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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.'"
..who read that as 24hrs of Blue Screen of Death testing? :(
Isn't that a Mac?
Flame On!
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?
Linux hasn't failed, it just takes a long time to gain market share from Microsoft. Open source is at a disadvantage sometimes. Most of us don't have the money to get developers to write the uninteresting code that no one wants to write themselves. I guess the Linux community has that advantage with companies like Redhat, IBM and Novell in the picture.
What I find interesting is the interest in BSD distros. I know some people don't like me using the term distro as applied to BSD, but its the easiest way to explain what it really is. What I don't understand is the duplication of effort. PC-BSD and DesktopBSD are both KDE and FreeBSD based desktop environments. At least my project is original, albeit unpopular.
The fundamental reason many of us think free desktops will prevail is still there. Think of BSD systems as a backup in case Linux fails in the desktop market. Even if we all fail, we may force Microsoft and Apple to innovate to stay ahead of us.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
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.
It doesn't need hope. It's already succeeded, in Mac OS X.
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
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.
Ah, but you modified the statement. Is Linux "not gaining market share" as you said or is it just taking a while like the parent said?
If it's just taking a while, it hasn't failed (yet) unless you define that it must gain a certain market share in a certain amount of time.
I don't know the actual stats on any of that, but my guess is that Linux is probably not losing market share... just gaining it more slowly than some want it to. It may never get a majority market share, and that could be considered a failure, but I think it's too early to say.
Here are two comparisons and a (shameless plug) novice user's perspective.
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 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.''
It's got a complete BSD user space, and its kernel (xnu, not Mach) is a mixture of Mach and BSD.
If you were to completely excise BSD from OS X, even though most of what makes OS X what it is would remain, OS X would no longer function.
OS X is a Unix (properly certified, even, in Leopard), and it's derived in no small part from BSD.
Sounds terribly userfriendly, even my mother would have no trouble installing this.
wait...
In my mind, the good thing with BSD is that it hasn't cared about all that, and always tried to stay Unix. If someone wants a user-friendly system, I really don't think they care whether it runs Linux or BSD underneath the shiny GUI. It's not as if they're even going to notice the difference. It seems to me that Linux generally has better support for "consumer-grade" hardware, too. I don't really get why they bother with this.
Then again, I guess it's not my time they're wasting, at least.
I know some people don't like me using the term distro as applied to BSD, but its the easiest way to explain what it really is.
The big difference is that many perceive that Linux is an OS where it is not. Linux needs userland, and fits well with GNU. AFAIK all BSD's are OS's on their own, and are maintained as an OS in the source tree whereas Linux is just the kernel. Each flavour of BSD is an OS of itself. DesktopBSD and PC-BSD are maintained in parallel to FreeBSD. As compared to DragonflyBSD which is a 4.x fork, or NetBSD or OpenBSD which too are forks.
Just say it with me - Linux is not an OS. Linux/GNU is an OS. Add some a package manager and you have a distribution.
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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
How is that different than DesktopBSD or PC-BSD? Redhat is a combination of the linux kernel + gnu tools + desktops.. its maintained in parallel with the movement of those projects and snapshots of that work are releases. Redhat has a package manager as does FreeBSD, and the other BSDs. The most noticable difference between using FreeBSD by itself or using one of the ripoffs is the package manager has a nice custom gui that's preloaded.
Also it has been argued many times that the term Linux can also be applied as a common name for the various distros using the kernel. Its an accepted use even if its not correct. If you go into a bookstore and look for a book on Linux its not about the kernel, but rather the software that makes up an OS including the linux kernel. O'Reilly published books with Linux kernel or Linux driver development in the names to distinguish. Your argument would have been useful 15 years ago, but now you've lost the battle. My first book on the os was called "Teach yourself Linux in 24 hours". I bought that in 1999. (or was it 98) It included Redhat 5.0 anyway. Even Robert Love's book on the Linux kernel is called "Linux Kernel Development." I have it sitting on my bookshelf right now in this very room.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
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.
Linux does have a lead in hardware support. Binary blobs are available and BSDs can't tap the drivers written because of licensing to catch up. The Linux community is much more accepting of commercial endevors. Sometimes that is a good trait and sometimes its not. OpenBSD has gained attention for fighting binary blobs. FreeBSD has embrased binary blobs with their intel wireless deal. OpenBSD's approach is better down the road, but FreeBSD is arguably a better desktop right now because they have drivers. What happens when FreeBSD 8 or 9 come out and vendors stop supporting the new or old versions?
You are right that most users see Gnome or KDE. I've chosen a GNUstep path with some (hopefully) custom software additions for MidnightBSD for just this reason. No one else is doing it. Apple has used some open source software in OS X and it seems to be gaining momentum. Their market share is going up. I think Apple and Mozilla has demonstrated that people don't care if they use OSS or not. We won't win them over with philosophy, but with better software at a cheaper (read free) price.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
combatically speaking, a demon with a pitchfork can wreck almost all varieties of penguins in a fight
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 ;)
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