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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.'"
...why BSD has any hope of success where Linux has failed?
fp
..who read that as 24hrs of Blue Screen of Death testing? :(
But when I did (usually FreeBSD) I always found it a quick and easy and once installed it was very fast. Linux always gave me more problems but to be fair I generally didn't care about getting sound drivers and maxing out the video drivers etc with FreeBSD since it was almost always a server.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Isn't that a Mac?
Flame On!
No need to read the article. The computer with BSD didn't even boot.
T_A
Seems everyone is in the business of making a user-friendly OS. No one has yet understood that we have tons of user-friendly OSes and that the OS is not the problem?
PC-BSD us a pretty friendly name, but I think I would have gone for uBSunDto.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
iphone. Probably easier to use than a Mac.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Whatever it is, and that goes for *all of you*,
I DON'T FUCKING CARE.
You just discovered something that sits well with your limited brain patterns, and all of a sudden you feel this violent need to validate it.
Here's a hint: A very big hint: IF YOU CONSTANTLY NEED TO FEEL VALIDATED ABOUT YOUR CHOICES, THEN THEY WERE BAD CHOICES.
I am not going to join your stupid fucking cult. Deal with it.
I tried this out recently after being given a disc at a linux fest. It's pretty nice. The guy giving out the discs explained that when you install applications, the applications come bundled with all of their dependencies included. This makes the apps use a little bit more disc space, but avoids the issue of two apps requiring two incompatible dependencies. That's pretty nice.
The downside, at least a couple months ago, was that the disc is an install disc rather than a live one. I think he said it takes over the whole drive as well, but I won't swear to that and it may have changed since then. Anyway, I had it in parallels for a while and although it wasn't enough to convince me to abandon ubuntu, I will say that installing software was brain dead easy -- not that synaptic is hard, but with synaptic you do need to know the name of what you want. With PC-BSD, you just pick from a menu of shiny icons and descriptions.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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.
I don't know... I always thought the learning curve for FreeBSD was pretty shallow. I used GNU/Linux for years before trying FreeBSD, and Linux distributions were all over the board; you never knew what bizarre software configuration you were going to get, or how the system was going to behave or configure. Even after steady use, Linux confused the hell out of me. When I tried FreeBSD, it took a little effort to learn the basics of managing the system: installing, updating, removing software packages. After that it was easy street. Tweaking the base system conf files was obvious... a little too obvious. They say editing text files isn't "intuitive", but this is as close as it gets. For the stuff you can't figure out, the documentation is complete and readily accessible.
Having a front end that helps you autoconfig stuff doesn't actually lesson the learning curve, but in my opinion steepens it. When the autoconfig goes wrong, you're pretty much stuck without a clue.
Go back to the drawing board with the name. Windows users want something simple sounding. Putting BSD, Linux, or some pun based on the names of a Linux distribution in the title isn't going to help. In fact, it's probably going to hurt because Linux and BSD sound difficult and dorky. You use Linux and BSD as a selling point when people don't want Linux or BSD. Don't go out of your way to advertise it as a Linux or BSD project, make it look like something other than BSD or Linux, and go from there. As someone who works with marketing, it just always blows my mind that one of the simplest things the OS community could do, give a project an easy, accessible, and non-dorky name, is never even attempted.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
Official PCBSD web and download page.
--
The easiest way to earn money with your web.
there already is a FreeBSD derivative that's easy to use and attracting Windows users. It's called OS X :)
Not trolling just trying to be funny. More power to them.
As always I am baffled by the hardware platform. Clearly cost is not an issue for this test. Which means that any other factor is the driver. Security? Personal preference? Certainly not compatibility. So with this test and with any other, Ubuntu, Linspire, etc etc etc the point is not going to be the cost of the desktop and we can simply ignore the cost of Vista when looking at any head to head to comparison.
Between Linux and *BSD? To my understanding they are just kernels. Both using the gnu/fsf/x GPL'd code for the system. ls on BSD and linux I'm guessing is the same, both run Xfree86 or X.org, apache, php, MySQL, gimp, whatever it is. 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. So besides that, what *IS* the difference from a user perspective or is it all lower level API differences (BSD not use int 0x80h sys calls?).
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
As a Mac user, I don't really understand all this effort to make Linux (or BSD) as easy to use as Windows. I don't find Windows particularly easy compared to the Mac.
Now if you could make Linux (or BSD) as easy to use as a Mac....
If this machine had been acquired without OS and the user, instead, decided to buy WindowsXP separately, this user would have had the same problems I had. In my case, the video device wasn't detected, the sound device wasn't detected and the network device wasn't detected. A beginner would also need to rely on someone with experience to get those issues resolved.
I have rather become accustomed to the idea of loading the OS and resolving driver and other hardware configuration issues as part of the installation process. It's the same in Windows as it is for Linux. (Not usually the case with Mac, but they control both the hardware AND the software and there's good reason for that.) The exceptions for this are when a hardware maker cobbles his own OS+Apps+Driver installation software to match the hardware or when, by some uncommon scenario, all hardware in the configuration is identified and supported by whatever comes with the OS. (It happens but it's rare.)
It shouldn't be said about Linux or Windows or *BSD that an expert or experienced user should be available in case of trouble as if this were a problem exclusive to it or to other OSes. It should be said because it's generally true of all.
Almost.
It's a Mac running VMWare Fusion http://www.vmware.com/beta/fusion/features.html.
Why the rhetorical? You can not parse a sentence?
With mac/darwin ports, I get all the ease of install of my favorite tool sets just like the ports tree with BSD and I can even purchase that *evil* commercial software like Quickbooks, Office, and *gasp* Photoshop.
I personally found FreeBSD easy to deal with and the ports tree a much better way of installing software than on the Linux systems of the day as there was no standard way to do this between distros. At least with FreeBSD, there was pretty much ONE FreeBSD.
If I was going to set up a simple inexpensive webserver, FreeBSD would still be my first choice on some cheap PC hardware.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I've heard that what users care about is applications, and that is why even though Ubuntu is clearly ahead of Windows in many categories, it still hasn't crossed over to mass desktop use. I don't think that is true, because most of the applications people use for basic productivity are loaded on to Ubuntu already.
What seems to be the new stumbling block is peripherals. Its about whether you can hook up a digital camera, an ipod, or an all in one machine, and and have it work out of the box.
And so, is there anything technically in BSD that would make any of this easier? Probably not. Which makes me think this project isn't going to find its niche too quickly.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
I've given this one a go. I'm mainly a linux man myself. I'm no stranger to the command line and often find bash the easiest way to fix problems with linux. This however did not give me any grounding for this BSD. Maybe this is just my fault... I suppose I should have been expecting some troubles. I think the biggest issue I had was with updating software. I wanted to upgrade firefox from the version that came on the DVD I was given (I think that it was 1.5.0.3 or something.
/.../www/firefox (that might be wrong, but you get the idea) and then type "make install clean". I tired to do that and just got loads of text output which didn't seem to be going anywhere. After about 15 mins I decided to kill that and look around.
The first thing I thought of was going to the firefox site and see if they had an installer for BSD but couldn't find one. Then I decided to search online to see if there was an easy way to do it. The thing I looked at suggested cd-ing into the directory
I found another site which listed the 9 ways he'd tried to update firefox and how in the end none of them work properly. He got flamed in the comments on his blog with comments calling him an ignorant n00b etc. (which would be an image which would put me off going on the forums... or at least make me nervous). In the end I decided that it'd just be a hell of a lot less of a headache to go back to fedora and do "yum update" to update the whole system - there's even a GUI if thats your thing.
So if you think that I've missed something really obvious about this OS or that I've got it totally wrong, you could be right... it doesn't really matter. It still highlights the fact that it just isn't a "user friendly windows alternative" in the same way that a lot of linuxes are.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
IS DYING AND ITS bleak future. in Others what to the longest or keed to be Kreskin Then Jordan Hubbard
Sounds terribly userfriendly, even my mother would have no trouble installing this.
wait...
Having used FreeBSD for a couple months, I'd say the biggest beef I've had is their bug handling (especially reporting) system. It's fantastically slow to submit (several minutes even when no files are attached), submissions are not acknowledged, it can take up to 15 minutes for submissions to show up in the system (making for ~30 minutes in total to verify submission of a single bug), it's hard to search properly (search "Text in single-line fields", WTF?), the default search lists all bugs on one page, searching for "State: Any" doesn't show closed bugs, it shows HTML escape codes for special characters (e.g., "ł"), and their wiki page on improving the bug tracking system is immutable. And yes, most of this has already been reported, but not fixed.
In open source, having an easy to use bug tracking system is IMO paramount.
It installed nicely for me under Parallels 3 on my company's MacBook Pro. However, once up and running, the display was set to 1280x1024 and would not change, which means I had to scroll just to see the whole desktop on my 1440x900 screen. I'd go to the control panel, set it to 1024x768, press OK or apply (I tried both) and it would bounce me out to the login screen, and when I logged back in, I was still at 1280x1024. I can't log into the GUI as root (not allowed) to see if that makes a difference, nor could I find an obviously relevant line to change in xorg.conf (which I would not have even known was the place to go were it not for the Ars article.)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
"Basic productivity" apps don't pay the rent. Highly specialized ( 2/3 per discipline ) 'for_trade' proggies pay the rent. Lots of those apps are available for M$, most for APPLE and damned-feckin' few for *nix. THAT's the killer --- why *nix has 0.87% penetration in the desktop market. Up from 0.037% several years ago. And VISTA doesn't even work yet.
I wish I had mod points. Since when is having an opinion (which he was perfect honest about possibly being because of his own misunderstandings) trolling? Because it doesn't suit you? I guess it's easier to write opinions off you dislike then taking them on their merit. But it's cheap and I don't understand how you got modded up. The parent offered an on-topic opinion and even worded it with a little humility. You berate his post and offer very little in terms of discussion. THAT is trolling.
An appropriate post would have simply been informational. Who knows, maybe he would have gone back and tried it? At the very least people would have been able to balance what was his experience with your knowledge. Instead you supply a curt and dismissive remark effectively cutting the conversation.
Quack, quack.
I've been looking for my next desktop replacement in the next, dunno, 2-3 years? I am running a gaggle of what will be my last turn of the crank of MS operating systems. Because I am cheap. For me there's zero upside to replace all my hardware just to support the next version of Windows, itself of dubious incremental value. So when the time comes it will be along the lines of old equipment. Not obsolete but certainly not new. Right now, for my purposes the likely candidates, if the decision was today, is Ubuntu, Linspire/Freespire or a mini Mac. Given that notebook machines will probably dip under the price of desktops by then at least at the low end that may or may not throw another problem in. If a Mac notebook is in the sweet spot then that's the pick, else a cheap Lenovo or similar running one of the above OS's.
It's always amusing how the Lunix d00dz and Apple d00dz and FOSSies are always talking about how everyone has to move away from Windows or Office or whatever. Because they just know their offering can't stand on it's own merits, they need to drum up some kind of phony counter-culture vibe.
How about you just make something PEOPLE want to use, rather than being so hate-obsessed that you are fixated on "converting" Windows users? Nobody wants your FOSSie OS flavor of the week. It used to be Red Hat, then it was Lundows, then it was Ubunghole, now it's PC-BFD.
Make something which works. Can you drop disk, install, and have it auto-detect and auto-config your computer without having to manually dig around and get things working? If not, it's just as worthless as Lunix. So... rather than whining about how Microsoft is "forcing" people not to use this latest FOSSie trainwreck of an OS... why not get the damn thing to work right?
Stop chasing Windows 95's tail lights: make a damn OS which can handle hardware, or get out of the damn way and let the real OS makers run the show.
The productivity tools people using now - today - are in Microsoft Office.
The same tools they have been using for the last ten to fifteen years. OpenOffice has some "brand name" recognition. But, beyond that, there is almost nothing that would ring a bell.
The geek assumes that some functional similarity in an unfamiliar app makes it a practical substitute.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Meanwhile with the Windows Platform SDK, I know anything I link to is safe and I don't have to worry about restrictions about redistributing anything, so long as the end user's copy of Windows has everything installed.
If I drop the terse legalese of the EULA for the terse legalese of GPL, what have I won, really? BSD is free without any strings attached. I don't have to worry about my builds or what I link to or have any worries beyond, gasp, actually coding. Closed but complete is not necessarily a bad thing for non-technical end users, nor is open as in libre for developers or users.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
Test the following: Grab a Joe Average, get them in front of a freshly installed Windows XP machine, give them a regular h264 video file, and ask them to play it. Watch him suffer. Windows freshly installed is not as tinkering-free as you make it seem ;)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'd love to see that for Windows XP so I can run Vista programs and DX10 without feeling tainted.
... or is it just me?
What you describe is a windows install disc.
If you want to be listened to rather than just offend a bunch of people, try not to have a subject like "Note to Open Source OS pushers..." for your comment
Saying someone is "pushing" something makes them appear aggressive and opinionated, or at least says you think they are. This colors everything you say after it in a very negative light. As someone that never works with marketting, I'm amazed this didn't occur to you, unless it did and you were just seeking attention.
I'm guessing you got stuck with Windows then..
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
Oh anonymous coward, how full of wisdom you continue to be. Linux actually runs usably on all my hardware, which windows does not.
I was looking forward to this article so I could read about the interesting experiences of other PC-BSD users or Linux converts; what a disappointment. Here's a couple of points for folks who haven't used PC-BSD yet and are wondering what it's all about:
1. It's not a new kind of BSD, it's FreeBSD with a graphical installer and the KDE desktop
2. It's FreeBSD. Before you start complaining about how unfriendly you think the OS is, go learn about FreeBSD first. FreeBSD isn't about giving you a fun user experience or the latest version of software, it's about producing a rock-solid Unix OS in a well-engineered environment. That means the man pages are awesome, the choices are well explained, and the system as a coherent whole seems to be better put together than a lot of distros. You don't get a flash plugin for Firefox, you don't get the latest and greatest in drivers. It's FreeBSD.
I have gradually grown frustrated with Linux distros after floating from SUSE to Mepis to Ubuntu to Mandriva to Slackware to Dream and back to SUSE. I thought I'd give BSD a try, but was simply not clever enough to get a straight-up version of FreeBSD to install on my laptop. PC-BSD not only installed with as much ease as SUSE 9.3 (detecting all my hardware, setting up the network, the sound card, and everything else) but left me with a good looking, modern KDE desktop (early write up is here: http://therandymon.com/content/view/87/79/). Now that it's installed I can start learning about BSDs the old fashioned way - by learning with some books.
It's got some other interesting things. Its packages are intuitive and easy to use, something I wish Linux distros would adopt for userland software, leaving apt-get and equivalents for system software and power users. I was able to add Opera, my favorite browser, with no fuss and no muss.
It's lacking the driver support of a lot of Linux distros because FreeBSD has always lagged behind in the driver department, and it's not Linux it's BSD so those of you who are looking for another flashy Linux experience will be disappointed to learn it's FreeBSD and requires you to learn some new things.
Basically: if you're looking for a good Unix experience or need help installing FreeBSD on your machine, this is a great way to do it. It's a better introduction to the Unix world than most Linuxes are. It is not however just another Linux distro, and Linux users expecting that will be disappointed, as the comments in this article seem to confirm.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
One of the problems with GNU/Linux distributions is that they are NOT different versions of the same OS, and should, as such, be referred to as completely different operating systems. They're organized differently, they're configured differently, and you manage applications differently. It doesn't matter if the code is the same; from a user's standpoint, Ubuntu is a completely different system than Mandriva.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
There's no shitty brushed metal so it can't be a Mac.
Why would you want it to be harder to learn?
Look at a curve on a graph (with time on the x axis, as is normal) and you'll see what I mean.
ON SECURITY:
I have asked folks from the LINUX world to try the CIS Tool on their machines, vs. a fully secured Windows Server 2003 SP #2 system I have here, & they would NOT "take" on this freely offered comparison here:
http://linux.sys-con.com/read/382946_f.htm
Now, I suspect more than a few TRIED to exceed my score of 84.735 on this test (my using the OS setup above) vs. theirs, & they could NOT exceed my score.
Many said "if you want security, go BSD"... that said?
Will any of you BSD users (this one, or variants) take the challenge?
(MacOS X users are going to be "let down" though, because there isn't a version of CIS Tool for them yet... this is a case of "more softwares are available for Windows vs. MacOS X" though, a clearly cut one in fact!)
CIS (center for internet security) Tool 1.x downloads for BSD, Linux, Windows etc. et al users are here:
http://www.cisecurity.org/index.html
(Amongst all others they have)
Good luck, I would like to do such a comparison, & I would like any photos of results sent my way, here:
apk4776239@hotmail.com
And, I, in turn? Will send the photo result of my CIS Tool 1.x score back to you in return.
NOTE: The program requires Java runtimes!
APK
P.S.=> I am out to see which OS can be secured the BEST online is why. I get no takers from the Linux world, & suggestions to "GO BSD", so... put your monies where your mouths are I guess! I am willing to do so, how about you? apk
There was one FreeBSD just like there was one Red Hat Linux. Or does the netcraft confirmation make NetBSD, OpenBSD, DesktopBSD, DragonflyBSD and now PC-BSD not count?
the article says and i quote: i don't get this i always thought freebsd used ipfw and not pf as its packet filter, so what does this mean?
has the author made a mistake or has freebsd's native ipfw been replaced by a pc-bsd's implementation of OBSD's pf ?
or is ipfw essentially a pf fork as well? or am i just plain wrong, can someone please explain
Actually, custom kernel configuration is even easier than editing the GENERIC config file, which changes from time to time in ways that one may want to port to one's custom configurations. My custom config for Nokia IP440s looks something like this:
And so forth. This takes out the drivers I don't need, but if some kernel option or device driver gets added to GENERIC in the mean time, my config doesn't break. It beats the hell out of the Linux kernel build configuration especially since it's moderately future-proof and human-readable, and on the rare occasion when a particular option or driver doesn't have a manual page, there's at least a line or two in src/sys/conf/LINT or src/sys/<arch>/conf/LINT that will clue you in. I hate building custom kernels on Linux because it's such a pain compared to the BSD's kernel build system (and yes, I know about "make reconfigure").I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
Ok what's with this there is "ONE FBSD" mentality? I can effectively do the same thing by only using Ubuntu and say there is only ONE UBUNTU.