PC-BSD 8.0 Release Focuses On Desktop Use

donadony writes "Last Monday PC-BSD 8.0 was released. PC-BSD is based on FreeBSD and uses KDE as its default desktop environment. PC-BSD is designed to make BSD much easier for desktop use. The 8.0 release includes support for 3D acceleration with NVIDIA drivers on amd64 and improvements in the USB subsystem. The PC-BSD team has also developed a friendly package manager system with a simple-to-use GUI tool (see the screenshots tour). For a full list of changes, refer to the changelog."

Comments

Linux Binary Compatible

[CSHARP123]

Using Linux Binary compatible layer does all the Linux drivers work too or just applications? Does anybody know?

Re:Linux Binary Compatible

[ig88b]

Just applications.

Re:Linux Binary Compatible

[bsDaemon]

I used to use XiG Acclerated X Linux binaries on top of the linux abi on FreeBSD 3.3 back in the day, because the Voodoo3 drivers were better than the 'native' ones for XFree86 where at the time. I wouldn't try sticking network drivers or anything in, but I'm not really a kernel expert. There is an ndiswrapper-type thing for FreeBSD/PC-BSD if you need that for wifi, though.

Re:Linux Binary Compatible

[V!NCENT]

The layer is for the ABI, in other words the Application Binary Interface (it's like the API of a Kernel for applications). This is because FreeBSD is not Linux. With Linux the drivers are from within the kernel, or somewhat outside of it with modules.

However... If you want open source graphics drivers (I am sorry... I do not know your level of knowledge/expertice so just ignore what I am about to say if it makes you go like *whoooosh* ;) ) than these are tied into X.org (the graphical foundation upon which the Linux GUI's works) and the Linux KMS (kernel mode setting) (as the UMS, user mode setting, is disabled in most current drivers) and if FreeBSD already has the KMS feature (was planned) then these drivers work out of the box on FreeBSD ;).

Re:Linux Binary Compatible

[BitZtream]

I should expand on that, really what FBSD binary emulation is ... is just syscall emulation. You still use all the Linux libraries (some slightly patched to be more efficient on FBSD under the emulated syscall interface, but essentially unchanged and unchanged versions directly from a linux box will work).

The only thing the emulation layer does is tell the runtime linker to use a different syscall interface and a different library path for Linux libs, with some minor patches to the linux libs to make things smoother.

Re:Am I the only ignorant one to think...

[CSHARP123]

Only difference is, this is not from Microsoft and it works Just out of the box. You do not need to struggle like how you do with Windows. Hope this helps.

Bad Headline

[Vyse of Arcadia]

Every PC-BSD release focuses on desktop use. It's a desktop distribution.

No, i think all 4 of them are OK

[Colin Smith]

And doing fine.

 

Been testing it

[WinterSolstice]

And this is a BIG improvement over version 7. Still some bugs to be worked out, but it's got far better integration with the PBI installer (similar to synaptic), a very good GUI installer, and the very latest nvidia drivers.

Very nice, very well executed. They turned it out pretty fast too.

Re:Been testing it

[ByOhTek]

Anything complimenting BSD on /. tends to get an initial troll mod I've found. It's amazing how much hate Linux users have for it.

My experience is quite different from the above AC (of course, both are anecdotal, take your grain of salt - and mine are with FreeBSD, not BSD in general). FreeBSD users tend to be pretty laid back, if it isn't working, they recognize it. They may not care, they don't need it, or they may be working on it.

Linux users tend to get up in arms if you don't treat FreeBSD like the second coming of satan for taking away a small amount of their user base and development power, when Linux is obviously the true and correct solution.

Re:Been testing it

[KlaymenDK]

There's this saying, "Linux is for people who hate Microsoft, BSD is for people who love UNIX."

It's tongue-in-cheek and very debatable, of course. But isn't there an undercurrent of truth in it, that BSD fans on average are driven by a positive force, and linux fans on average are driven by a negative one?

I'm ASKING, not trolling. FYI, while I conceptually prefer BSD, in practice I'm using linux.

Re:Been testing it

[bsDaemon]

Linux, particularly the GNU/FSF types, tend to be more ideologically motivated, I find, and I think most of the hate against Free/Net/Open BSD is hate against the BSD license because it doesn't fit into their framework of how the world should be. They're the ones that are going to be on about "software freedom" and all that, rather than "this works, let's use it."

Case in point, I mentioned above that I actually paid money for a commercial X server about 11 years ago. If BSDi BSD/OS hadn't been $1000, I'd probably have bought the "commercial" BSD, too. However, FreeBSD tended to get most of the worth while improvements rolled back from BSDi, and it only cost me like $30 to order it on CD-ROM (the dark days of dial-up and all that). My current company uses FreeBSD as the basis of our product to avoid GPL issues, as does Juniper and others. The FSF-types, of course, aren't going to be down with that and look at it as "theft" (never mind the fact that I know my company, and possibly Juniper as well, have committers on the pay roll) or something.

I think it has to do with the fact that Linux is more readily obtained and there has been a concerted effort to recruits new users. Its sort of like the Mormon Unix, in a way. What this means in practicality is that there is a large portion of the user base that has the "zeal of the convert" -- I'm not going to say that I didn't feel that way when I was 12/13/14 years old and was first starting out, but it's a real thing. As Theo once said, 'bsd is for people who love unix; linux is for people who hate microsoft.' That's kind of a classic troll, but its kind of true, too, to an extent.

I think that the type of people who are into BSD are generally older, have more experience in the industry, and are less ideologically driven in their OS choice than say, high school kids who saw pretty screen shots carefully crafted to look like something out of 'swordfish' or 'the matrix' an want to be 'l33t'. That's not to say that there aren't a lot of professional, neutral-minded Linux people, but then that's going to be the difference between the RHEL/CentOS-type of users and say, Mint (which I've tried and used before and I don't hate it, but let's face it -- we're not putting that on a production server any time soon).

BSD and Linux have their places, as do Windows and MacOSX. I (obviously) prefer BSD to Linux (though I've worked as an admin on a CentOS farm before), and Mac to Windows (though I didn't really have any problems with Vista 64 Ultimate as a desktop OS, just the command line was still for crap), but I can use the other and often do, and I'm at a point in my life where just getting the work done with the minimum headache is more important than what tool i use to get it done. From what I know of Linus, he seems to be of similar mind, too.

Re:Been testing it

[bsDaemon]

KDE took hold in the FreeBSD community because Qt wasn't its self "free software" until relatively recently. A lot of people seem to forget that, and that the reason that Gnome was started (as an official part of the GNU project) was due to wanting a "completely free" desktop. A lot of the big linux distributions couldn't or wouldn't include KDE or other Qt-based software back then because of it.

KDE projects themselves were GPL/LGPL, but not being married to the license as a pre-requesite for using Qt made it more "acceptable" in the BSD world. At least that's my take on it, having watched it all gone down.

I'll admit that I'm not crazy about the GPL but if people want to release code under it, that's their prerogative. I don't like KDE 'cause I think its ugly and unwieldy and frankly, I prefer Gnome to KDE... not that I really like Gnome much either, but oh well.

That stuff aside, I think the issue both of us were talking about really just boils down to "damn kids, get off my lawn." Hell, I'm only 26 myself, but this is my authentic 5-digit ID. I like to think I grew out of the b.s. a long time ago.. plus, I never liked 'swordfish'.

Re:Been testing it

[pgmrdlm]

Well, you know dick measure r. if you would have read the COMPLETE post. you would have seen I only flame back when the person gives me crap over MY NIX flavor of choice. I don't push it on anyone.

So get both your mind and hands off my dick. Because I don't give a fuck what OS you or anyone else use's.

What, you looking at my dick because your an asshole and trying to be filled?

Not drowning but waving....

[afc_wimbledon]

You do not need to struggle like how you do with Windows

Mod me troll if you please, but you may think of it as struggling, I prefer to think of it as consulting. If it was easy, who'd pay me for it?

Re:Wait

[jellomizer]

If you want to nitpick BSD has a higher market share on the Desktop then Linux does. Based on the fact that OS X is based on BSD.

Sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's finally the year of the BSD desktop! I knew this day would come.

that link is wrong

[tresstatus]

not to point out the obvious, but when you go to the change log link from the summary, you actually wind up going to http://www.unixmen.com/content/view/151/11/ which tells you how to install nagios. here is a link to the pcbsd 8.0 changelog... http://www.pcbsd.org/content/view/151/11/

PBI files

[abigor]

One of the nicest things about PC-BSD is the whole PBI idea, which are basically like .pkg files on OS X. When installing apps via PBIs, you get all the dependencies in one shot, which means you don't destabilise your whole system when installing from a central repository where app A requires a library version that breaks apps B, C, D.... This is particularly true when you want to use third party repositories.

PBIs are simply downloaded and installed from places like http://www.pbidir.com/, the process is graphical, and they are easily uninstalled without fuss.

Re:PBI files

[WinterSolstice]

I'm a huge fan of the PBIs and I think they're a really good way to quickly install objects that would otherwise require ports and complex dependencies.

The best part is they don't interfere with each other, unlike some of the apt-get/yum type packages. For the most part they encapsulate everything that would have been in the ports build.

When the PBI is updated, you get a notification and can just clicky click to upgrade it (without trashing the rest of your system just because Gimp 9.9 requires some lib that everything else hates)

Easy to make too - just get the PBI installer, and then build them from the existing port. Porting still remains an exercise for the reader ;)

Installing Firefox, Quake, America's Army, Rhythmbox or Gnome like this is awesome. I hope that it takes off as a model.

Re:PBI files

[tepples]

And as I understand it, the idea of PBI is to simplify the case where "you try to get it from somewhere else".

Re:PBI files

[WinterSolstice]

http://www.pcbsd.org/content/view/20/26/

Pretty much everything that isn't included in the base install of the system. Each one is a full delta snapshot, so far as I understand it.

Yes. This is less disk efficient, but FAR more user time efficient, which is kind of the point.

Re:PBI files

[WinterSolstice]

Ok, I think you missed something.

All PBIs are a delta snapshot of a specific PC-BSD release, and then whatever that app needs to run.

Therefore a PBI built on 8.0-RELEASE will not install on a PC-BSD 7 system. At all. It won't partially install and break things, it just won't install.

That's the whole point of the design. It's like someone else said with the app store, or like building from ports. If your system is wrong, it stops and says "Sorry". It won't break your system. The PBI builder is designed to be version locked.

Let's take Rhythmbox as an example. It's a Gnome App. It requires some (but not all) of the Gnome tools to run. It's a bit heftier than it would be if Gnome were installed by default, but not nearly as big as the full Gnome install. Gnome is, btw, unsupported. The PBI was created because people are allowed to create PBIs for unsupported software, as long as the ports exist :)

By contrast, if we look at Amarok, it has just the Amarok specific stuff since KDE is part of the default install.

Hope that makes a bit more sense?

Re:Wait

[flydpnkrtn]

Er, well that's not quite true. It seems there's a lot of confusion in this area...

The OS X kernel is called XNU, and is Mach-based. It's not the FreeBSD kernel.

OS X's userland is called Darwin, is open source, and IS based on a FreeBSD userland (not kernel)

Just sayin'

Re:Wait

[V!NCENT]

Mac OS X is based on NeXT.

What Apple does is that they recycle open source bits for their own use, and they happened to use some BSD stuff, but Mac OS X is by far not based on BSD! Let's start with the fact that Mac OS X has two kernels instead of one... So there you go...

And also, Apple does occaisionally contribute some stuff back to FreeBSD, so in some sense BSD's marketshare is also a bit of Apple's by your definition...

Re:Wait

[abigor]

XNU features a POSIX api, a process model, networking, and various other bits from FreeBSD, although of course much altered from the original. It sort of wraps Mach.

Why Linux?

[r_benchley]

Why do we need Linux for the desktop? While Windows has the best hardware support coverage among all operating systems, I am curious what are the reasons behind picking Linux for a desktop oriented operating system.

Re:Why Linux?

[ivanwyc]

Simply because windows is not free. And I don't want to reboot my computer as frequent as I change my underwear.

Re:Why Linux?

[Hatta]

While Windows has the best hardware support coverage among all operating systems

That's not true. Linux supports a much greater set of hardware. Since we're not at the mercy of the vendor to keep their drivers updated, Linux is often able to support old hardware that new versions of Windows won't. Not to mention all the architectures Linux has been ported to.

Re:Why Linux?

[pgmrdlm]

Security. Go ahead, pass me a .exe file via one of your hacked web pages. Wait, it doesn't run on my unix/linux box. Damn, you can't infect and make my desktop part of your botnet.

And no, i did not mean you. Sorry, just the only way I could think of phrasing that.

i still use windows as my primary desktop, but I am performing more and more tasks from my FreeBSD KDE desktop.

Definatly ALL my email.

Most of my surfing.

I don't game, so what do I care about games.

open office opens ALL the microsoft files that I need.

So, why do I need microsoft and all the hackers that go with it?

Re:Too hard to switch again

[silverglade00]

It's the same ports system. They just add the capability to use a .pbi file to install a package when you don't want to bother using the ports. This is just another choice.

You can download .pbi file, click, use application.

You can cd /usr/ports/..., make install clean.

You can pkg_add.

If you like using ports, then just think of PC-BSD as getting a desktop up and running quickly without having to manually choose X and KDE during the install.

I love it

[not already in use]

I would love nothing more than to see a BSD licensed solution succeed on the desktop, if nothing more, than to prove to FSF folks the definition of irony when it comes to being "free and open."

SUS and POSIX are identical

[tepples]

POSIX is the portable OS interface, it was originally intended for Unix derivitatives, but it does not define what UNIX is. The Open Group defines what UNIX is

POSIX:2001 and Single UNIX Specification version 3 are identical.

Bah!

[OverZealous.com]

BSD will never work on the desktop! It's far too Unixy.

Now, excuse me as I get back to work on my user-friendly Mac.