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Author Topic: PCBSD - I'm fairly impressed  (Read 3222 times)

toadlife

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PCBSD - I'm fairly impressed
« on: 19 December 2005, 12:27 »
So I have this old Athlon 1GZ box with 384 RAM and a 40Gb hard drive that's been sitting at my mom's house for ages. The power supply died on it about a year ago, and she used a laptop from work, so she didn't care about getting it fixed. I recently bought  a new case, so I had an extra PS and offered to put it in her PC.

Just for kicks, I installed PCBSD 1.0-rc1 on the machine to see how far it has progressed. It's pretty good - though there are a few things I would change. The installer was all graphical and everything installed with minimal input. It's based on FreeBSD 6.0 and starts up with a graphical login to KDE 3.4.3. You install software on it at PCBSD.ORG via a custom package system where you download a package file, double click on it, and you're done. It also has an auto-update systems that download and install both OS and package updates.

A couple of stupid issues so far...

* K3B requires root password to run. It can and should be made to run as non-root by default. Damn the security issues!
* The default regular user is allowed to su to root, but any users you create afterward with their built in user manager can't. The built in user manager does not give you an option to change this.
* The setup program set up my monitor with a max resolution of 1024x768. It's a 19" screen, and can go to 1600x1200. I would have to edit my Xorg config manually to change this.


All of these issues, *I* know how to fix, but the average Joe trying out a non windows OS for the first time would be out of luck.

You guys should give it a whirl.

There is also another Desktop FreeBSD disro called desktopBSD which I might try too.


http://pcbsd.org
http://desktopbsd.net
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Aloone_Jonez

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Re: PCBSD - I'm fairly impressed
« Reply #1 on: 19 December 2005, 13:31 »
How does it compare with some of nube Linux distro's as far as ease of use and power?

I hope that the BSD community will decide on a standard package format if binary disrtibution is going to become the norm - they don't want to end up in the same mess as Linux.
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toadlife

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Re: PCBSD - I'm fairly impressed
« Reply #2 on: 19 December 2005, 13:39 »
Quote from: Aloone_Jonez
How does it compare with some of nube Linux distro's as far as ease of use and power?

I hope that the BSD community will decide on a standard package format if binary disrtibution is going to become the norm - they don't want to end up in the same mess as Linux.

I wouldn't know - I havn't used linux in a couple of years. It's ten times easier than FreeBSD though!

Judging by what I've read about the n00bish linux distros today, I would guess that it doesn't even compare, the reason being that this is a fairly new phenomenon (The drive to make an easy Desktop BSD) and there has not yet a been large body of work put into making BSD easy. The little problems I ran into seem like they would be fairly easy to fix though.

It's a very good start though, and if they get some more developers that can invest some time in the custom KDE apps (like the PCBSD admin/update tools), I think it could be really great.
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ReggieMicheals

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Re: PCBSD - I'm fairly impressed
« Reply #3 on: 19 December 2005, 22:24 »
I gotta to agree with you...
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WMD

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Re: PCBSD - I'm fairly impressed
« Reply #4 on: 19 December 2005, 23:12 »
I'm gonna try this in VMware.  I'll get back to you with the results later.
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WMD

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Re: PCBSD - I'm fairly impressed
« Reply #5 on: 20 December 2005, 03:13 »
Ok, I wasn't able to do very much because I ran out of HD space. :(  However, I browsed through the desktop, and was able to try one of those PBI files.

The verdict?  Brilliance.  I did run into the same resoltion problem as toadlife (except with 800x600 max, because I chose that for the installer), and upon installing Opera it didn't recognize any but a few ugly fonts that made me download Firefox (upon which I ran out of space).

But this is great stuff.  I should try it on a real computer sometime.
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toadlife

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Re: PCBSD - I'm fairly impressed
« Reply #6 on: 20 December 2005, 11:16 »
Wow. I installed "update3" for Rc1 and the mouse stopped working! That's one nasty bug!

If anyone decides to try this, you should look at this thread . I posted a 'fix' the bug.
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Aloone_Jonez

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Re: PCBSD - I'm fairly impressed
« Reply #7 on: 20 December 2005, 19:46 »
What are the minimum system requirements?

Is BSD lighter/heavier than Linux?
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cymon

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Re: PCBSD - I'm fairly impressed
« Reply #8 on: 20 December 2005, 20:47 »
Quote from: Aloone_Jonez
What are the minimum system requirements?

Is BSD lighter/heavier than Linux?


I would assume, seeing as how Linux is just a kernel. But once again, it all depends. You can't really compare it as a whole, just because it depends on the purpose of the distro. One of those single floppy distros would be small, obviously, but the newbie friendly distros would be pretty heavy, with all that GUI crap. Something like Debian would be in the middle. Though I've got a really old PII-300 just waiting for an OS. This sounds a bit heavy, but I think I'll try FreeBSD.
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piratePenguin

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Re: PCBSD - I'm fairly impressed
« Reply #9 on: 20 December 2005, 21:04 »
I wouldn't think there'd be a huge difference performance wise. They both (FreeBSD and GNU/Linux) have excellent kernels, with excellent memory management (I think FreeBSD actually has better memory management than Linux, but only for rarely used stuff that the Linux dev's have yet to bother copying (and it kicks ass that they can copy, from eachother (i.e. share)). That's according to a guy on ##freebsd on freenode, and it's likely not the whole story) and excellent pre-emption stuff (although, I believe Linux to be better there (pre-empting system calls, or something), but I dunno, and I don't think it'd matter too-much overall). Then, they'd be running (mostly) the same user-mode applications and desktop enviornments. So I doubt there'd be a huge difference between the two.
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WMD

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Re: PCBSD - I'm fairly impressed
« Reply #10 on: 20 December 2005, 21:55 »
Hmm, the update3 didn't break my mouse.  But then again, I didn't reboot after installing.  Was that what does it?

As for system requirements, the website says:
Pentium 2 300MHz
128MB RAM
4GB hard drive space (my test showed it to use under 2GB to install, actually)

Not far away from what most Linux distros claim...or XP claims, for that matter.  My testing machine was a VMware machine with a P4 2.8GHz (not including overhead), 160MB RAM, and 2.5GB hard drive (that filled up within 20 minutes because I didn't actually have that much space available).  Very fast.
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toadlife

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Re: PCBSD - I'm fairly impressed
« Reply #11 on: 20 December 2005, 22:28 »
update3 only breaks usb mice....and you have to reboot for it to happen. So if you have a usb mouse and you install the update and reboot your have to do the little fix I posted in that thread. It's not hard.
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WMD

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Re: PCBSD - I'm fairly impressed
« Reply #12 on: 21 December 2005, 02:04 »
Ah, ok...I have a PS/2 mouse anyway.
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solemnwarning

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Re: PCBSD - I'm fairly impressed
« Reply #13 on: 21 December 2005, 05:52 »
Ive got some new ram for my 486 (2x 8MB 72Pin SIMM) to replace the damaged 16MB SIMM, HDD and CDROM are SCSI - im gonna install slack 4.0 on it once the new ram is here
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WMD

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Re: PCBSD - I'm fairly impressed
« Reply #14 on: 21 December 2005, 06:33 »
Quote from: solemnwarning
Ive got some new ram for my 486 (2x 8MB 72Pin SIMM) to replace the damaged 16MB SIMM, HDD and CDROM are SCSI - im gonna install slack 4.0 on it once the new ram is here

This is on topic...how?
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