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24-hour Test Drive of PC-BSD
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica has a concise introduction to PC-BSD, a FreeBSD derivative that emphasizes ease of use and aims to convert Windows users. The review describes the installation process, articulates the advantages of PC-BSD,and reveal some of the challenges that the reviewer faced along the way. From the article: 'In the end, I would suggest this distribution to new users provided they had someone to call in case of a driver malfunction during installation. I would also recommend PC-BSD to seasoned Unix users that have never tried using FreeBSD before and would prefer a shallower learning curve before getting down to business.'"
Official PCBSD web and download page.
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Actually BSD doesn't use as much GNU stuff as Linux does otherwise RMS would be screaming that you should call it GNU/BSD.
For a while commercial Linux developers where using the BSD libc so they could statically link it to get around some major library problems Linux was having.
There are difference between BSD and Linux. For one BSD tends towards stability over features. It is a different set of trade offs.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I've already got VMs out the nose with different OSs I just had to try. The PC-BSD folks make one readily available at the following location:
PC-BSD VMWare Image
I recommend this method of trying out new OSs, or avoiding corrupting your computer's virtue by installing one is made by whichever large West Coast corporation you dislike.
technical writing / development
BSD is a whole operating system, with a full userland. Linux is just a kernel. As an example, the FreeBSD kernel is vastly different than the OpenBSD kernel, but Redhat and Ubuntu use basically the same kernel.
Here are two comparisons and a (shameless plug) novice user's perspective.
You could also try doing "pkg_add -r firefox" which will attempt to fetch the binary packages necessary from a mirror, that way you won't have to wait for everything to be compiled... Of course, this applies to FreeBSD but I assume it's pretty much similar on PC-BSD.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
No. "Linux", strictly speaking, refers only to the kernel, but, for better or worse, it's also used to refer to complete systems ("distributions") built around that kernel, e.g. "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" or "SUSE Linux Enterprise" or "Mandriva Linux" (some distributions that use the L word in their names) or "Debian GNU/Linux" (a distribution that uses the L word in its name, but adds "GNU" to refer to the GNU project software in the distribution) or Ubuntu or Fedora (two distributions that don't use the L word). (I.e., if you will, people sometimes use the word "Linux" to refer to Linux distributions, not just the Linux kernel.)
{Free,Net,Open,DragonFly}BSD, and derivatives of them such as PC-BSD, are complete systems; if, for example, you go to http://www.freebsd.org/developers/cvs.html, it gives instructions for getting access to the CVS tree for the complete system - kernel, libraries, applications, daemons, etc..
The Linux kernel, the C library used in most distributions (GNU libc), many of the other libraries in most distributions, and many (most?) application programs and daemons in most distributions, are GPLed. GTK+/GNOME and Qt/KDE are also under the GPL or LGPL. Other software in the distributions might be under other licenses, e.g. BSD licenses, MIT license for X11, etc..
The BSD kernels are, not surprisingly, under a BSD license. The C libraries used in the BSDs are also under a BSD license, and are not based on the same code as GNU libc; the same applies to some libraries that are GPLed in Linux distributions. That also applies to utilities. In particular:
you guessed incorrectly - Linux distributions have an ls from GNU, while the BSDs have their own BSD-licensed versions of ls.
However:
that part is true - although it's also true of many commercial UN*Xes. So:
you probably would notice few, if any differences - unless you opened xterm or Konsole or GNOME Terminal or... and started poking around, in which case you'd see more differences.
From the perspective of a non-power-user mainly using a GUI, probably very little, except to the extent that particular features of the GUI are or aren't supported by particular OSes; a command-line user might see more differences, which might make be more notable if they're differences from what they're used to on whatever flavor of UN*X they mainly use.
That also is true of many commercial UN*Xes, as almost all of them have X11 and could run, for example, KDE or GNOME (I think the primary GUI for Solaris is GNOME-based at this point, although I think CDE is still available). The primary exception is, of course, OS X.
There are BSDs and Linux distributions that could run on the machine on which I'm typing this - and none of them would use "int 0x80" ("0x80h" is redundant, it's either "0x80" or "80h" to say "hex 80") system calls, because that instruction isn't present on PowerPC. :-) Even on x86 processors, with later processors a system might use "sysenter" or "syscall" rather than "int 0x80". And, in any case, system call traps are at a level below the API - read() is an API, the under
Give him krita instead. As a side-benefit from not being able to complain about the name, he won't be able to complain about the window layout either.
Well I suggest you look at the FreeBSD handbook on their website. FreeBSD has some of the best documentation of any OS I've ever used. What you need to do depends on the OS version you are running.
/usr/src/UPDATING often has directions that you need to read. Also, I usually just skip single user mode. If the OS version isn't that far apart you can usually get away with it. Its not correct, but it works.
cvsup your src, make buildworld, make buildkernel, make installkernel, reboot on the new kernel in single user mode, make installworld, mergemaster (carefully). Sometimes you need a mergemaster -p in there.
If its a recent version, you can just run portsnap to update ports.
portsnap fetch extract (first time use)
portsnap fetch update (every other time)
You can install portsnap from ports if you have a slightly older version.
The mergemaster step is when you'll possibly overwrite your config files for src updates. make world is a very old way to do it. You wouldn't use that now except for building jails.
The important advice is to read the handbook. Feel free to ask questions on the freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list too. They tend to be quite nice on there.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone