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24-hour Test Drive of PC-BSD
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Jun 19, 2007 03:11 PM
from the might-get-a-few-reluctant-IT-folks-on-board dept.
from the might-get-a-few-reluctant-IT-folks-on-board dept.
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.'"
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Am I the only one.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Am I the only one.. (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I have not installed BSD for a while (Score:2)
Re: I have not installed BSD for a while (Score:3, Interesting)
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 Linu
"a FreeBSD derivative that emphasizes ease of use" (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't that a Mac?
Flame On!
No (Score:2)
Re:"a FreeBSD derivative that emphasizes ease of u (Score:2)
It's a Mac running VMWare Fusion http://www.vmware.com/beta/fusion/features.html [vmware.com].
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Do we really need this? (Score:3, Interesting)
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I tried to install Ubuntu last week, and it couldn't figure out my monitor's resolution of 1920x1200 (a pretty common one nowadays). After an hour of fiddling with it and reading technical advice on forums, I accidentally crashed the X-server and could no longer log into the GUI.
That is far from user friendly
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Re:Do we really need this? (Score:5, Insightful)
I tried to install Windows last week, and it required special drivers to recognize the hard drive. Worse than that, it demanded I enter all kinds of activation keys and jump through various hoops just to get work done. It also didn't include an office suite (a pretty common productivity tool nowadays). After an hour of fiddling with it and reading the useless quickstart guide, I accidentally got infected with malware and could no longer use the computer.
That is far from user friendly. In fact, I would almost say that it was user-hostile.
Of course, different people have different definitions of 'friendly.'
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
-Gentoo: Only took me a combined (installed it maybe 3 times) 3 days, 7 tries and 2 forum searches (for getting around a bug in the install process) to get running. Worked fine but one I wanted to try wouldn't install period.
-Debian: Worked fine mostly, a lot of manual stuff and the docs downright suck (compared to Gentoo with its forums). That is till I tried getting suspend mode working only to have it keep locking
Re:Do we really need this? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Do we really need this? (Score:4, Funny)
Not if you're trying to install it on a PC.
Parent
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Re:Do we really need this? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a lot of great hardware that is extremely poorly supported under Linux. Certainly, that's not the fault of Linux or its developers, but it's absurd to pretend it's just "shitty hardware".
Parent
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How about you shut up, and go do something, versus tell other people what NOT to do.
I'm a Windows user who runs Linux servers (not very good at the latter, especially without my admin), and when I saw this article advertising shallower learning curve for Windows users, I downloaded it. And I plan to evaluate it and very likely use it.
Friendly name (Score:2)
no dependency issues with apps (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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This is something that's always puzzled me anyway. Unix in general, at least on systems with shared libraries (everyone now) generally specifies version numbers in the libraries. So there's nothing stopping you (in the
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Learning curve (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Note to Open Source OS pushers... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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Links, links, links... (Score:3, Informative)
Official PCBSD web [pcbsd.org] and download page [pcbsd.org].
--
The easiest way to earn money with your web [text-link-ads.com].
Baffled by the hardware (Score:2)
VMWare image available (Score:5, Informative)
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 [pcbsd.org]
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.
I recommend the same for Windows users (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I've also test driven PC-BSD (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:I've also test driven PC-BSD (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
Trolling? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
userfriendly? (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds terribly userfriendly, even my mother would have no trouble installing this.
wait...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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
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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 fa
Re:Will somebody please explain... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
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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 packa
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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.
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My question is whether this would pull Windows users into it that might be put off by GPL or if it would snipe users of Ubuntu.
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Re:Will somebody please explain... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Will somebody please explain... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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Re:What's the real difference (Score:5, Informative)
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 [freebsd.org], 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
Parent