Submitted by After months and months of work, the PC-BSD team released v1.0 final. “PC-BSD software is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PC-BSD 1.0 for x86 based processors. This first ‘non-beta’ release of PC-BSD ushers in a new era of stability and simplicity for desktop operating systems based on UNIX. Powered by the latest FreeBSD 6.0 and integrated with KDE 3.5.2, PC-BSD provides a solid server base, while being user-friendly enough to run as a primary desktop system.” Changelog, release notes, and download, of course.
Cool! At last PC-BSD is here. Hope people will enjoy the new features. This release comes with much work from the translators, with more than 50 different languages, I think we can congratulate the excellent work of all of them, for the hours of work they have provided during their little free time. One good feature that many people asked for is when you put a CD, DVD or plug a USB Flash drive, PC-BSD auto-detects it and asks you what you wanna do, a must have. Also, for the USB key, an icon appears on the desktop to unmount it safely. A hard work has been done to enhance fonts too. The “Search” field of Konqueror is pretty neat too, Opera and Firefox had it, why Konqueror wouldn’t?
Also, more than 40 bugs have been fixed, very important, hope the “Bug report” forum will be less crowdy now! 
And obviously there is the easy system installer, and the PBI system to install software in 2-3 clicks!
Enjoy this release of PC-BSD, and spread the word!
The “Search” field of Konqueror is pretty neat too,…., why Konqueror wouldn’t?
The search field has been in Konqueror for ages, at least 3.3 or 3.2 if not earlier. Personally I find it quite annoying and useless, and the first thing I turn off if it’s enabled. The webshortcuts are all you need, gg: wp: imdb: kde: qt: etc.
Edited 2006-04-30 17:01
I couldn’t agree more. When I first started using linux, I used the search box in Konqueror all the time (simply because this is what I’d used in Firefox under Windows).
Now I find myself trying to type gg: into the address bar of Internet Explorer. It doesn’t like it
You have to use ? [word]. And IE will search for that word using the default search engine. This feature has been in IE for a longtime now.
The “Search” field of Konqueror is pretty neat too, Opera and Firefox had it, why Konqueror wouldn’t?
While I find the search input field quite a good addition, I prefer using CTRL+L to get into the URL input field and then using KDE’s web shortcuts, for example “gg:KDE” to search on Google for “KDE”
Yes, well, I don’t use the search fild, I use the shortcut (in Opera, in my case), but PC-BSD is aimed at being user-friendly, and most people don’t know about these useful shortcuts. They would probably type http://www.google.com instead of using the shortcut, for not knowing…
Anyone who tried both “distributions”?
I’d really like to know which one is better in terms of (software/ports) compatibility and stability.
I tried to use DesktopBSD but couldn’t, since it’s based on Free 5.4, just like I couldn’t use PC 0.9. But once PC upgraded to Free 6.0 source, it did a much better job recognizing my hardware minus my ethernet. Desktop said they won’t upgrade until 6.1 is officially released, and since they release their’s in DVD, I’m sure it’ll be a smoking system. So I would recommend PC-BSD for the pbi’s number 1, and number 2, for using Free 6.0 source, it works much better with hardware, higher range of compatability, that kind of thing. But if you want 64, including dual core I’m sure, then have to use Desktop. But once Desktop updates their source after the next Free release, and PC does likewise after it comes out, then I don’t see it making any difference, unless the pbi installs are important to you, assuming the pbi packages are kept regularly up to date. I say just go BSD and use ports. Personally I think going PC-BSD with ports is the best, but I haven’t found anything wrong with DesktopBSD aside from the fact that it’s based on older source, but I’m sure 4, 6 weeks, that’s all going to change for the both of them!
B-S-D, B-S-D, B-S-D, B-S-D, B-S-D
I have installed both PCBSD and DesktopBSD under vmware.
Both are pretty impressive.Besides a lot of pbi’s there’s ofcource good the old ports-tree with portsnap,portupgrade..
I tried one of the earlier betas and was impressed. It worked very well and was easy to use, and I had never tried any version of BSD before. I’m anxious to try out version 1.0
I like the new installer.Allthough not bug free yet it’s a good start.After install of the pakage(s) the menu updating tool pops up.At least someone thinks it’s time to get rid of those ugly emty not found icons 🙂
Couldn’t resist to tryout <portupgrade -NrRa> from cli 🙂
Very nice art work btw
I like it overall, but is there any way to change the cartoony devil horns logo back to the normal KDE logo?
Yep, this tutorial might help you, although I don’t know by heart wher you’ll find the K logo to stick it back:
http://www.pcbsd.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1942
Thanks
BSD is a nice OS at it’s core and it’s nice to see somebody making something usable by lesser species of nerds (or even the odd NORMAL person) than the normal BSD user.
How does this stack up to DesktopBSD? Better? Worse? I only want to know because I intend on downloading one, I’m just not sure which.
I guess it’s all about flavours. Both have their benefits I suppose. I haven’t really tried Desktop BSD for a while but I have tried PCBSD and I love it.
I think at some point these two will merge (or I wouldn’t be surprised if they will at least), but if there is room for 300 linux desktop distros I’m confident there is room for 2 BSD flavours for the desktop.
As usual, they seem to have 2 different approaches to 3rd party add-ons. PCBSD go for .pbi (which works brilliant) while Desktopbsd uses Ports.
There is becoming a bigger archive of .pbis as we speak but can’t compete with the volume of ports at all. Luckily on PCBSD you can use ports but with a little more hazzle. Obviously it’s logical for these 2 to merge, .pbi for “native” (ehrm or what you wanna call it) DesktopBSD could move their ports system to PCBSD for seminative but easier install than traditional Portinstalls.
My view on all this is simply that I figure that PCBSD has started later but accomplished a lot more in less time. Therefor I’d recommend you to go with that for now (unless something happens).
Truly impressive, easy to install. Few weird things, though.
Keyboard during install: no us layout available, Syria is on top of the (cut off alphabetic) list. I chose english uk at long last, reset it in kde later.
No mic boost option available in kmix. I need that for skype, ekiga ea. I read somewhere you had to recompile the kernel after tweaking ac97.c. ?????
LibFlash pbi nowhere to be found (found it on 1.0rc last week). Seems to be missing on purpose (?).
Lastly, after installing the ports system, linux binary compatibility and the bsd java sdk/jre, compiling eclipse SDK landed me right in some gtk gnome dependency hell. Unrecoverable.
Other than that, great 1.0!
Edited 2006-05-01 05:30
Ditto to most of the above…install went smoothly, recognized all of my hardware except for the correct Samsung 700IFT monitor specs, then the hunt for libflash.pbi. It’s missing from the PBI site as mentioned in “kneewobbleer”‘s note so I installed from ports. I experienced the same Gnome/GTK warnings and failed builds of Moz 1.5.2 and VLC!!! Hopefully these things will get worked out as this in most respects is a painless way to get FreeBSD up and running in short order. My complements to the Team…Great Work!!!
I’ve been running PC-BSD in vmware for a bit, and it’s really impressive! The PBI-system is probably the neatest thing, and why something like it hasn’t been embraced by any Linux distro boggles the mind. The repository-based package management systems out there are the biggest usabillity flaw in Linux. Sure, apt and friends are great for servers, but for a desktop they’re overly complicated. Also, because of all the shared libraries, they make it hard to make packages that work on multiple distros. If you could just download a .pbi, testing development versions or finding new software would be much easier.
Gentoo BSD will give some nice PC-OpenBSD and PC-NetBSD along with PC-FreeBSD. I think 2006 is also the year of BSD besides my beloved Linux.
Ok, first, what happens when you install apps using the FreeBSD ports system, you know, the cd /usr/ports/xxx/xxx && make&& make install clean way? Does it put the shortcuts correctly on KDE’s menu? I am not sure how .pbi is now regarding volume in repos. Second, does the freebsd way of upgrading (make buildkernel installkernel…etc) works just the same with PC-BSD? I hope they did not deviate too much from the freebsd way of things. I personally think having too much difference from freebsd makes it less tasteful. Thanks.
PC-BSD includes the ports & standard supfiles in the root home folder. Doing the standard cvsup will populate /usr/ports and /usr/src .. from there, you can install ports/compile the system as normal on any other FreeBSD 6 system. Bottom line: if you need a FreeBSD desktop, PC-BSD is a great way to get there fast while still letting you harness the full power of FreeBSD 6.
Looks good! I’ve been holding off until 1.0, so now I’m eager to try it.
One minor annoyance about the BSDs is that they all seem to default to the C shell. The first thing I do is install Bash so I can function comfortably.
But I don’t even see Bash in the “All included packages” list in the release notes, so I assume that means I still have to download it separately. It just seems odd to me that the most important (IMO) package or port isn’t even included.
Now that it has hit 1.0 final I have been wondering. I use OpenSuSE 10, it is fine unless I want to install something not through YaST. So like how is it in campared to OpenSuSE 10?
Does it allow root with the pasword chose by you? Kubutu (sp?) didn’t.
Is it user-friendly without being dumbed down?
How good is the hardware detection, like if it works on OpenSuSE 10 it will work on PC-BSD right?
Oh & does it have a complete control panel?
Their Firefox package is a bit outdated.
http://www.pbidir.com/packages.php?code=65
(
http://www.pbidir.com/developers.php?action=s
Rejected Josh Firefox 1.5.0.1
)
I see they have sun jdk and jre pbi package.
Can they distribuite binary packages of sun java ?
I’m not entirely sure, but FreeBSD has recently been granted this ability throught the FreeBSD Foundation.
I don’t think they are allowed, but they are simple repackaging the FreeBSD jdk and jre into an easy to use pbi.