PC-BSD 1.4 RC1 has been released. “After a month of refinement, the PC-BSD team is pleased to make available the 1.4RC release. This update addresses many of the reported bugs from 1.4BETA, as well as adding working i18n support for international languages. PC-BSD 1.4RC can be downloaded via our mirrors or via Torrent on the 1.4 download page.”
i am continualy impressed with this project. i really cant wait to see pc-bsd running KDE 4 and using opera 9.5 on a (when that time comes) tried and tested freebsd 7.0 stable core.
and that my friends is my dream OS. ….mmmmmmm
KDE4+FreeBSD 7.0 yummy, congrats to Kris Moore and the team of PC-BSD.
I wish I had a spare PC to install it on, but I ain’t gonna put it on my main box. It looks like it has some serious potential. I’d really like to see it as a live CD.
You could try the VMWare image, if that’s an option for you. (Latest is 1.3.01)
http://www.pcbsd.org/?p=download#vmware
I like what I’m seeing, i think PC-BSD is on the right track. Once 1.4 is out, i will not download it, but i will subscribe to the official cd-roms to help the project out.
i am continually impressed with this project. i really cant wait to see pc-bsd running Gnome 2.20 and using Firefox 3.0 on a (when that time comes) tried and tested freebsd 7.0 stable core.
and that my friends is my dream OS. ….mmmmmmm
I would love to see a freebsd based desktop with gnome and all the great stuff it has. I just cant find my self liking kde for some odd reason. As soon as someone puts the polish into a freebsd based gnome variant I’ll spend money on it.
Same here …cannot take a shine to KDE …
From what I read on their forum, there will NEVER be a Gnome version.
And thus the reason I will never use it, support it, or recommend it to anyone.
And since when did your personal opinion regarding the Gnome/KDE “issue” become a meaningful asset to the broader community?
I’m sorry to rant, but PC-BSD is a KDE centric OS based on FreeBSD. If you don’t like it, fine, but there’s no public value in those kind of opinions.
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I’ve been using 1.4 beta since the first release and it works great in most aspects, network stability is one notable exeption.
Also, I’ve never had any success running any version of PC-BSD on any kind/brand of RAID controller. Whereas FreeBSD will run flawlessly on the same hardware. Ranging from cheap to medium and high priced controllers.
Also, I’ve never had any success running any version of PC-BSD on any kind/brand of RAID controller. Whereas FreeBSD will run flawlessly on the same hardware.
Strange, PC-BSD was only desktop BSD that supported all kind of raid controllers in installer (3ware, LSI, Adaptec). Tried same with DesktopBSD and failed.
It is a business problem, not a personal issue. I support a wide range of users who are using linux on the desktop right now. I am unable to switch them over to using a bsd based desktop because of the refusal to support the gnome environment. I simple don’t have time or desire to retrain current users on kde, especially since kde is in the process of shifting from 3x / 4x.
It is really sad to see such blatant refusal to support gnome from the pcbsd project. I would love to use fbsd as a base operating system instead of (linux + gnu + random stuff).
I am unable to switch them over to using a bsd based desktop because of the refusal to support the gnome environment.
What do you mean by “support”? There is absolutely nothing stopping you from installing GNOME on your users systems. Nothing. If you don’t like the fact that KDE is the default, use vanilla FreeBSD instead.
The 1.4beta was the first version of PC-BSD to install on my laptop. Version 1.3 wouldn’t boot up. While I did get 1.4b to install it would lock up after 5 mins of use with having 3d acceleration on as well as off. Hopefully they can resolve that, if so I’ll be one happy spud.
For now I’m using desktopbsd which didn’t have any issues installing on the laptop and it came with a game that no linux install has ever come with before. I present to you knetwalk! My newest addiction
Maybe I am too lazy to dig for this, but does anyone know if there is or will be (when?) an x86-64 version of this or any other desktop oriented BSD-based OS?
AFAICT PCBSD doesn’t provide any 64bit builds yet, however more of us wait for that to happen =)
In the 1.3 times, PC-BSD had some language issues. This is what pissed many “lower educated” german users off: They assumed to have a german system installed, but error messages were presented in english. Some PBIs installed afterwards did not provide a german GUI interface. I think this problem is because of KDE. Furthermore, in Germany ISO-8859-1 is needed to be set, PC-BSD sets UTF-8… As long as you rely on KDE, german language works in most (but sadly not all) cases. But text mode and non-KDE applications do not work as assumed. (NB: Text mode is needed on some cases for maintenance operations and troubleshooting.)
I hope 1.4 will provide a better support for german language. The german translations are very sloppy and cannot compete with an english system – which I prefer, allthough german is my native language, but I cannot stand the bad or not existing translations. I’ll still have a look at it.
Not having everything (!) in german as the native language is what makes newbies (and users who want to abandon expensive MICROS~1 products) to come back to their “good XP”. Allthough, as we all know, users do not want to read, recognizing error messages and their content is important.
in Germany ISO-8859-1 is needed to be set, PC-BSD sets UTF-8
Nope. German doesn’t need iso-8859-1. It works very well with utf-8. utf-8 is THE recommended character encoding as it is designed to work with virtually any language in the world, while isos were designed to work with only one language family (ie: western european). Most OSes have migrated or are migrating to utf-8. The web is also migrating to utf-8 for the same reason. If you look at web 2.0 web sites, 99% of them use utf-8 encoding.
“Nope. German doesn’t need iso-8859-1. It works very well with utf-8.”
Inside KDE, yes, it works properly. If you need to work in text mode, problems do occur, you cannot enter umlauts or ligatures, or they are not displayed properly.
Cont.: http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=18560&comment_id=268873
“utf-8 is THE recommended character encoding as it is designed to work with virtually any language in the world, while isos were designed to work with only one language family (ie: western european). Most OSes have migrated or are migrating to utf-8.”
Thank you for this explaination. I will have a concrete look at it.
“The web is also migrating to utf-8 for the same reason.”
Last time I checked, no charset declaration is done. While (meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″) has been the usual declaration for standard conform pages for some years, you can see some different “Windows” charsets, too, which usually produce defective outputs inside the web browser. The migration you mentioned would require a massive change in HTML files. Maybe “new” pages will be UTF, but “old” pages will surely stay ISO for a while.
“If you look at web 2.0 web sites, 99% of them use utf-8 encoding.”
UFT-8 has been around for a long time. As far as I know, it’s being used in mails to display non-standard characters in topics / concerns and inside the message body.
German ASCII would be ISO-8859-15 instead of -1 and furthermore we are using unicode (UTF-8) in Germany.
>The german translations are very sloppy
If you’re are from Germany, help them!
“German ASCII would be ISO-8859-15 instead of -1 and furthermore we are using unicode (UTF-8) in Germany. “
ISO-8859-15 features the Euro sign instead of the generic currency sign, umlauts are supported in both of them. UTF-8 unicode does not seem to have an effect on some non-KDE apps and no effect in text mode, so umlauts or the eszett ligature cannot be entered. FreeBSD uses some system variables to control language specific behaviour in order to display certain values in the preferred regional format (LC_TIME, LC_MONETARY, LC_COLLATE etc.), others do control program output languages (LC_MESSAGES). Inside KDE, UFT-8 is the correct choice, I agree. As long as you stick to KDE applications and don’t do any “strange” stuff, you won’t notice anything.
“If you’re are from Germany, help them!”
Sorry, KDE is definitely not designed for me, I had to waste a lot of red pencils… 🙂
Furthermore, we have a high rate of functional illiteracy here in Germany, so no one would see any difference. Fundamental techniques of society (such as reading, writing, elementar mathematics) are not very important here, sadly.
I’ve never been able to get PC-BSD to install a boot loader and “just work” without resorting to something like GAG (same story for me with FreeBSD). Does PC-BSD now install a boot loader that “just works”? Something along the lines of grub?
FreeBSD has its own installer. Although GRUB can work with FreeBSD, they’ve developed their own. The last time I saw any kind of a PC-BSD installation, it seems to just basically ask if you want a boot loader menu or not. But if you install FreeBSD, it asks if you want the FreeBSD boot loader, the standard one, or none. So I am not really clear on what you are saying, what the problem is.
It’s not really a problem, per se. I’m just used to loading linux and having grub install as the boot loader and picking up windows or whatever else I’ve got on my drives at the time and it “just working” as far as being able to boot into linux, windows, or whatever.
Every time I’ve loaded any form of BSD, however, the boot loader it installs never seems to work and I have to either reconfigure grub to pick it up, use GAG, or have the BSD variant as my only OS.
Basically, I was wondering if the PC-BSD boot loader worked a little better/easier — like grub.