Linked by Eugenia Loli on Tue 9th May 2006 09:01 UTC, submitted by kaiwai
"It is my great pleasure and privilege to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE. This release is the next step in the development of the 6.X branch, delivering several performance improvements, many bugfixes, and a few new features. These include: Addition of a keyboard multiplexer. This allows USB and PS/2 keyboards to coexist without any special options at boot. Many fixes for filesystem stability. High load stress tests are now run successfully on a regular basis as part of the normal FreeBSD QA process. Automatic configuration for man Bluetooth devices, as well as automatic support for running WiFi access points. Addition of drivers for new ethernet and SAS and SATA RAID controllers."
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Member since:2006-05-09
They are not touting their umpteen thousands of packages
From the Ubuntu.com website: "Ubuntu includes more than 16,000 pieces of software". They appear to do exactly that.
I have to disagree that BSD is not ready for the desktop: the FreeBSD ports system includes everything you need, such as KDE and Gnome. I even know a BSD 'distro' that's aimed primarily at the desktop: PC-BSD http://www.pcbsd.org/.
Member since:2006-05-10
noescom talked about PC-BSD, but there is also DesktopBSD: http://www.desktopbsd.org/
What is nice with this "version" of FreeBSD is that it is so compatible with the "normal" FreeBSD that they have put their tools into the FreeBSD port system, in sysutils/desktopbsd-tools
Combined with KDE, it may ease the use of FreeBSD for new users. For instance, there are tools to easily mount/unmount devices, to create users, and I love the GUI to manage ports.
It is less powerfull than with a textual terminal, but it may be a start.
Member since:2006-01-01
Take Ubuntu for example. Couple of years ago no one ever heard of it. Now its one of the most popular distros out there. Lets face it. They are not touting their umpteen thousands of packages. They made it easy and simple to use, manage, and install applications.
Ubuntu, of course, is based on Debian, one of the biggest and oldest GNU/Linux distros. That explains the large number of packages and the sophisticated package management system that Ubuntu has -- it all comes from Debian.
FreshPorts http://www.freshports.org/ has some statistics about FreeBSD's Ports.
Member since:2005-11-09
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Member since:
2006-03-29
"You don't have to wait, open a few terminals and run "portsnap fetch ; portsnap update ; portupgrade -a" and it does its job. Besides that, are there over 14000 packages available with Yum or APT-Get?"
That is the issue. We end up waiting for a long time.
And those 14000 packages are not always maintained. Are you saying all 14000 packages are well tested and will install without any issues on a FreeBSD system? The number of packages is not appropriate measurement here.
Take Ubuntu for example. Couple of years ago no one ever heard of it. Now its one of the most popular distros out there. Lets face it. They are not touting their umpteen thousands of packages. They made it easy and simple to use, manage, and install applications.
FreeBSD is good for many tasks but being a desktop is not one - not right now. I have been a BSD user for many years and I would love to see this change but until then I will not be directing beginers to it.