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.'"

Comments

VMWare image available

[athloi]

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.

Re:What's the real difference

[Guy Harris]

To my understanding they are just kernels.

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..

Both using the gnu/fsf/x GPL'd code for the system.

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:

ls on BSD and linux I'm guessing is the same

you guessed incorrectly - Linux distributions have an ls from GNU, while the BSDs have their own BSD-licensed versions of ls.

However:

both run Xfree86 or X.org, apache, php, MySQL, gimp, whatever it is

that part is true - although it's also true of many commercial UN*Xes. So:

I bet if you had a FreeBSD box and a Linux box sitting next to each other, with the same UI (KDE/GNOME, OpenOffice, Gaim) running you wouldn't notice a difference.

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.

So besides that, what *IS* the difference from a user perspective

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.

or is it all lower level API differences (BSD not use int 0x80h sys calls?)

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