The DesktopBSD team has released their most important release to date– DesktopBSD 1.0 is now available via .torrent or as a ‘normal’ download. The release includes KDE 3.5.1, FreeBSD 5.5-PRERELEASE, a user-friendlier package manager, and many more smaller improvements, which are detailed in the changelog and the release notes.
its good to see that desktop projects for bsd have come into fruition.
what I would like to see is a similar project that uses GNOME and GTK.
Ya, my girlfriend actually is using one of the release candidates.
If my girlfriend can use it.. you can too lol
Then again, I bet your girlfriend is smarter then you *lol*
oh she is. trust me she is. she just doesnt’ know computers
and a greater community.
can still build from souce :-p
Sorry, but you can use every single package or port that’s available in FreeBSD, you may want to look at http://www.freshports.org for more information. FreeBSD and DesktopBSD as well have the second largest collection of packages/ports only behind Debian (and that is questionable too for some reasons)…
Or do you think more packages should be included in the DVD images?
Sorry but I don’t get your point at all.
Daniel Seuffert, DesktopBSD team
LOL, I don’t understand his point either. What package does he want that you can’t install on DesktopBSD?
I agree, as before I have not had a problem getting packages at all.
!!!
” Or do you think more packages should be included in the DVD images? ”
Well, IMHO is a bit ridiculous to release a DVD ISO ith a bit more than 1 Gb.. They should have released 2 CD ISOs.
Is not worrthy to spend a DVD , above all a good one, for anything less than 3 Gb. An having such a big number of programs and ports comming from FreBSD , I do not see why they did not released a bigger DVD image!!!
Angel–Fr@gzill@
!!!
Sorry, there are 2 CD Isos for i386. Not for amd64 because we assumed every amd64 machine has DVD…
And the images will get larger soon but not to 3 GB. Please think of people not having broadband internet.
DesktopBSD’s main goal is to provide a desktop operating system that’s easy to use… http://www.desktopbsd.net/index.php?id=32
PC-BSD has as its goal to be an easy to install and use desktop OS… http://www.pcbsd.org/?p=pcbsd
There’s getting to be some overlap in the BSD arena, but that’s good. The Linux world offers a wide and finely-differentiated set of choices. Now BSD is sprouting some more choices too.
Although I’m more keen on PC-BSD. Still don’t get why DesktopBSD base the distro on the 5-branch as it’s next to deprecated these days.
Everytime I try and download PC-BSD, it quits near the end. I tried all the mirrors.
‘wget’ usually solves problems like that.
the 5-branch as it’s next to deprecated these days
I ain’t no BSD expert, but why will they release FreeBSD 5.5 next monday then?
It seems the freebsd 5.x branch is well alive on the server side. And now on the desktop too with DesktopBSD.
5.5 is likely the last member of the 5-branch. The 6-branch is basically a renamed 5-branch in order to get away from the poor reputation of the 5-branch, to get a clean start so to speak.
So in the regard, the 5-branch is deprecated and IMHO not worth basing a distro on.
I believe the reasoning was to avoid instabilities usually found in early major number releases, however I agree, 6 is really just a renamed 5, and therefore didn’t have the huge issues that the early 5’s had.
You are absolutely right, DesktopBSD is a bit more conservative than PC-BSD, so we stayed with 5.x for the moment.
Of course that will change soon after release 6.1.
Just in case nobody has noticed: We use RELENG_5 of February 5 instead of 5.4 release for some reasons (WLan etc.).
Best regards, Daniel
You are absolutely right, DesktopBSD is a bit more conservative than PC-BSD, so we stayed with 5.x for the moment.
Of course that will change soon after release 6.1.
And that is exactly as it should be. 6.0 was a little unstable on my laptop, but 6.1-PRERELEASE is doing great. And again good on you for running the latest 5 branch, as the early 5.4 was more unstable for me than 5.3.
Which of the two FreeBSD-for-the-desktop distro’s offer the best desktop experience?
Not necessarily for polemics’ sake, but it would be interesting to see how the two compare to eachother. Idea for an OSNews article anyone?
(yeah I’m too lazy to do it myself)
Well, PC-BSD offers a few “novelities” such as an alternative method of installing software (PBI) and is based on FreeBSD 6.x. I haven’t tinkered as much with DesktopBSD, but it is based on FreeBSD 5.x.
Personally I like PC-BSD and look forward too the day when more software is available as PBIs (you got the normal FreeBSD ports system available too, but for desktop users, PBI is a Good Thing (TM)).
But, the only way to get a real feel for these two systems is to give them a spin yourself. Off to download ISOs with you! 🙂
Somewhat of an incomplete but interesting mini-review and comparison here:
http://therandymon.com/content/view/87/79/
I haven’t had much of a chance to test this out yet, but how well does it really work? Sure they have a recent version of KDE installed, but how well does hardware detection work? I don’t think FreeBSD (what this is based off of I believe) has anything similar to HAL in Linux to make hardware “Just Work TM”.
Am I wrong in saying that this wouldn’t be a great desktop distro because of hardware support, or am I just behind the times and simply wrong? I’d love to see a project like this succeed, but the last time I played with FreeBSD, Linux killed it in regards to out of the box hardware support and overall hardware support.
I have to agree. FreeBSD seems to lag behind Linux in hardware support. And let’s face it: an OS is no good if it doesn’t support your hardware. Linux runs happily on the hardware that I have and it recognizes everything. FreeBSD on the other hand is a pain to get working–especially with X windows.
Edited 2006-03-28 21:53
FreeBSD on the other hand is a pain to get working–especially with X windows.
I disagree. I use both systems (FreeBSD and Gentoo). FreeBSD is very easy to install using SysInstall. Also, configuring X.org is exactly the same way as on Gentoo.
Hi Joe,
The “pain” enters into the equation when you use the /same/ commands as in Linux and it still doesn’t give you the correct xorg.conf file.
So, depending on your HW it can be a *pain* not because the tools are different but because FreeBSD does not recognize HW correctly in many instances where Linux does.
That was my point. FreeBSD definitely lags behind Linux in HW support.
Edited 2006-03-28 22:09
FreeBSD definitely lags behind Linux in HW support.
Maybe. But to tell you the truth, I didn’t have many incompatible hw issues over the years, and when FreeBSD didn’t detect my hw, neither did Gentoo. I never saw any piece of hw that was detected in Gentoo that wasn’t in FreeBSD. This is maybe because I don’t use exotic hw though…
Actually, I had better experiences on FreeBSD than on Linux with some odd-hardware. configuring a multi-head system w/ AGP & PCI graphics cards has been a lot easier on FreeBSD, as well as getting Bluetooth to work.
I’ve been using FreeBSD as my main Desktop OS for over 9 months now & I can’t complain, you just have to (somewhat) know what you’re doing.
When Linux works and FreeBSD doesn’t… has to be the OS
FreeBSD doesn’t have the same thing as HAL no, but things “do just work”, and with the future KDE solid project, there will be no need. Also, hardware support is fairly good for most desktops. The big missing pieces are usually with multimedia devices, like my professional soundcard does not work unless I use commercial OSS drivers. The real difference is seen when looking at how well things are put together in a BSD box though, the jigsaw puzzle fits together in, what appears to be, a very clean way. Sometimes I think the linux distro’s try slapping together pieces that sort of fit, but in the end create a sloppy job of things. One of the other big differences in the FreeBSD/DesktopBSD world is they are completely compatible. Meaning that in the end, if I were a commercial distributor of software, I don’t have to worry about binary compatability with 10 different systems that all essentially do the exact same thing.
TheMonoTone
Do you see FreeBSD HW support improving as FreeBSD gets more popular? It would have to…I’m seriously considering switching to it from nearly 4 years in Linux…
FreeBSD hardware support improves gradually, the key being that the FreeBSD developers don’t say hardware is supported until it really will work, all the time, in almost every situation. I’ve had numerous problems with linux hardware support, the kernel says it supports something, you go to use it, and it doesn’t work properly. I can’t recall a time I’ve ever had that happen in FreeBSD.
Of course hardware support will improve as time goes on, the key point I’m trying to make however, is that while it may take more time for it to be supported in FreeBSD, when it is, its assured that it will work. If it doesn’t work, then it will likely be fixed very quickly, or dropped from the support list until it can properly be fixed.
So by all means try FreeBSD, and if your hardware works with it (its pretty likely these days), you will probably end up liking it quite a lot.
I don’t know about that. On every machine I’ve tried, FreeBSD support has eclipsed that of Ubuntu and SUSE by at least an order of magnitude.
I’m sure that on some esoteric propreitary NDA’d crap Linux distros have better support, but I try to avoid such anyhow.
So you are trying to tell me that out of the box FreeBSD hardware support eclipsed that of Ubuntu and SUSE… Why am I feeling sceptical and say I don’t believe you?
Can you post the exact hardware details and versions of FreeBSD, Ubuntu, and SUSE you used?
“FreeBSD support has eclipsed that of Ubuntu and SUSE”
Find this hard to believe from my experience. It is admitted by most users of FreeBSD that FreeBSD and the other BSDs lag behind Linux in drivers and hardware support. I have found this to be true first hand.
Now, you may have had a good experience but that is hardly enough objective evidence that FreeBSD “eclipses” that of Ubuntu…highly, highly unlikely.
I’m no freebsd expert either, but i’ve had problems w/6 (freaks out at the cardbus on my laptop)that weren’t in 5x and i’ve heard many others say similar about 6. 5x is actually supposed to have more features, 6 is supposed to be a leaner/meaner direction, which is all well and good, but from what i’ve seen i’ll wait until fbsd 6.5 or so comes out then maybe switch to it or a distro that uses it.
Out of interest, what advantages would I get from running KDE on DesktopBSD as opposed to a Linux-based distro like Kubuntu or Mepis?
And are the disadvantages?
Apologies if that sounds like I’m doing the project down — that’s certainly not my intention. I’m just genuinely curious about what advantages the BSD architecture brings over the usual GNU/Linux set up.
Sorry, I don’t want to start a flamewar and I’m not able to go much into details here, maybe you start with a general look at BSD and Linux here:
http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/bsd4linux1.php
It’s not a matter of KDE at all, that is really fine on BSD and Linux.
Best regards, Daniel
what advantages would I get from running KDE on DesktopBSD as opposed to a Linux-based distro like Kubuntu or Mepis?
KDE will be exactly the same on *BSD or Linux. The big advantage is the underlying system: FreeBSD. I use both Linux and FreeBSD, and I tend to use almost only FreeBSD nowadays. I prefer it to Linux. Some of the explanation here: http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/bsd4linux1.php
That link is a thinly disguised diatribe.
Please don’t post it as some sort of objective analysis of the differences because that isn’t what it is and you know it.
A few of you have mentioned HAL, I thought I would point out that HAL is on its way to FreeBSD.
is that it and pc-bsd aim to do the same thing mostly the same way, and it wastes the desktopbsd name that could be used for a gnome based bsd desktop
Sorry, this is not the place to go too much into technical details but think of it again. There are a lot of reasons for Kris Moore (PC-BSD) and Peter Hofer (DesktopBSD) why they have choosen KDE instead of Gnome.
For a user it’s not a prob at all: Use Ports, packages or use the Ports-GUI to install Gnome and you are happy again with your Gnome.
For a developer there’s nothing wrong with Gnome itself and I would really like to see a similar project using FreeBSD and Gnome. All the code is public and can be used under BSD-license at will, do it! Or find people willing to start a project! Both projects will help you as much as they can, we are BSD.
DesktopBSD-CVS: http://websvn.desktopbsd.net/
(Note: Server is currently under extreme high load! Please wait a bit!)
PC-BSD: http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/pcbsd/#dirlist
Best regards, Daniel