PCBSD 0.7 was released. This release is built from the FreeBSD 5.4 core, and fixes many bugs from earlier versions, as well as updating the package manager/creator.
PC-BSD 0.7 released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I can’t wait till they reach their goal. It seems they are updating it rapidly, which is great. If all goes well, maybe, just maybe I’ll use it more than GNU/Linux as they realize the goals that I want and like.
If the screenshots work as they claim then this looks like someone has a good grasp of the average computer user and using UNIX. Looks very easy to install. Very cool
Why the PC-BSD spam in the OpenBSD story comments?
Actually, I believe that honor goes to 386BSD; but that was a long time ago and as everyone preaches “the desktop isn’t what is was then.”
> Why the PC-BSD spam in the OpenBSD story comments?
It is neither spam (Not trying to sell anything) not unrelated. It’s a talk about BSD.
They have done a great job already. It’s pretty sweet and the software install idea is SMART! Wish there was the same simple installer for Linux.
Yea I know apt is great etc. But an installer that never has to worry about dependencies. (Even APT can get jacked up with that. Not as much as other installers but it can still happen)
But if you could make an installer like that that could work across all versions of Linux would be the KILLER app.
Anyway, I am a Linux guy but I must say GREAT WORK GUYS!
> and as everyone preaches “the desktop isn’t what is was then.”
Thank God! I would be selling hamburgers!!
HAHAHa, well, better to not tell to Apple guys, them would get socked by that news!! they can get a depression!!! haha
There is an gtk itunes work-a-like floating around.
I wonder why it is that specifically BSD threads attract so many trolls while most of the linux threads go unmolested. It’s not like the BSDs are competing with Linux, yet there seems an endless supply if casual users that feel theatened by them, enough to trash pretty much every BSD thread that comes across OSnews. I realizse this post iself could be seen as bate or the continuance of said flames, hard to avoid and I’m sorry for that.
I don’t usually feed trolls, but in this case Anonymous has a point. There is not much really good desktop software available for FreeBSD (or for Linux for that matter), at least in the areas in which I’m interested.
For FreeBSD it could be that there are not that many desktops running. Even SoftMaker, who has a decent Word clone, seems to be backing away from FreeBSD. CodeWeavers does not release their product for FreeBSD and it does not run under Linux emulation.
For this reason I do hope that PCBSD gets substantial penetration: there will be more desktop software available. I’ve invested in getting to know FreeBSD well enough that I probably won’t install it, but if I were starting now, I sure would.
If BSD is dead, better tell yahoo, they use it exclusively.
It’s a nice distro and has some really unique ideas. I think modeling install/update after the windows installer is a winner. Linux is really a bummer when it comes to updrages and installs. That’s my biggest problem with *NIXes, the customers expect them to install and update like WindowsXP.
I don’t usually feed trolls, but in this case Anonymous has a point. There is not much really good desktop software available for FreeBSD (or for Linux for that matter), at least in the areas in which I’m interested.
————————————————————–
Well, there is plenty of good software for FreeBSD.
http://www.freebsd.org/ports
Please take note:
“There are currently 12892 ports in the FreeBSD Ports Collection.”
Yes, there is over 12,000 ports in the tree. So that means you have things such as:
OpenOffice
FireFox / Mozilla
Amarok
Flac
Mplayer
VLC
Thuderbird
Slypheed
Scribus
Sodipodi
There is a lot of software out there in the FreeBSD universe. Please take a second look and see if that changes your mind.
Enjoy
Maybe this great Distro grabs much attention to BSD.
because I belive it ROCKS
There is a lot of software out there in the FreeBSD universe. Please take a second look and see if that changes your mind.
———————
I often see the list of software cited above (usually with more entries) with claims made for it. My opinion is that those who claim this simply have not pushed the software and are impressed by lists with a lot of entries.
I’ve tried most of the non-multimedia software you list. The browsers are good enough, as generally is Gnome (and probably KDE; I’ve not used it).
However, a lot of the mainstream desktop applications are simply NOT good enough. OO.o, for example, is not. It is simply not compatible enough with Word (PowerPoint compatibility is even worse), and that compatibility is REALLY important. I’ve not tried the beta of 2.0 yet; perhaps this is better. TextMaker was even worse in some documents that are important to me that are only available in .doc format.
Let me give you today’s example: An important potential strategic partner sent me a proposal that was awarded government funding. It was delivered in RTF format (I know, I know), and OO.o choked on it — it crashed. My copy of Word 2000 on an old machine 98SE machine opened it fine.
Could I have asked for version in .doc format, for example? Sure, but I had enough trouble getting this in the first place, and Word files (in whatever format) are the lingua franca of the business community. One needs to be able to read these without flaw every time. And there was no guarantee that the .doc file would have been read with OO.o any better.
Now this was a horribly complex document — an extremely technical scientific proposal with complicated boilerplate, detailed figures and the whole nine yards. But this is the sort of thing I need — it is not a luxury.
I can give you other examples (don’t get me going on the GIMP), but what I have learned is that industrial-quality desktop tools compatible with the mainstream are simply not available on open-source platforms. They are fine for non-critical things, but not for anything terribly complicated.
I do hope that changes (and that’s why I support PCBSD), as I’m a Berkeley Unix hand of over 20 years, and I don’t want to give that up. My main machine runs FreeBSD, and it will continue to. But I sure wish that better software would be available. I’d gladly pay for it.
BSD is dead. Putting a “PC” in front of it ain’t nothing but necrophilia.
Ironically, desktop *BSD is only just taking off…… one example – there are increasing numbers of desktop Linux users who are just starting to find that FreeBSD (for example) can be quite a useable desktop for them….. – a direct parallel can be drawn to a Windows “power user” in mid-2002 who started to realise that “desktop Linux” could be useable for them – there seems to be a similar phenomenon at work here ……..
Read this:
http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/images/e/e5/Metafilter.jpg
Kudos to the PC-BSD project. This FreeBSD “distro” aimed at the desktop is very promising, and even if it’s a newborn, it managed to attract tons of attention. It’s also climbing the distrowatch.com list pretty quickly.
At last, the stability and power of BSD will be brought to the average user.
Since this place is (sadly, IMHO) starting to become like slashdot, here’s a gentle reminder of *facts* about BSD.
~~~ FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3367381
“FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year.”
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/06/07/nearly_25_million_acti…
“[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003.”
What’s New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
http://bsd.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/04/133253&tid=122&tid=…
“FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can’t do much more than 100kpps.”
~~~ NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
http://www.serverwatch.com/sreviews/article.php/3427681
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
http://bsd.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/03/2235255&tid=95
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)
http://netbsd.org/Changes/#internet2-landspeed2
~~~ OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1730774,00.asp
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/11/16/1544210
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.
http://www.openssh.org/usage/ssh-stats.html
~~~ *BSD in general:
The world’s safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
http://www.mi2g.com/cgi/mi2g/press/021104.php
“The world’s safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment – operating system plus applications – is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin.”
BSD Success Stories (O’Reilly, 2004) (pdf)
http://linux.oreilly.com/news/bsd_ss.pdf
(from Onlamp BSD DevCenter)
http://www.onlamp.com/bsd/
“The BSDs – FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others – have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration.”
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well – undisputedly.
http://www.keltia.net/photos/Bellamy/Daemonette/daemonette_bg1024_t…
—
Being able to read *other people’s* source code is a nice thing, not a ‘fundamental freedom’.
PC-BSD is a very nice project. I’ve installed on my PC yesterday. I was sceptic. During the install process I’ve answer only five or six questions and after 20 minutes i’am able to login a newly installed BSD-based operating system. Everithing is went smooth…
I found some screenshots here:
http://www.hup.hu/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=8837
hi there, i’m sorry when i got a bit frustrated and posted about pcbsd in topics for openBSD and solaris…but as they are unix…again sorry!
so good to see an offical topic here
pcbsd could move many “unskilled” users to use bsd.
under the hood its a 99.9% freeBSD which won’t change!!
cause the intention is not to give up the good “handbook” and the knowledge by creating something new!
so through pcbsd i had first contact with freebsd and i’m overwhelmed!!
lets go hand in hand…
freeBSD on servers and pc-bsd on desktops
This project is incredible. It is only the second beta (I believe) and so polished? Very nice installer, beautiful fonts, great KDE customization…
It has taken years and/or large teams for some linux distros to reach similar results.
And this comes from a big linux fan.
FreeBSD and Linux are opensource so why so much hatred for BSD. These guys are going to die fighting with each other and Microsoft (the communists) is going to win as the two fools could never get along.
And keep up the good work
“FreeBSD and Linux are opensource so why so much hatred for BSD”
I totally disagree. There are many people who love both and I am a good example. What has put me off from the BSDs so far is the steep learning curve. I wanted to connect my ASDL modem but even something that simple required a kernel recompile and a lot of manual editing. That is why this project is extremely welcome and everybody should support it.
>There will never be something like Steinberg for this OS.
Try ardour, rosegarden or muse.
>There will never be something like Premiere for this OS.
Cinelerra.
>There will never be something like Dreamweaver for this OS.
Try Quantaplus for KDE. To me it’s doing a better job than DW without being such a resource-pig. QP’s code editor is without doubt better than DW’s, and the WYSIWYG editor in DW is pretty much useless since it doesn’t support CSS very well.
>There will never be something like Audition for this OS.
Rezound. Audition has it’s strong points compared to Rezound, but Rezound’s got a couple of nice features too. Check out the oscilloscope, for example.
>There will never be something for this OS that makes it useful.
What a statement ,-)
Dunno, but my tasks are mostly in these fields, and I often feel these free apps do the job better than their propriotery counterparts. At least you should check out the Jack platform for audio processing, it really kicks ass to anything I’ve seen on windows. The interoperability of Jack and supported apps makes for a seriously powerful workstation.
When it comes to multimedia, this is what’s the big advantage of *nix and free software: interoperability. On windows you have lots of apps, but they all try to cover each other’s features, and it’s hard to make them work with each other. On *nix you can have each app handling each it’s seperate task, wich makes for a more flexible, efficient and powerful system.
I don’t do BSD myself, but as far as I know the apps mentioned will run on that as good as on GNU/Linux and Mac OS X.
The real strenght of Free operatng systems are Free Software applications. We don’t have to wait for for a certain company to deliver a proprietary element, we just adapt an existing one to our needs. I am a GPL fan and I don’t use *BSD, but it is certainly not dead! It’s userbase is growing and it’s features are getting better and better.
> There will never be something for this OS that makes it useful.
Me and others use Free Software exclusively. I find it very useful, believe me.
“BSD is dead. Putting a “PC” in front of it ain’t nothing but necrophilia.”
I don’t get why this guy thinks BSD is dead. Some people sometimes say that BeOS is dead – but even then there are plenty of people who would be happy to go to great lengths to disagree with him – Haiku and Zeta developers not being among the least of them. Do you think it is possible that he might be lame enough to be confusing BSD with BeOS?
As was said BSD is very much like Linux (or at least there is a sighly different development and licencing model) in that it is an open develpment model staffed by a large number of dedicated volunteers – so that even if no one ever used it again, it would never really go away or die.
Also as has been said, Apple should be informed if BSD is dead – because they have pretty much staked their entire financial and technological future on it.
In any case, it seems like a very strange thing to say.
GJ
Given the fact that FreeBSD has Java problems (they don’t have a proper native port of Java5 yet), how would this affect OpenOffice2.
If are are using .doc files to send around very complex documents with illustrations, charts and everything else – and your doing it for business, do yourself and your client a favor and send a PDF.
Why? Because I’ve had .doc files choke on different versions of Word – it’s not nice having to tell your client to upgrade. Also, who says they’re not going to edit something in the file when push comes to shove and say “Ha, it is in the specs – the one you sent us – you just deleted it.”
We’re becoming a truly digital society where everything needs to interoperate. So when you send a document to an outside source, send it as a PDF and save yourself the grief of having to deal with Words docs.
I enjoy both Linux and BSD, I dont really see any competition between the two, they both have their places. Anyways, its really great to see a young project like this get some time in the spotlight, isnt this what open source is all about? hackers making their favorit projects better for everyone?
Is it possible to install PCBSD apps on FreeBSD. I see that there are 2 cd images (ISO images) to be downloaded. I could not install the netbsd build of Firefox on FreeBSD that’s why I am asking. Also, anyone succesfully installed VLC media player on BSD they don’t seem to compile.
*BSD has no problem with Java. Sun has a problem with licensing Java.
OTOH, GCJ, Kaffe/classpath and other free Java implementations are at the point where they can handle OpenOffice’s Java components (as well as Eclipse).
If you want to get firefox working on FreeBSD try this
pkg_add -r firefox
This should work. If thats what you are asking for.
i am running freebsd5.4. freebsd is still evolving. just last night i upgraded to xfce4.22. also am running kde 3.4. is kde3.4 dead? got fluxbox and ctwm. firefox and mplayer works at http://www.ifilm.com. firefox and flash7 work on msnbc slideshow pix of the week. electric sheep 2.6 blows my mind. thunderbird reads my e-mail. f-prot and clamav check the winxp partition for viruses. yesterday Mr. Draves’s “bomb” was fixed and another psychedelic app is installed to blow my mind. with amsn and ymessenger i instant message. streamtuner finds me music. i can go on and on.
looks to me like freebsd runs at the cutting edge. they are usually first with keeping up with gnome and kde version numbers. those who invoke that word dead are dead in imagination. hell, even dos is not dead. even windows 3.1 is not dead, maybe retired.
You can get native JDK support on FreeBSD but it is time consuming.
If all you need is the JMV on your browser try using the built in jvm plugin in KDE’s Konqueror.
If you are a firefox fan and want the java plugin try and compile it up. it shouldnt take more than 4 hours to finish freebsd.org/java/ or ask your friend who did it before for a precompiled copy that would take about 2 minutes
I am a linux user but after installing PC-BSD 07 I am blown away by the sheer simplicity of the install and KDE works just the same, so I feel right at home here. A few behind-the scenes stuff to learn, but it’s not that hard to get your head around, and the experience is just the same as using Linux. Everything just works! I can get on with my work without the OS getting in the way at all.
Good stuff is comming out of the PC-BSD camp and I will be keeping an eye open for the beta upgrades all the way to 1.0. I am sure it will be a big hitter.
Keep up the frentic pace PC-BSD developers you are on to a very good thing here.
If are are using .doc files to send around very complex documents with illustrations, charts and everything else – and your doing it for business, do yourself and your client a favor and send a PDF.
——————
Everything I send out is indeed in PDF format. My issue is the ability to READ .doc files properly. Some files are available only as .doc files, and that is not going to change.
What are they serious. Does this actually require a user to go hunt the internet and manually download a package and manually install it the windows way?!?! That is very 1995.
Why not use FreeBSD ports! So how do you upgrade a package this ‘new’ pcbsd way? Go to the internet and hunt for the latest version. That’s bad news when you want to keep your system up to date.
I hope I’m wrong about this, because otherwise this is a show stopper for me. Just becuase windows does it, doesn’t make it the right way. Unix has inherent advantages, maybe if we promoted these advantages more instead of hide them behind a veil of windows like inefficiency, the *nix may be a more popular platform.
Got to love how trolls like that can flat ignore facts.
Fact: Linux trolls are facing hard times (BSD’s, Solaris 10, etc etc) The Linux hype honeymooon is over, time to start delivering the goods.
Fact: BSD powers some of the largest sites on the web (Yahoo for example) always has, probably always will. BSD has nothing to prove to the Linux folks. Both OS’es are excellent in their own regards. Don’t like BSD, don’t use it….the BSD community really doesn’t care.
Fact: BSD’s are about the closest thing to real UNIX you can run on a PC and have a rich and long history. When you use the internet, you should remember that a great deal of it’s history evolves around UNIX and the BSD’s, show a bit of respect, grin.
Fact: If the BSD’s had large hardware vendors and the hype that Linux has gotten over the last few years, the OS landscape would look a lot different.
Fact: BSD folks are not trying to compete with Redmond’s OS’es on a desktop replacement, as such you don’t have nearly the chaos and division of focus and general instability of the linux landscape.
Note: I applaude the PCBSD folks for their work. FreeBSD (and the other BSDs) will remain fairly focused on an OS for a server. Don’t forget, there’s another nice user friendly OS out there based upon BSD code, it comes from a company you might of heard of…Apple. I wish the PCBSD folks sucess and will keep an eye on the results of their great work so far.
————–
Some reading to chew on if you think BSD is dead…..
From “Red Hat loses Linux servers market share”
http://www.computerweekly.com/Article131947.htm
“Also popular with shared hosting companies is FreeBSD, a flavour of Unix distributed under an open-source licence.
The platform is not included with the Linux numbers, but has been popular with hosting companies since the dawn of the web, and is continuing to grow. More than two million active sites use FreeBSD – about one million more than Red Hat, according to Netcraft.”
From “Large Hosting Provider Switches to FreeBSD”
http://www.w3reports.com/index.php?itemid=869
“Offmyserver, a rackmount server provider, recently completed a migration of 50 servers to the FreeBSD operating system for Host Department, a large web hosting and hosting reseller company. The servers were previously running Red Hat Linux 9 and Red Hat Linux Advanced Server.
“Based on our experience with high traffic internet systems where reliability is a must, the FreeBSD operating system has proven itself many times over. FreeBSD is in use at some of the highest traffic sites on the internet and our customer needed the best throughput available,” said Matt Olander, Offmyserver engineer. “The FreeBSD operating system delivered on all of Host Department’s requirements including ease of administration, reliability, and security.”
The initial migration of 20 systems happened one year ago and the systems have been very stable since, said Offmyserver production manager, Austin Stewart.
“Unlike the previous operating system we had, which was getting compromised at least once a month and caused our sysadmins small to major headaches, FreeBSD is simply untouchable,” said Jimmy Rianto, CEO of Host Department, LLC. ”
And of course the controversal report from mi2g detailing the BSDs and Mac OS X as the two safest OS’es out there (security wise) and getting many a Linux fanboy’s shorts in a bind, the spin and counter attacks against mi2g was (still is) hillarious to watch/read:
http://www.mi2g.com/cgi/mi2g/press/021104.php
Just one question for the “BSD is dead” trolls, please explain the chart located here:
From “Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD”
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/06/07/nearly_25_million_acti…
Maybe I’m blind, but those graphs are charting upwards with a sharp increase kicking in during the last year or so. Humm, dying but it’s numbers are increasing. Troll must of taken a different math class than the rest of us.
Of course folks will want to flame with counter articles, have at it. BSD has been around for decades and will continue to be around, plenty of evidence it will continue to grow as folks fed up with Linux and the GPL will start looking elsewhere as the Linux media honeymoon is ending.
Flame all you want.
JT
One can still use PORTS on PCBSD, btw…Just as Ubuntu users can easily use APT…
I think if the target of the OS is the average desktop user – which according to their vision:
“The long term vision is as thus: To create a desktop OS using the FreeBSD platform, that can be used by business and home users as easily as the leading major operating systems, while still retaining the power-functionality of UNIX that makes FreeBSD such a solid platform. To accomplish this, there are several things that we believe must be done:”
On software management:
“Software must be available, and easily installed.One of the biggest headaches for casual users and even more skilled technicians is the challenge of adding software to their *nix system. On Linux this process can be a nightmare, since every distro seems to be running different versions required libraries, and as software developers have found, it is near impossible to create a binary which supports all of them. FreeBSD has one of the best port systems in the world, and while powerful, it still is not user-friendly enough for the huge majority of desktop users. To accomplish the goal of easily installable software, we feel that a program must be created that allows users to download and install software, all within a GUI interface, and with no knowledge of the system, dependencies, required libraries, etc. This has been one of the factors that has made systems such as Windows® and even the Macintosh® operating systems so user-friendly in the past, but for some reason the various Linux / UNIX distributions can’t seem to find a way to duplicate it. PC-BSD hopes to solve this problem, by building software which can be used to package, install, and remove software in this method.”
I think they’re methodology is this – most *nix methods of installation are difficult to grasp or know very well. Apt is wonderful, and upgrading/installing is USUALLY rather simple. However, even many users have occassionally broken their system…And they’re not always simple to repair. And repositories are a bit much for the average person to understand.
RPM’s, well, don’t even get me started with dependancy and installation crap. I’ve never tried PORTS or PORTAGE (Gentoo) but I can say this – PORTS is not designed for the average user.
In the interest of free software (as in freedom) why don’t you contribute rather than question someone’s methods? What they say is true for the novice – software installation is HARD on BSD/Linux systems. They simply disagree on how this is to be done. Isn’t that why we have distributions and flavors in the free software world?
Perhaps you can design a simple GUI for PORTS much like APT’s Synaptic… That way the user can choose what road to take, or your option could replace the current method if it is better
So tell me now who is trying to start absolutely unnecessary wars between brethren operating system.
Do I have to choose between linux and BSD, in your opinion?
Can’t I use them both?
“I think they’re methodology is this – most *nix methods of installation are difficult to grasp or know very well”
Arguable, but wouldn’t a better solution be to make a super easy user interface to the existing system. If you want people to use a new system, show them what is better, not what is the same! I just think this is wasted effort to make an existing system that works more inefficient only for the sake of similarity.
No, I disagree. Think about it for a minute: their mission is *not* to bring FreeBSD to unix gurus or somewhat “power users”: it’s already there.
Their mission is to bring it to *everybody* who can use Windows or a Mac.
I totally agree with you about the excellence of FreeBSD ports. Actually, IMHO it’s the *best* package management system around (and sure as hell I’m not the only one to say that..). But.. I remember the first time I used FreeBSD (a couple of years ago), and tried to install stuff on it. Now, I’m no Unix guru – yet
– but I’m not even the most clueless user. Still, I managed to screw up with dependencies – and it was entirely *my* fault, because I hadn’t read & understood the instructions properly, because if you have understood it, the FreeBSD ports system *just works* – that’s what makes it excellent.
The bottom line is, if you want to bring BSD to *everybody* who can use windows/mac, FreeBSD ports is *not* the way to go, because you’re talking about the average clueless newbie, who’s probably too impatient to even read the Handbook.
You could say the same things about Sysinstaller vs. PC-BSD’s new graphical installer. Many experienced users say sysinstaller is great, and that it was enough. But it’s not for them that the PC-BSD installer was written!
The PC-BSD guys have a very precise objective:
http://www.pcbsd.org/?p=project
that is, to bring FreeBSD to the average desktop user.
And the results of their efforts look extremely promising!
(btw, to whomever might be interested into FreeBSD ports, these are the links that taught me how to handle them properly – and I found them pretty exhaustive. It’s the handbook’s dedicated chapter and three excellent tutorials)
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports.htm…
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2003/08/07/FreeBSD_Basics.html
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2003/08/28/FreeBSD_Basics.html
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2003/09/18/FreeBSD_Basics.html
Arguable, but wouldn’t a better solution be to make a super easy user interface to the existing system. If you want people to use a new system, show them what is better, not what is the same! I just think this is wasted effort to make an existing system that works more inefficient only for the sake of similarity.
My guess is that making a really user-friendly GUI for ports is not the easiest thing in the world.
But anyway, what’s the problem? If the average user gets tired of the windows-like way of installing stuff, hey, he can start using ports. Under the PC-BSD hood there’s always a complete a fully working FreeBSD system.
However, a lot of the mainstream desktop applications are simply NOT good enough. OO.o, for example, is not. It is simply not compatible enough with Word (PowerPoint compatibility is even worse), and that compatibility is REALLY important. I’ve not tried the beta of 2.0 yet; perhaps this is better. TextMaker was even worse in some documents that are important to me that are only available in .doc format.
So then take GNOME-Office.. I run FreeBSD/GNOME as my core desktop and have installed all the apps I need. For me GAIM is the ultimate MSN client. GNOME-Office is nice and interoperable with MS Office.
For music I use Beep-media-player [which is an GTK2 XMMS fork] and for movies I have Totem installed [comes with GNOME]. For graphics I use The GIMP and for RSS feeds liferea. For browsing I use Firefox with Plugger.
All installed from ports and packages. Compiling GNOME takes ages but you can install the packages from CD. Anything runs fast en stable, so I don’t see the point to use Linux over BSD. Indeed there are over 12000 apps in the ports.. 🙂
Java sux anyway..
Indeed.. I never used another operating system where I only have to do “cvsup /path/to/standard-supfile ; mergemaster -p ; cd /usr/src ; make -j4 buildworld ; make buildkernel ; make installkernel ; make install world ; mergemaster” to upgrade from release to release without any troubles, just a reboot and upgraded. For ports only “cvsup /path/to/ports-supfile ; portupgrade -Ra”. So it’s not dead at all.
How does FreeBSD/PC-BSD deal with dependencies?
Let’s say that I downloaded a Gimp package. That Gimp package requires GTK+ 2.6 but you only have GTK+ 2.4 installed. Now you still need access to the internet to upgrade GTK+. How is such an issue dealt with?
I never used another operating system where I only have to do “cvsup /path/to/standard-supfile ; mergemaster -p ; cd /usr/src ; make -j4 buildworld ; make buildkernel ; make installkernel ; make install world ; mergemaster” to upgrade from release to release without any troubles, just a reboot and upgraded. For ports only “cvsup /path/to/ports-supfile ; portupgrade -Ra”.
Oh yeah! That is sooo much better than inserting your Windows CD and clicking setup.
*sigh*
I didn’t mention AbiWord because it is not in the same league as OO.o. OO.o at least works some of the time when reading complicated .doc files. The same cannot be said for AbiWord, at least for documents that are important to me.
As I said in an earlier message, don’t get me started on the GIMP. Until it incorporates a complete color-managed workflow using icc profiles derived from on-site calibrations from input through screen display to output it is a toy. Yes, the developers are working on it, but this is hard, and neither Linux or the *BSDs are color aware.
For reference, I use no messenging, play no music, view no videos or any of that stuff. I don’t even have a sound card installed. I use it as a hard-core workstation. In that context, the Gnome desktop management tools (including Epiphay/Plugger) are plenty good enough. KDE probably is too. I don’t push this part of the system.
What I do push are the traditional Unix tools (which are fine) and applications for office and scientific applications (largely numerical codes and image processing), and I push them hard. Here none of the OSS software is good enough. Note that this is true for Linux as well.
As far as I can tell, there are only two ways out.
First is for Linux and FreeBSD desktops to get enough market penetration for the usual suspects to find it worth their while to port their software over. Some of this is happening; I have a good (not free) FEM program that runs on Linux that works fine. PCBSD is one part of getting more OSS desktops, and it might prompt more people to write native FreeBSD applications.
The other would be to move to the Mac, where enough applications are available and the Unix underpinnings are still there. I still have issues with drinking the Apple Cool-aid, though.
each software package (pbi software packages i mean) comes with all necessary packages for to work. you just have to download the .pbi package, click on it, type the root password and it installs the package. You then have the option to create shortcuts in the KDE menu and desktop before the wizard finishes. plain simple. If two apps work with different versions of a package, thats not realy a problem. Some people may say this will create lots of unnecessary garbage on your hard drive (unlike microsoft’s windows which does an exelent job integrating everything
)but last time i checked, most hard drives selling now have at least 80GB so, i dont see any problems here. I see a BIG problem solved!
Someone asked for java?
There is a .pbi package which installs a wizard to install linux’s java so you can use openoffice 2.0
And i think there will be a flash wizard soon too.
I am new to unix but this is outrageously simple to work on…
Its the first time i see developers with such high level of knowlege working to make it easy for EVERYONE to use an Os. If you want my opinion, This philosophy is going to pay back.FAST!
Keep up the exelent work Kris!!!
>Oh yeah! That is sooo much better than inserting your Windows CD and clicking setup.
Well.. yes. Actually, it is.
(Btw, that wasn’t PCBSD-specific: that was FreeBSD, an OS that is not meant to be used by people who’re afraid to type in the cmdline. In due time the PC-BSD guys will come up with some windows-like, clueless-friendly way to do it, I’m sure
http://www.pcbsd.org/?p=packages
From what I’ve understood, PC-BSD is meant to be usable even by those who don’t know what a dependency is.
So, in the case you pointed out, I think (not sure because I didn’t try it myself) that you’ll end up by having both versions of GTK+ installed. But this is *good*: they want to keep it simple, and IMHO they are doing the right thing.
If you know enough to understand dependencies and library upgrades, then you’re not supposed to use a new oversimplified package system; you’re supposed to use the FreeBSD ports system – that is right there, under the hood.
“I never used another operating system where I only have to do “cvsup /path/to/standard-supfile ; mergemaster -p ; cd /usr/src ; make -j4 buildworld ; make buildkernel ; make installkernel ; make install world ; mergemaster” to upgrade from release to release without any troubles, just a reboot and upgraded. For ports only “cvsup /path/to/ports-supfile ; portupgrade -Ra”.
I think a wizard can be created for that. why not?
“I never used another operating system where I only have to do “cvsup /path/to/standard-supfile ; mergemaster -p ; cd /usr/src ; make -j4 buildworld ; make buildkernel ; make installkernel ; make install world ; mergemaster” to upgrade from release to release without any troubles, just a reboot and upgraded. For ports only “cvsup /path/to/ports-supfile ; portupgrade -Ra”.
I think a wizard can be created for that. why not?
My 2 pence:
PC-BSD definitely needs it – and I’m sure they’ll make it soon.
FreeBSD definitely *doesn’t* need it.
I was obviously referring to PC-BSD.
Isnt it just great that after you install PC-BSD (aprox: 15 minutes for me)you can grab the command line and play with FREEBSD? Of course you didnt compile it specifically for your hardware but you started working in 20 minutes and you can optimize it anytime after… While being able to work already…
>I was obviously referring to PC-BSD.
Yeah, sorry – I got it on second reading
Oh yeah! That is sooo much better than inserting your Windows CD and clicking setup.
It actually is. You can’t upgrade Windows AND get the latest versions of all your installed applications by issuing a few commands.
how old are you son?
(to the anonimous coward, not(IP: —.dyn.iinet.net.au)… )
lol
“So tell me now who is trying to start absolutely unnecessary wars between brethren operating system.”
If you inferred that, it wasn’t intended. Yeah some things I said probably came across pointed, but that’s how you make points against a clearly Linux fanboy troll that I was clearly having some fun with his complete lack of facts in his statement that BSD is dead. If you took my comments as an attack on Linux, then maybe you should examine your insecurity regarding Linux.
“Do I have to choose between linux and BSD, in your opinion?”
Nope, use what ever you want. I think I made that clear when I stated if you don’t like BSD, don’t use it.
“Can’t I use them both?”
You can use whatever OS you wish in any combination you wish in accordance with the respective licenses. Knock yourself out. In fact I think you’ll like the BSD license more than any of the others if you read them with an open mind, it’s about as “open” as open can be. Nope, not attacking GPL, put your hackles down folks, grin.
There is no religious war between BSD and Linux. I can’t speak for the Linux community. This is because the bulk of BSD users are technical professionals that have made their choices for their own reasons and really don’t care about hype, the trend of the year, media bias, and we’re not out to destroy Microsoft or Red Hat. Sure there will always be a few BSD users that want Linux gone (‘taint gonna happen anymore than BSD going away) but they don’t represent the mainstream BSD user community. Most BSD folks do their own thing and really aren’t concerned daily about what the OS news media is saying and haven’t cared for many years. For the better or worse, the BSD world is just a diffrent world than the Linux world. I always like the following saying:
“BSD is what you get when a bunch of Unix hackers sit down to try to port a Unix system to the PC. Linux is what you get when a bunch of PC hackers sit down and try to write a Unix system for the PC.”
No OS is perfect, they each have pros and cons, different design philosophies, and on & on. You pick what you feel fits the need the best. Religious wars between OS’es are about like “Ford versus Chevy” debates, silly and childish.
???????Oh yeah! That is sooo much better than inserting your Windows CD and clicking setup.
I run Debian (Kanotix) because I got tired of inserting a CD into a Window$ machine every 2 or 3 Days to try and remove the spyware,Gator, virii, and trojans Reboot. Reboot. Reboot.
I am looking forward to trying this BSD.
Just nothing more than my 2 pence (as usual..):
… advocacy links are interesting, but why all this goddamn flaming?
As the Wise Man Says: “Can’t we all just get along?…”
You said it yourself: religious wars don’t belong to the BSD camp. Maybe it’s about time to act accordingly.
As the Wise Man Says: “Can’t we all just get along?…”
That man was last seen brutally beaten, raped, and left for dead.
Oh yeah! That is sooo much better than inserting your Windows CD and clicking setup.
I just like to *see* what happens.. 🙂 cheers!!
How does FreeBSD/PC-BSD deal with dependencies?
Let’s say that I downloaded a Gimp package. That Gimp package requires GTK+ 2.6 but you only have GTK+ 2.4 installed. Now you still need access to the internet to upgrade GTK+. How is such an issue dealt with?
If PCBSD is still that much FreeBSD that I expect, you can just do a “cvsup /path/to/ports-supfile ; portupgrade -Ra
… advocacy links are interesting, but why all this goddamn flaming?
As the Wise Man Says: “Can’t we all just get along?…”
True so true..
RE:”@ Renato (IP: 84.90.13.—)
By Anonymous (IP: —.anonymizer.com) – Posted on 2005-05-20 20:08:30
how old are you son?
Old enough to know that people used to laugh at Unix the same way they laugh at Windows today.”
if you were here for so long you wouldnt waste your time trolling…
Just ignore the BITCH guys, he isnt worth the eye movement required to read his posts. Sorry for the language guys… this insect was annoying.
Let me give you today’s example: An important potential strategic partner sent me a proposal that was awarded government funding. It was delivered in RTF format (I know, I know), and OO.o choked on it — it crashed. My copy of Word 2000 on an old machine 98SE machine opened it fine.
Could I have asked for version in .doc format, for example? Sure, but I had enough trouble getting this in the first place, and Word files (in whatever format) are the lingua franca of the business community. One needs to be able to read these without flaw every time. And there was no guarantee that the .doc file would have been read with OO.o any better.
============================================================
Actually, OO.o is good enough but in a different context. As an general office suite, its darn good. However, if compatibility is the only measuring stick, then yes, it has drawbacks.
Dr J, I am a proponent of Open File formats and I see strides taking place in certain areas. However, MS does hold all the cards to the .doc format, plain and simple.
Can open file formats become universially accepted? I believe that they can, in time. I see a point where MS will incorporate a universal file format into Word/Excel. Now the quality or functionality may not be up to par. This would be based on their business strategy. Also, would it be a default file format? Probably not.
With enough presure from the industry, MS will have to make conessions.
In the mean time, Wine/CrossOver Office would be an temporary solution.
Adam (IP: —.nap.wideopenwest.com) wrote
>BSD is ok and all for the desktop and low-end servers.
Well.. That’s quite reductive, to say the least.
I don’t think that the gigantic Yahoo network (with exceptional requirements of stability, security and performance) is entirely made of low-end servers.
Open file formats are certainly the way to go. But as you point out, that will take some time to become commonplace. Many of the challenging files I deal with that come essentially only in .doc format are from certain parts of the government, and change in the government is very slow. Usually they are pretty good about using open formats, but in this case they dropped the ball.
I think that this is a good place for the Open Source community to push for open file formats.
Anyway, I’ve realized that I’m going to have to install Wine. I’ve avoided that, because it takes a lot for futzing around to get it right. Also, it is my understanding that FreeBSD can’t read hidden files on Windows CDs, so an intermediate machine is required. Still, that is about the only way to get true file compatibility (I’ll see about API adequacy).
Unfortuantely, CrossOver Office does not run on FreeBSD, and CodeWeavers refuses to offer anything concrete on whether a FreeBSD version might be on the horizon.
I know I sound like a broken record on this topic, but I really tire of the kids saying OSS software is good enough for business. You didn’t, and I thnk you for that. Right now is not adequate for any business that has contact with the outside world. Today, that’s all of them. Used in isolation, OSS desktop software is probably good enough. That’s a big qualifier, though.
I don’t think that the gigantic Yahoo network (with exceptional requirements of stability, security and performance) is entirely made of low-end servers.
Dunno what the Yahoo network consists of, but no open-source BSD as of yet can run on four processors efficiently.
Maybe Yahoo is not giving all the changes back to FreeBSD, assuming they made any.
However, if you are running a high-end server and want something free and stable, use a quality GNU/Linux distribution or Solaris.
Ah, Yeah right.. So that’s the reason why Microsoft used FreeBSD for a long time for their Hotmail service and still uses FreeBSD on some of the msn.com servers [http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://msn.com].. Now I understand.. And that also why one of the biggest ISP’s run FreeBSD on their servers [http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.yahoo.com].. Very nice that you explained it to us.. 😉
First of all: FreeBSD has native Java, both 1.4.x and 1.5.x – the problem is that because of SUN’s licensing, it cannot distribute binaries. I even built 1.5 (but realized that browser plugins are not built with it yet) without any problems. So, if you have java built, you can use ooo2. In fact, FreeBSD has the best oo.o2 support: they provide binaries for the latest builds, and what’s more, they provide binaries for localized languages as well. I currently have build101 installed.
I was a bit afraid that they won’t tackle the java problem – and I am positively surprised. This is the only way they could do it btw. Actually, I mentioned this previously in the first beta thread:
http://osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=10480&limit=no#369829
– along with the flash problem. Now they only have to do the same thing with flash (which should be less of a hassle btw) – and the last obstacle from being a viable desktop OS will be removed.