Submitted by A known and usual problem with alternative operating systems is getting them on normal users’ desktops. OEMs won’t take you seriously until you gain massive traction, and even then your chances are still pretty low. So, iXsystems, PC-BSD‘s parent company, decided to take matters into its own hands, and has unveiled a PC-BSD workstation, with a PC-BSD laptop under way.
PC-BSD is a rather unique “distribution” of FreeBSD, geared completely towards everyday use. It has several good qualities, but the one that stands out is probably its PBI package management system, which works with Windows-like installers which install the software in self-contained directories. My experiences with PC-BSD confirm that PBI is one heck of a decent system.
Anyway, iXsystems acquired PC-BSD almost three years ago (it’s been three years?), and this move has enabled PC-BSD to gain a serious foot in the door at larger companies. For instance, they have a redistribution agreements with Opera and Adobe concerning Flash, and also agreements with Fry’s getting PC-BSD 1.4 on the shelves, and a similar deal at Micro Center.
Since iXsystems is primarily a server/storage/etc. hardware company, the step from that to bringing desktop and laptop machines to market with PC-BSD pre-installed seems rather natural. The PC-BSD desktop, named iX-Apollo Extreme, is completely certified for PC-BSD (and consequently FreeBSD). “The iX-Apollo Extreme Series features the latest Intel Core i7 technology utilizing up to 16GB of DDR3 memory, GigE LAN, 3D capable nVidia graphics and a whisper quiet chassis design with a high efficiency power supply,” the company states. PC-BSD 7.x will come pre-installed and pre-configured.
A PC-BSD laptop is also in the works, but this one requires a little more time before it can be put out there on the market. We’ve almost finished the work necessary to release a solid BSD-based laptop,” Matt Olander writes, “Once we’ve got the NIC driver ported and tested, we’ll have more info on the site and make this unit available for online purchase.”
Pretty exciting news for the PC-BSD people. It seems like the acquisition just keeps on bringing a lot of good to the PC-BSD world.
I hope this gains some traction. The weakest point of PCBSD (and FreeBSD) is laptop support. I speak of suspend, special keys, sound chips, wireless, bluetooth etc
Maybe now PCBSD will finally be laptop friendly. It has severely crippled functionality on my Thinkpad R61 (PCBSD 7.1).
BTW, those are nice specs on the desktop.
probably not related not working on pcbsd but Suspend doesn’t work on my thinkpad either (using Fedora 10/11).
Don’t feel bad, Hibernate and Suspend don’t work 100% on my wife’s laptop either.
Did I mention she uses MS-Vista?
(laptop came with it…)
I just want this: http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/home/index.htm
with that display: http://www.pixelqi.com/.
All FOSS OS vendors then should stock those and sell them. I am sure they would sell like crazy.
That netbook looks very sweet…
I wonder if I can put OS X on there?
I didn’t read the specs, just liked the idea of a detachable touch screen…
It’s ARM based so, unless you find a way to strip OSX from an iPhone and get it to run on the device, I’d say no.
I really love what they are doing with PC-BSD. This has got to be my favorite OS (in the unix field, asider from open solaris) out there right now. please keep up the good work guys. also loving the BPI system
Seems a bit pointless to make a beefy system available with hefty graphics when we’re still limited to 4GB RAM with the 32 bit nVidia driver. Sure the 64 bit driver is under investigation but it’s still a long ways off. These days 64 bit workstations are really becoming necessary as data workloads are demanding > 4GB of RAM. This isn’t a function of application bloat either but more so the increasingly large datasets for visualization, simulation, video processing, etc., the sort of things *nix workstations are great for. 32 bit workstations are falling by the wayside and FBSD (and by necessity PC-BSD) unfortunately has a big blow dealt against it in the 64 bit arena.
Edited 2009-06-30 03:11 UTC
It’s what happens when you jump into the proprietary wagon. The guys there look cool and nice at first but then you find yourself thrown down a bridge with concrete boots.
You are voting with your money(and this also goes to OEMs). Don’t vote for the Ass-Rapers Party.
Oh yes, people are voting with their money. It’s a shame the rather small (by comparison) amount of people who care about open source vs proprietary don’t really have enough buying power to make a dent as compared to those who don’t… and usually, we end up voting the other way than the masses. People are voting with their money, and we’re getting proprietary everything because of it since, like it or not, most people don’t care as long as it works.
People are voting with their money, and we’re getting proprietary everything because of it since, like it or not, most people don’t care as long as it works.
No, even worse. Voting is a conscious process. People just spend money without thinking. They expect it to work, but unfortunately it almost never “just works”. Instead of starting to think of ways to get the stuff to work, they just offload it to others in exchange for money or worse; they just appeal to the kindness of a tech savvy person for free.
It’s this “I just consume and someone else will clean up the mess after me” that keeps so many shoddy products on the market alive.
In the case of nVidia it’s not really a bad product, it might actually be the best hardware, it’s just that they enjoy mistreating their customers. Nothing they hide in the driver can be as valuable as they make it to be. If it was it would have been illegally reverse-engineered by a rival years ago as I am sure it is not beyond a single decent REer to do it.
Others, well, they don’t have a good product, they don’t even have a good driver, but they do make sure you won’t be able to use their products even if you keep using the same version of Windows on the same computer.
Like everything in life, if you vote you will most likely lose, but if you don’t vote you will lose for sure.
I voted with my money and got a laptop with intel graphic chipset. After using it for a year, I have this to say:
f–k open source intel graphic driver
I will take nvidia proprietary driver any day of the week.
Funny, I did the same thing (bought a Thinkpad R60 with Intel graphics just to run Linux/X11) and I haven’t looked back since. The Intel driver has been much better for my stress-level than the Nvidia drivers (installs as part of the base OS, works without hassles and a few xorg.conf tweaks have greatly improved performance). Granted, I don’t play 3D FPS games on my laptop, but for standard 3d and visual effects it can’t be beat in my experience.
I’m also still using Xubuntu 8.10, maybe that has something to do with it.
So what then is the appropriate hardware solution for an engineering company who’s computing requirements demand 4-8 CPU cores, 8-16GB RAM, and a hefty high performance graphics card for visualization? You’re basically stuck with an x64 + nVidia workstation running Linux or Solaris. There’s the ATI route but at the moment their open source drivers don’t hold a flame to the proprietary drivers, and they’re even more platform limited.
Sure it sucks going with the proprietary route, but the requirements are what they are. Telling your customers that your deliverables will take twice as long and cost twice as much because you just didn’t “feel right” about buying the equipment necessary to get the job done on time is a laughable excuse at best; you’d never expect to stay in business.
I’m not saying that I like it, in fact quite the opposite. The lack of effective open source solutions in this realm is abysmal. Unfortunately though, that is the current state of affairs.
Perhaps they don’t need to assemble the hardware themselves, but I really think there should be a big fat “Buy an Ubuntu computer” button on the ubuntu.com webpage. If it simply points to Dell or other partners doesn’t matter. Just make easy to buy one from ubuntu.com.
I think this is very cool, but I’m not happy about the Nvidia card, because I prefer open source driver, especially if I use an open source OS.
[OT]I hope there will be a shift to ATI to show people want open specs. They did the right thing when the opened them and changed from providing a addon to directly contributing to X.org. I can’t understand, why some people think that’s a bad move.[/OT]
I would love to take that workstation for a spin. Of course you know I would have to install Ubuntu 9.04 on it just so I could compare the performance of it against the version of PC-BSD that they include with it.