PC-BSD 9.1 has been released. "The PC-BSD team is pleased to announce that version 9.1 is now available! This release includes many exciting new features and enhancements, such as a vastly improved system installer, ZFS 'Boot Environment' support, TrueOS (a FreeBSD based server with additional power-user utilities), and much more!" PC-BSD 9.1 is based on the soon-to-be released FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE with several enhancements, including an updated installer, better ZFS support during installation, bug fixes and new GUI configuration/administrative utilities.
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Member since:2005-06-29
Well I've changed hardware since then so take that into consideration, but it seems to be much more stable and cohesive this time around. I know some of that is due to improvements to KDE as well, as only very recently I've been able to use that DE to get work done.
I'm definitely impressed though! I'm considering moving away from GNU/Linux on my workstation and vanilla FreeBSD is a pain to install and configure, so I jumped on the chance to try the new PC-BSD. For me, it's almost there. I also love the "True OS" server features; geeks.com has some nice server hardware on sale really cheap and I'm thinking of picking up a unit for bare metal to play around on. BSD is my first choice for a server OS.
Edit: Commenting via phone still sucks: P
Edited 2012-12-22 04:13 UTC
Member since:2006-12-05
I agree on FreeBSD being a pain to configure as a complete desktop OS, yet awesome for servers. My main problem with PC-BSD has always been its way of packaging programs, Windows-style, with everything needed for a package contained within the package. Good for eliminating dependencies (duplicates), but not for conserving disk space, unfortunately. In a way, I kind of wish DesktopBSD was still in development... it was similar, also very good, but with a more traditional style of package management.
I am tempted to give the latest version a try though, overall it sounds good, and I do like BSD in general. Some *huge* upgrades appear to be coming up with FreeBSD 10, BTW... of course, that's probably a year or more away, but it's already sounding good.
Member since:2006-12-05
I broke down and said "fsck it" and decided to delete the Win8 partitions to make room for a new one last night. I haven't put a whole lot of time trying PC-BSD out yet, but
Two things that don't work:
- Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02). No surprise here--I'm lucky if I can find a Linux distro that supports this wretched, god damn wireless card... I've given up on even bothering to try to get it to work several years ago, so I don't blame BSD on it. I honestly no longer even care about that card.
- Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs CA0106 Soundblaster. This one's a little more important, and it's probably the only thing that would prevent me from using PC-BSD exclusively on the machine as a desktop OS.
One thing I am exremely impressed about is its memory use with KDE. It's generally very low at ~200 MB or less for the most part, even while installing packages (something that never seems to fail to spike memory use in most Linux distros I've tried). Of course, I wasn't really heavily using the system so I'll be doing more testing, but that's very impressive so far. openSUSE guzzles several hundred megs right after logging in, quickly leading to swapping.
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Member since:
2006-12-05
Yeah, my problem is I can't spare any room for it (maybe when I delete the Win8 eval partitions), so for now a live DVD is the only way. That's somewhat disappointing. How is it compared to 9.0?
Edited 2012-12-22 03:53 UTC