PC-BSD 0.5a Beta: BSD For Dummies 98
linuxbeta writes "PC-BSD 0.5a beta has now been released! You can download the 670Mb ISO file from our download page. This version fixes some minor bugs, and now has fully automatic network support. Screenshots available." So what's it all about? From the PC-BSD FAQ: "This OS has as its goals to be user-friendly, especially in the area of software installation and management, something that many of the *nix based distros have not yet mastered."
I question the motive behind "User Friendly" (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally I don't think a "User Friendly" flavor of BSD is needed. What is needed is trained admins.
BSD is not meant at all for average joe; and selling it as such is misrepresenting the collective BSD OS. BSDs are powerful, stable, secure server and workstation OSes. NetBSD also runs good on your toaster.
Re:I question the motive behind "User Friendly" (Score:5, Insightful)
Under GPL (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Ooooo... Graphical installer! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:screenshots. (Score:5, Insightful)
They are to show the new guys what is in store for them when they get the system up and running and how the desktop will look.
As remember this is targeted at the "Newbies" and most of them probably have never seen KDE let alone know what it is
Re:I question the motive behind "User Friendly" (Score:5, Insightful)
Ain't gonna happen. There are already 3 major BSD's aimed at the trained admin.
On the other hand, there's only 1 BSD aimed at the end user, and it's not free (OS X). This BSD fills an empty niche.
BSD is not meant at all for average joe; and selling it as such is misrepresenting the collective BSD OS.
BSD isn't "meant" for anyone. It's just aimed at the trained UNIX user because it's not a reasonable OS to aim at the average joe. OS X proves that you can aim a BSD at the computer neophyte, while still satisfying the upper echelon of UNIX gurus. I don't expect this new BSD to be as user-friendly as OS X, but it will be free. Let's hope great things come of it.
Re:KDE on FreeBSD (Score:3, Insightful)
Believe it or not, you don't need the eye candy to get work done. Many computer tasks don't even need a human in the loop.
Why is this a separate project? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is this being launched as "PC-BSD"? This is just the standard FreeBSD installer redone (word for word) with a GUI interface. And by standard this I mean straight out of the box, without any tweaks. KDE doesn't even have font smoothing turned on!
Let's not pretend that "PC-BSD" is something new or exciting. It doesn't fill a new niche (Free / Open / Net) or take the OS in a new direction (Dragonfly). As it stands, other than the GUI installer this is strictly "Look mom, I made me a distro!" However, if done as part of the FreeBSD effort this could be valuable.
I'm sure the FreeBSD team would welcome these folks' effort at building a GUI installer (not that the text one is difficult to use...it is very straightforward), and instructions on contributing to FreeBSD are available at www.freebsd.org.
Re:I question the motive behind "User Friendly" (Score:3, Insightful)
You aren't the target market (plus suggestions) (Score:5, Insightful)
People complaining about server installs and power user installs shouldn't use this: they are not the target market, and they should quit complaining and simply not use it: no loss.
Complaining about the desktop choice is another self-defeating proposition: he had to pick *something*, and it had to be one thing to start with, not "pick one of 1000". It also has the benefit of giving a platform target ABI to developers who want to do desktop applications: one of the biggest reasons UNIX systems don't end up with a lot of applications is lack of a uniform target ABI. Even if the API was the same across multiple look-and-feel values, it's not enough to attract developers: requiring a recompilation means doubling their support and testing burdens, as well as their SKU count (if they don't ship all versions on the same CD/DVD).
One of the best things MacOS X did, from this perspective, is *not* open up the GUI code, so that people have a hard time making a zillion incompatible versions and shipping them around, fragmenting the market. I hope he does not cave in to pressure to "pull a RedHat" with a "KDE or Gnome" option.
For the average user, it's a step in the right direction, and one that all of the BSD's, save MacOS X, have been too snobby to take on their own (or too caught up in the myth of the server being the only market space that's a valid target for a BSD based OS).
There are a couple of things that could be changed to make it better, but it's miles above the fear-inspiring raw text prompt and ASCII graphics of the normal FreeBSD installer.
Instead of a hierarchical relationship between things you have to fill out, as in sysinstall, where it's an exercise for the student to traverse the installation/configuration tree, it's a simple linear progression.
Instead of dropping you to a raw login prompt, it drops you to a KDE login.
All in all, it removes much of the "fear barrier" that keeps people from even considering installing a BSD operating system on their machine in the first place.
I dislike the use of the GPL, but given that it's written against a GPL'ed toolkit, it's excusable in the face of what it provides.
Here's what else I think it needs to really polish it off:
o Graphical partition editor
It currently assumes you have a free partition lying around, and it doesn't really permit editing it. I know this is a very hard nut to crack, and that Partition Magic has an entire product dedicated to the task (AFAIK, it's the only product that can safely resize NTFS partitions); I'm not sure how doable this is, but it's near the top of the list.
NB: The only reasonably way I have ever come up with to deal with this, short of contracting the work out the the P.M. people, is a Window NT install program that allocated a chunk of disk space *inside* the NTFS, and then a booter program that is an icon on the NT desktop, and let FreeBSD use the existing allocated NTFS file as a fielsystem, after hacking the block driver to make it appear virtually contiguous. I expect that this will be the last thing on my list implemented, if ever.
o Creation of an "admin" account, rather than root
This would just be the initial user's account, with rights to "sudo"; they could name it anything they wanted to name it. The root account would be disabled by default; you could always enable it via "sudo passwd" later, if you wanted to be able to login as root instead of the user.
o Automatic walk-through for the configuration
If you have an initial account other than the root account, you can walk the user immediately through the account-specific configuration. This would be a smoother transition, rather than stopping, requiring a login, and then continuing.
o Automatic login as the admin user
I realize that this may seem much less anal than a typical UNIX appraoch to things, but it's possible to do this relatively safely, simpy by enabling a screen saver
Re:Torrent? (Score:4, Insightful)
I disagree with making things "easy" (Score:3, Insightful)
All the Linux/OSX/Windows users will pull the "stodgy bsd user/you just want to seem l337" card. FWIW i've used fbsd for 1 year, linux for 7, windows for 3 and OSX for 2, and my opinion has been the same forever.
Just as someone noted early on, we need to make smarter users, not dumber computers. "Dumbing down" an OS, program or anything doesn't really make it more simple. It's just a facade over the real complexity underneath.
What's more, the user outgrows this crutch quickly, and then all the "simplification" stuff gets in their way from there on out.
Secondly, we don't need to introduce non-geeky people to geek-oriented OSes. They won't really get anything out of it, no differently than geeky people won't get anything out of a "user-friendly" os such as MacOS9 or Windows95.
Yeah, i know that there is OSX, which is claiming to "bridge the gap", but 99% of Mac users are actually using Aqua and all it's iStuff, not puttering around the underlying *BSD bits. Some folks here will pipe up and say they spend loads of time in the guts, sure, but this is the BSD section on
Thirdly, if something great comes of this, well... great. More power to them. But watch for the OSX zealots* to cry foul and say "It's just another PC-Folks ripping of the Mac-Folks thing" and "Copycat OSX/BSD for the PC!" and stuff.
Fourthly, though i will say that BSD is a much better foundation that Linux (for a lot of reasons) to base an OS on, I don't expect it to reach wide popularity, no differently than some of the more "user friendly" Linux distros (Lycoris, Lindows, et al).
* by "zealots", i mean the loud, vocal segment of Mac users that Just Don't Get It(tm), not ALL Mac users.
Re:Why is this a separate project? (Score:3, Insightful)
PC-BSD does fill a niche; a BSD equivalent to something like Mandrake or Ubuntu. I love FreeBSD, but I can't imagine Joe Average being able to do all of the things necessary in order to actually use his shiny new FreeBSD desktop; he'll have to recompile his kernel to support his sound card and other devices, upgrade his ports, learn how to install X, and some other non-newbie friendly stuff.
Enter PC-BSD. PC-BSD is pretty much a hybrid of FreeBSD and KDE. It has a graphical installer, a graphical interface for FreeBSD ports, graphical tools for setup, and uses KDE as a graphical desktop. It would be very nice for those who want to get away from Windows and want to have the security and stability of a BSD, yet still have the usability.
There are just one minor qualm that I have with PC-BSD: the use of the GPL rather than the BSD license for PC-BSD-specific tools. It's nothing to be mad about (I have nothing against the GPL; I use GPL'd software all the time), nor is it anything that would impact PC-BSD's expected user base, but I think that the BSD license is one of the most important parts of the BSD philosophy. Plus, this would also mean that (Free|Open|Net)BSD would probably never import PC-BSD's features, solely because of licensing Then again, KDE is under the GPL, and the BSDs themselves have some GPL'd components (such as gcc) included with it, so it's not a problem for me.