“PC-BSD 0.8.3 was released today. This version offers some new visuals, new languages, as well as important bugfixes with systems that have had trouble booting after the install. The complete changelog is available here. Users running 0.8.2 may update to this version using the Online Update utility within the PC-BSD Config menu.” Download here, release notes here.
I have tried several times to get a working PC-BSD system up and running.. and for whatever reason I have never been able to. But, with what this ‘distro’ has to offer, I am not that discouraged. *Downloads* Well done to the development team – and I look forward to the fruits of their labour.
Hi , I was heavily involved with PC-BSD I wrote the PBI creation How-to’s and such, I then replaced my aging Nix box with a new Athlon64, and I had problems too, me and Kris Moore (PC-BSD Creator) have spent months trying to figure out the problem, turns out the problems i had was to do with FDISK geometry problems, but in 0.8.3 those problems have been rectified.
so hopefully it works for you too.
I think this is a freebsd issue. You can almost always have it boot if you fdisk after installation and flag *only* the right partition “Active”.
I heve tried PC-BSD several times and, though I think pbi idea is great, I have to say that it is far slower than his ‘direct’ competitor DesktopBSD which is really fast
This is due to Kris building his kernel with SMP support, which one single CPU systems does slow the OS Down.
that should be fixable with an installer which installs smp kernel on smp machines only no?
Anyway, i am playing with it since the beginning and it is surely getting better with each release.
PBI packages have to get some testing before they ship though… I know they are toying with it for now, and some packages work perfectly but some were obviously made in a hurry..
I hope Kris can start doing real development now that all major installation and boot problems seem to be getting squashed
Downloaded and about to play
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The last time I tried (0.8.2) I ran into repeated problems with some error related to bz2 … that it was unable to install it properly or that it was unable to decompress packages. After three tries, gave up and installed Ubuntu. I use FreeBSD 5.4 as my main dev system but had issues installing that also on this system but Linux CDs seem to install without any problems.
I am a Gnome user. I have had issues with the following but others may not have.
I installed PC-BSD to check it out and then installed gnome through the ports system. But I cannot install any PBIs from within Gnome nor can I create any PBIs from Gnome. Are are any plans/work going on to create a GTK front-end to the PBI creation utility and also facilitate the PBI installation from within Gnome?
Thanks.
PC-BSD tools are QT not KDE, so are accessible via GNOME, atm PC-BSD tools do not support commandline flagging, so atm it would require re-writing the QT apps to work with GTK+, there are plans for flag support in commandline use so writing a frontend utilising those flags should be pretty rudimentary once they are implemented.
As for GNOME, I am working on a GNOME version of PC-BSD, which will address menu issues and such.
The coolest thing about this project is the installer system. As good as most linux distros may be (and they indeed are), installing apps is just not right. To non computer enthusiasts, the windows, PC-BSD or OSX way to install will always be better no matter what more experienced open source OS users may say.
Linux on the desktop will begin when someone clones the pbi (PC-BSD Installer) concept. In fact, as Linux has far better support for desktop usage at this time, it had much greater chances of sucess than this project but as most linux “desktop” distro devs are so stubborn… (I know it’s their right, their job)
Have you guys tried to install things in PC-BSD? Hell, it’s easier than in windows
.
Free OS’s will always have the problem of lack of hardware makers support though… No stability, no good for commercial apps.
I’ve used PC-BSD since it was released to the public, and
its getting better everytime.
I agree PBI is the key.
I think all open-source OSs should agree on a package
system similar to PBI.
Say one for Linux, one for BSD, etc.
Having things nice and neat, while being easily
manageable ismuch better than having a mess of bits all
over the place! I don’t wanna re-live the time when I
used Win2k and find that the registry grows to a
ridiculous size even when the app has been removed long
ago.
after 2 yrs.