel itself, glibc, numerous GNU utilities, and potentially thousands of end user applications - web browsers, mail programs, editors, office suites, etc). The creators of distributions generally do a fine job of this integration but occasionally the fact that it doesn't all fit together perfectly is exposed (particularly if things aren't working properly and one is trying to fault-find, or perhaps upgrade or change particular bits of the system). The FreeBSD developers aren't (primarily) integrators. Most of the bits of the core system have no "upstream", the developers are working directly on a single project source tree for a complete, minimalist Unix-like system. This system a kernel, libc and the various other system libraries, all the command-line utilites you expect from a POSIX system, documentation (a man page for each program and system call), etc. If, for example, you run a /bin/sh script which contains a find command then the entire software stack up and down (sh, find, libc, kernel) comes from a single set of developers with a unified plan and architecture.
• Size of the default install: the core system is relatively small, uncluttered, yet highly functional. The PC-BSD review mentions Linux distributions where the default install contains enormous amounts of sofware (several different office suits and numerous text editors). Conversely "minimal" installs in the Linux distribution world often really are minimal - lacking lots of basic stuff that I'd expect from a Unix system (vi, C compiler, man pages, etc). The FreeBSD default install is in many ways like a "complete install" of a late 80s commercial Unix distribution such as SunOS or Ultrix - the basic Unix toolset (vi, sh, csh, ls, awk, sed, grep, find, mail, man, make, cc, ...) is all there, but without much in the way of optional 3rd party free software. The whole thing, including sources and documentation fits in 500-ish Mbytes. The sysadmin can use the Ports mechanism to easily add any of about 15000 free software packages later, customizing the system applications to taste.
• Advantages of source based distribution: I have always found it strange that Linux culture is strongly free software / open source based, but other than Gentoo users, the vast majority of Linux people never actually use source code: 99% systems seem to be installed entirely from binary RPMs or DEBs or whatever provided by the distribution makers. I use a FreeBSD CD set to do an initial install, then I track the STABLE source branch in the project source repository. Every couple of weeks I resync /usr/src and rebuild the entire core system from source code to make sure that I'm up to date with security fixes, bug fixes, new drivers, etc. I know that the contents of /usr/src match the kernel, the libraries, the daemons and the POSIX utilities that I'm currently running, compiled with the options that I wanted. If I come across something that appears to be buggy behaviour I can load up the relevent part of the source tree in Emacs, run the binary under gdb and actually try to figure out what is going on. If some bit of behaviour niggles me I can try changing the sources and building a custom version (and easily diff the source tree and attempt to contribute back changes to the project if I think my hack is of some interest to others). Such an approach is not for everyone, but any means, but if you do have the hacker mind-set then it can be tremendously empowering.
• Familiarity: my first serious Unix experience was using commercial Unixes derived from 4BSD (SunOS 4, etc). I've admined and us

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[Epsillon]

Yes, there is. http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200302/fbsdscratch.htm l

First and foremost, read the handbook. This cannot be overstated. http://www1.uk.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/boo ks/handbook/

Bear in mind that, for a Linux user, FreeBSD will appear to behave most like Gentoo, particularly when building applications from ports. The actual inheritance was the other way around, but that hardly matters to this discussion.

The kernel config file is flat text, with the various options described in detail in the ${SRC}/sys/conf/NOTES and ${SRC}/sys/${ARCH}/NOTES files. Once you get used to it, nothing ever comes close to the ease of compiling new kernels IMHO. Just watch what depends on what, especially the COMPAT_??? options. Also, try not to use "custom" compiler flags like -ffast-math and -funroll-loops as you can end up with hard to diagnose problems when building from source.

Oh, and for anyone reading this thread who is saying "I only have one dsp device that gets locked and nothing else can use it," there is a sysctl knob which needs setting: hw.snd.pcm?.vchans which I usually set to 4 in /etc/sysctl.conf.

There's a lot of help to be had on the Usenet group comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc, too.

My last word on the subject is this: If you have an amd64 machine, for now I would use the i386 port (CPUTYPE=athlon64 in /etc/make.conf which will compile everything with -march=athlon-mp), especially if you use Firefox or you may end up rather frustrated. OpenOffice now works perfectly on amd64, as does JDK15 (albeit without the browser plugin) but native Firefox still has "issues" (startup hangs on a machine with an NFS mounted /home, hard locks, crashes to name but a few problems I have encountered) and plugins are rather flaky. I tend to use the 32bit Linux version on amd64, but the native i386 version has the most plugins available for it (win32codecs, Flash - you need a patch to make Flash7 work with the linuxpluginwrapper and native Firefox, see the message displayed when you install the port - et al). Also, there are no proprietary nVidia drivers for amd64 yet, which is not true for i386. This is being addressed in -CURRENT as nVidia have intimated that a key function they require is not present in the amd64 port and the devs are working on it, so the situation is set to change in the near future.

By the way, ports count at present is ~15500. That's 15.5 thousand services, applications, libraries and utilities available for the cost of typing "make install clean".

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[TheRaven64]

You know, the sound mixing thing definitely would have had a chance at getting me to give BSD a try if I had known about that a while ago when that was a bigger problem for me than it is now.

Indeed. I wouldn't expect it to be such a draw now, but it is just a concrete example of the attention to detail of the BSD teams.

I can see how a more unified system would appeal to most people. It was never something that particularly bugged me, since I guess I'm still in the mindset of seeing a collection of utilities as opposed to a unified system

For the most part, it's little things. A good example is network configuration. On OpenBSD, everything to do with configuring network interfaces is done through ifconfig. On Linux (and, sadly, FreeBSD) you have a separate utility to control WiFi settings. One Linux user recently told me that ifconfig was now deprecated in favour of something else (I can't remember what) on Linux systems, although the man page makes no mention of this.

I might try installing a couple of the BSDs in virtual machines and at least giving them a fair go.

If you're running in a VM, I would suggest OpenBSD. I find the userland cleaner, and the lack of 3D support isn't going to be an issue in a VM. The install process can be a bit daunting; it's not actually that hard, but it doesn't do much by way of hand-holding so make sure you have the manual open.

Is there anything like "BSD From Scratch" that will tell you how to bootstrap a BSD install?

Not really. The concept isn't so important in the BSD world. A BSD is an operating system; a kernel and a basic userland (including compiler tool chain). Once you have installed *BSD, you have what is known as the base system. This is everything that is maintained by the BSD team (including a few third party utilities that have patch branches maintained by the team). This might include X, but won't include something like GNOME.

Once you have the base system installed, you then add ports or packages. On FreeBSD and OpenBSD, a port is a framework for building a third party application (including dependency resolution and applying OS-specific patches), while a package is the binary version of a port. You can create a package by running 'make package' in the port's directory. On FreeBSD, ports are the usual way of installing applications, and binary packages sometimes lag behind the ports (you can use them interchangeably, since a package is just a precompiled port; the portupgrade utility has an option to try installing the package if it exists, or to build the port if it doesn't). On OpenBSD, the pre-built packages are much more heavily tested than the ports (although they are only released every six months with a release of the base system and so are often slightly out-of-date) and are the recommended way of installing software.

If you really want to do something a bit more manually, there is a tutorial on Ping Wales about installing OpenBSD without using the OpenBSD installer. It's focussed on using an existing system to create a bootable flash image, but you can probably adapt it to a real system. I wouldn't recommend actually doing this, but you might find it informative.

The BSD community has a reputation for being slightly newbie-hostile. For the most part, this comes from two things:

1. People posting newbie questions on development lists. There are lists for newbie questions, and if you post to the wrong list you might well get flamed.
2. People asking questions that are answered in the documentation. People put a lot of effort into writing BSD documentation - I wrote a small section of the FreeBSD Handbook - and it is very irritating to have people asking questions that you have already answered.

Re:Benefits of BSD?

[johansalk]

The best answer I found on this topic; it compares Debian, the best of Linux, to FreeBSD http://tinyurl.com/s74ws

Beginner friendly is...

[s0l3d4d]

... when you plug in your scanner, printer, digital camera, mobile phone, PDA, dvcam .. and it just works. When you don't need to even figure what program would possibly deal with such devices to start with.
Maybe they should do a test... 20 beginners with no computer experience or familiarity, that would use this operating system, and e.g. Mac OS X, plain installed FreeBSD and XP, and see what they think is really the easiest to use. The beginners would be way better to tell this than someone who makes their living writing computer related articles.

Re:Beginner friendly is...

[Brandybuck]

And, why IS installing taken to be a Rosetta Stone, anyway?

Because in the Windows world it's the single most frequent task. :-)

Limits to the Compatiblity Layer

[X43B]

"the ability to install Linux software, thanks to the binary compatibility layer" I tried FreeBSD once. I actually really liked it but it had one show stopper for me that led me back to FC. I was amazed that theLinux compatibilty layer was able to install Matlab, a closed source program. It worked, however, not all features worked. In my Matlab scripts I tend to make lots calls to the command line of the OS. This did not work and thus many of my scripts were rendered broken. Another strange quirk is the "exit" command did not work. I t was rather amusing that I could run all types of complicated operations and plotting routintes but it would return an error when trying to quit the program. I had to kill it from a shell.

PCBSD is good

[FudRucker]

i tried it, PCBSD makes a decent KDE desktop, i noticed KDE's kooka was broken - i am guessing it was broken because sane was not installed, i did a little google search and noticed FBSD considers sane/xsane a vulnerability because the temp files it creates while running can be exployted, and when i tried to compile sane-backends it complained about no USB , so i get libusb and compiled it and still sane-backends complained about nousb, i did not bother with libgphoto2 since sane was not wanting to work, other than this minor annoyence PCBSD is a decent KDE desktop, it just needs to shed some of the FreeBSD strict access control (server security?) to make better headway in the desktop/workstation arena. as a faithful Linux user i am glad to see PCBSD as an alternative, and i see MidnightBSD is a BSD desktop too...

BSD = i am not dead :)

Next Gen OS

[jeriqo]

Just seen a screenshot, is this a competitor for Windows 95?

Beginner friendly?

[jandersen]

Unfortunately 'beginner friendly' normally also means 'hostile to non-beginners'. I don't this has to be the case always, but that is one of the BIG problems with Windows and GNOME: they try to be 'beginner friendly' or just 'user friendly' and end up being dumbed down (or even infantile like the 'Fisher-Price Interface' in XP).

What I would like to see - though perhaps it is too much to hope for - is an interface where you could 'change gears', so to speak, from 'beginner' to 'experienced' to 'advanced' to 'bloody-know-it-all'; the beginner mode should have wizards, few options, easy, catoon-style documentation and bright, but calming colours, whereas the most advanced level would have none of the dumbing-down and would have complete, technical documentation of absolutely all features, options and parameters - no wizards, just vi and text-based parameter files.

Yes, I know, Linux is not too far from this by now, but technical documentation is still severely lacking in some areas, most notoriously when it comes to the GNOME desktop. In fact, it is so bad that I think the GNOME developers should freeze their development until they have produced proper, technical documentation of their SW.

Please

[tomstdenis]

stop [next] posting [next] articles [next] which [next] are [next] nothing [next] but [next] ad [next] impression [next] generators [next].

The dude put like 3 sentences per "page" and doesn't let you skip far into the article [hint, the dropdown says "...continue" so you can't just jump ahead to the conclusions and what not]. I stopped reading it after the 2nd page.

If [next] this [next] is [next] the [next] future [next] of [next] journalism [next] then [next] I [next] fear [next] for [next] our [next] future.

Tom

Re:Please

[OldManAndTheC]

Try the repaginator extension for Firefox

Caffeine

[Badfysh]

>But I have found that in some areas, it felt faster at the core level. Maybe I just had too much coffee that day?

Wouldn't it feel slower? Like Fry running around that museum?

Re:The article is a little too quick

[krog]

This article is written more like a 4th grade book report than a technical analysis. It represents about twenty seconds I will never, ever get back.

So I skipped the article and went straight...

[neo]

to the website. It looks like they have a windows like enviroment, but the real advantage is that they created an installer that doesn't rely on dependencies. Each application installs with all dependencies self contained, and with an installer that looks like a regular window/mac installer.

So it might be worth an install just to check out the system. Looks clean, they tout that it's fast, but I want to look for it myself. Will install this weekend on my Laptop and see if it really detects hardware like they say.

Skip the article, go to the website.

http://www.pcbsd.org/