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

[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

[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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

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.'

Next Gen OS

[jeriqo]

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

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

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.

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".

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

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.