PC-BSD review
Installation
Since I never played with PC-BSD I decided to install it with VMware. I created a new virtual machine, put the disk in the drive, and booted. Soon I got greeted by a text-menu, but before I could figure out what action to take (I wanted to install but couldn’t see this option in the list in a second) it already had made the default choice. Luckily this led me to the installation, though a few errors were displayed between all the screen output after this initial choice menu (never saw these errors back though).
The rest of the installation was pretty straightforward and presented in a nice graphical way. Some basic options were presented (partitions, language, keyboard, etc) but nothing a person like me couldn’t handle. Compare it to the friendly installers of Suse.
One minor thing that could be improved was the option to select the place of the boot loader. I didn’t found the selection method visually very clear.
At the end of the installation I was offered to set up the password for the root account and create a user.
When the installation was over, I was prompted not to forget to take out the disc and the system rebooted. I made it!
Reboot
After the installation rebooted I was eager to see what was going to happen. The first thing was the boot menu, which I wasn’t very impressed with (just gave me a simple text-menu), but it did its job. I was also looking out for errors that would be displayed but happily couldn’t detect any.
Somewhere in the middle of the boot proces I was greeted with a splash screen (wit a “PC-BSD start system” message) but it was gone before KDE was presented, so computer output was still present afterwards. That makes this screen quite meaningless IMHO.
At the end of the boot proces, which doesn’t take that long (but I’m no speed freak though), KDE was loading.
May I suggest Kororaa to you? It is a Gentoo based distro. it has an incredible amount of available software (22.000+). Which can as easily be installed as apt-get trough the kuroo installer. I consider myself still a newbie but Kororoaa is the one that helped me to learn linux.
More info:
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=kororaa
http://kororaa.org/
Comment by HXC — January 26, 2006 @ 3:36 pm
Hey HXC,
Thanks for the comment. I’ll surely take a closer look at it.
Comment by dissurion — January 26, 2006 @ 4:17 pm
You might want to try Kanotix. You can test drive
it from the cd drive as its a live distro. Of course
you only really see it in action when its on the hard drive…
After slackware, debian, mandriva, ubuntu, kubuntu, gentoo, fedora and vector, I have settled on this one. (Though of course I’m bound to try a few
others).
I run a dual boot: Freebsd and Kanotix. Freebsd is
an absolute cracker of a system, but it takes work to make it behave… In Linux I was looking for something that just worked, wanting a fullyautomatic system next to my freebsd (something that would help get the wife interested in life beyond windows), and figuring that with all the desktop development going on, there should be something usable out there.
Anyway, the wife still uses windows on her machine, but I have hopes for my daughter with Kanotix…
Comment by pparada — January 27, 2006 @ 3:59 am
What about Xandros? It is almost too close to windows, but the business version with crossover office is slick.
Comment by kevwit — January 27, 2006 @ 8:17 pm
By the way to change conf. files you don’t need to log in as root simply go to menu and choose run and after type kdesu i believe is like this name of editor vi or another one and the path to the file after pwd and that’s it.. cheers i tested pc-bsd from 0.7 beta till now mixed with a lot of linux distros
Comment by Duarte — January 30, 2006 @ 6:04 am
I’m a real big fan of PC-BSD’s lesser known cousin, DesktopBSD. It’s an easy to run desktop, but you don’t have the problems introduced by running .pbi’s. Instead, it uses a synaptic-like front-end to ports. Every file is built from source, so no conflicts with .pbi’s, and no messing around with command line syntax to install packages.
In the end, however, I find that FreeBSD and it’s derivatives just don’t have the hardware compatibility that I need, so I stick with debian derivatives and suse.
Comment by Morgan — February 3, 2006 @ 2:02 am
Nice review, very windows centric. But that’s not a problem since I’m a windows junkie. I love to use windows, but always eager to try other system. PCBSD is one of my favorites like debian or slack
Comment by dwilicious — February 3, 2006 @ 8:54 am