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Not to nitpick but PC-BSD is not a "distribution" per se, but rather an interpretation of FreeBSD. :-) I do agree with you, however, that PC-BSD is one of the best operating systems out there, for beginners to UNIX to sysadmins alike. If VirtualBox support were on par with Linux systems, I might be persuaded to switch to PC-BSD myself.
Oh I disagree. I run KDE on my main machine and absolutely love it.
Sure, my other systems run DWM, XFCE or competely headless (depending on their individual role). But for general computing I find KDE very effective for productivity.
Even though I prefer WindowMaker for my desktop, I still must have the KDE software installed. There are just too many nice tools: Kate, Kompare, Konsole, Umbrello, Konqueror, and the best of all is the integrated remote login management, so you can browse, edit, and save files locally or via SFTP/FTP/Samba/NFS without even thinking about it. No other desktop suite offers anything remotely as flexible.
Not to nitpick but PC-BSD is not a "distribution" per se, but rather an interpretation of FreeBSD. "
Sorry to nitpick, but you are wrong.
PC-BSD is a distribution of FreeBSD. They take FreeBSD, they modify some stuff, they add some stuff, they remove some stuff, they add a nice KDE GUI wrapper over it all, and add their PBI stuff. The FreeBSD community at large calls PC-BSD a distribution of FBSD.
Because they want to make sure that the ISOs, the source, etc are spread out on all the mirrors before unleashing the masses on their servers. It's the same process that's been in place for a decade (complete release, push to mirrors, wait, announce release).
Absolutely amazing how this comes up for every single release.
And now it's been announced, and available for download:
http://www.freebsd.org
Assuming the base and kernel is left untouched (from FreeBSD), it's likely you will have problems with PC-BSD... The 7.x series has an issue with Apple USB keyboards (on macbooks at least) and 8.0, 8.1-RC2 as well as 9.0-CURRENT will not boot; failing on an ACPI error (disabling ACPI at the loader presents a different boot problem).
I'm still waiting for a realistic solution on http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=12289&page=1 if you'd like to be kept up-to-date on the issue.
(I have a macbook 6,1)
Edited 2010-07-22 02:12 UTC
]. Check out FreeSBIE, as far as I know, there's no recent version of it (FreeBSD 5 and 6 versions are available).
Frenzy 1.2, based on FreeBSD 8.0, is available. No GUI (it's an admin rescue CD afterall), but it is very useful for testing if a system will boot/work with FreeBSD. And for rescuing systems that won't boot off the harddrive (or for imaging systems, or ...).
http://frenzy.org.ua/eng/
I did not installed it on *mac*, but check these:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/AppleMacbook
http://wiki.freebsd.org/IntelMacMini
I can't remember the last version of PC-BSD I've tried, maybe 6.x? I'm going to download and install it tonight. Just read that it does in fact support my wireless card on my laptop (B43 in linux) so that is all the more reason for me to try it. Just need to check to see if it supports my soundcard of which I don't remember the model, and NTFS. Then I'd be all set.
It has a driver equivalent for B43, yes, but for me the 8.0 release didn't work with it. I got the WLAN card up and running but soon my logs would fill with error messages and the network connection would be cut for random periods of time and randomly throughout the day. That's why I had to move my wireless server away from FreeBSD to Linux. Haven't tried 8.1 yet.
Years ago I tried PC-BSD because it seemed really cool. The installer was way more advanced and far easier than Ubuntu's installer, even now. I always wanted it to work and this was back when I was considering a move to the BSD's. But with PC-BSD there was always the problem of the password. I would enter a tough password consisting of letters, numbers and special characters and I would use around 18 to 20 characters. Then once I made it to the login screen the password would never be accepted. Even if that was no longer the case I would never leave Ubuntu nowadays.



