PC-BSD 1.4.1 has been released. "A update to PC-BSD has been released today, version 1.4.1. This new version may be obtained from our download page, additionally users who are running version 1.4 may download a patch to upgrade." It's mostly a bugfix release.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-06-29
I have been using FreeBSD for about a year and never thought about something that your post reminded me of. You said the FreeBSD bootloader is fully automatic. I normally use GRUB and manually modify it to add other distros etc. If you have the FreeBSD bootloader on the MBR, and then install another distro on another partition, does the FreeBSD bootloader automatically add an entry to its menu the next time you reboot? How does that actually work?
Member since:2005-07-11
Yes, it is automatic, but it is not pretty. 
It basically just looks at the partition table, the partition IDs, and adds entries with a best-guess at the name of the OS on the partition (based on partition ID).
The menu then looks something like:
F1: FreeBSD
F2: MSDOS
F3: Linux
Where F1 loads whatever is on the first partition on the disk, F2 loads whatever is on the second partition, and so on.
Crude, but it works.
Member since:2007-02-22
*snip for brevity's sake*
So far, it looked like PCBSD keeps all the GPLcruft away on optional packages that were not installed by default. The default PCBSD install doesn't really include stuff like GCC, Java, Perl, and Subversion, does it? Or is that only FreeBSD, and not PCBSD?
Member since:2006-05-19
So far, it looked like PCBSD keeps all the GPLcruft away on optional packages that were not installed by default. The default PCBSD install doesn't really include stuff like GCC, Java, Perl, and Subversion, does it? Or is that only FreeBSD, and not PCBSD?
Yes, PC-BSD 1.4.1 got GCC, Perl and Subversion in base install. Java is optional component (installed as PBI) due to Sun license restrictions.
Member since:
2006-05-19
Actually this version is how 1.4 release supposed to look like. FreeBSD/PC-BSD is good platform for programmers, students and enterprises because of these features:
. Installation is faster too, with fast cpu, it took ~5minutes on P4-3.2GHz with 1GB ram and 400GB sata drive.
1. All kind of programming languages included in base system by default (perl, python, qt, etc.). And of course GCC and subversion.
2. Intel wifi drivers (no 3945abg yet though).
3. All kind of free codecs- you can play almost all video and audio files without installing anything manually.
4. Sound card support is great- all common cards detected automatically and FreeBSD sound mixing is unbetable- you can play multiple sound instances and applications simultaneously- everything is mixed transparently in kernel level.
5. With LZMA compression installcd size is down from 700MB to 550MB (next release will have more goodies inside
6. No trouble messing with bootloaders like GRUB- FreeBSD boot0loader is fully automatic- no configuration changes needed for booting up multiple operating systems like Linux, Windows, other BSDs.
7. Did I already mention that Java is native?
8. Big thanks to nVidia for their great drivers.
Btw PC-BSD 1.4.1 is based on FreeBSD 6.3-PRERELEASE.