Submitted by The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.1 (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, and KDE 4.4.5. Version 8.1 contains a number of enhancements and improvements. Version 8.1 of PC-BSD is available for download from mirrors, as well as via torrent.
I have nothing but good things to say about PC-BSD. This is a distro that really works for me and is simple to use for anyone, even new crossovers to KDE. Great job all around.
Not to nitpick but PC-BSD is not a “distribution” per se, but rather an interpretation of FreeBSD. 🙂 I do agree with you, however, that PC-BSD is one of the best operating systems out there, for beginners to UNIX to sysadmins alike. If VirtualBox support were on par with Linux systems, I might be persuaded to switch to PC-BSD myself.
OS itself is nice, just like FreeBSD, which is the base, but can’t agree with this:
… because PC-BSD gets in a sysadmin way much too often … It forces you to use KDE [or fluxbox, IIRC], but it also uses many unccesecary daemons running in a background, like HAL for example. KDE is definitely not in taste of someone, who likes order, clean and leightweight env [which is – of course – most of sysadmins
]. Definitely not for me. Definitely not for one of my clients – been there, tried that, but it failed to bring the right experience, so now my client is happy with FBSD+XFCE4+Flash, small footprint, good performance and responsivenes.
Oh I disagree. I run KDE on my main machine and absolutely love it.
Sure, my other systems run DWM, XFCE or competely headless (depending on their individual role). But for general computing I find KDE very effective for productivity.
Even though I prefer WindowMaker for my desktop, I still must have the KDE software installed. There are just too many nice tools: Kate, Kompare, Konsole, Umbrello, Konqueror, and the best of all is the integrated remote login management, so you can browse, edit, and save files locally or via SFTP/FTP/Samba/NFS without even thinking about it. No other desktop suite offers anything remotely as flexible.
so you can browse, edit, and save files locally or via SFTP/FTP/Samba/NFS without even thinking about it. No other desktop suite offers anything remotely as flexible.
Actually, atleast GNOME does.
Last time I tried this on Gnome (about 9 months ago) it was nowhere near as seamless as on KDE. For one thing, it required some VFS setup work, whereas on KDE you just go to File->Open from any KDE app without preamble, and you can access any supported network type.
Sorry to nitpick, but you are wrong.
PC-BSD is a distribution of FreeBSD. They take FreeBSD, they modify some stuff, they add some stuff, they remove some stuff, they add a nice KDE GUI wrapper over it all, and add their PBI stuff.
The FreeBSD community at large calls PC-BSD a distribution of FBSD.
dunno why it isn’t announced officially yet…
Because they want to make sure that the ISOs, the source, etc are spread out on all the mirrors before unleashing the masses on their servers. It’s the same process that’s been in place for a decade (complete release, push to mirrors, wait, announce release).
Absolutely amazing how this comes up for every single release.
And now it’s been announced, and available for download:
http://www.freebsd.org
to get myself into BSD like alot of others, I have just got one thing to say…
Thank you for paving my way into the BSD world in an easy way.
I don’t think I would have ever explored BSD if it wasn’t for PC-BSD.
Sorry for my bad english.
It’s ok, but I’m not quite sure that you can know BSD better when actually sitting in a comfortable GUI all the time
On top of it it just looks like a regular Linux desktop. The real order lies beneath the surface.
Someone installed PC-BSD on a MacBook or MacBook Pro? Would be good to know if it would make a proper replacement for OS X.
Bye brejoc
Assuming the base and kernel is left untouched (from FreeBSD), it’s likely you will have problems with PC-BSD… The 7.x series has an issue with Apple USB keyboards (on macbooks at least) and 8.0, 8.1-RC2 as well as 9.0-CURRENT will not boot; failing on an ACPI error (disabling ACPI at the loader presents a different boot problem).
I’m still waiting for a realistic solution on http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=12289&page=1 if you’d like to be kept up-to-date on the issue.
(I have a macbook 6,1)
Edited 2010-07-22 02:12 UTC
Hi bombuzal,
good to know. I will check if the issue with the installer will also appear on a MB2,2.
Bye brejoc
I suggest you to try with some FreeBSD livecd [which is quite hard to spot these days. It is actually easier to spot OpenBSD livecd, which is quite extraordinary
].
My bet would be Frenzy of mfs_bsd.
Wish you luck!
Check out FreeSBIE, as far as I know, there’s no recent version of it (FreeBSD 5 and 6 versions are available).
Frenzy 1.2, based on FreeBSD 8.0, is available. No GUI (it’s an admin rescue CD afterall), but it is very useful for testing if a system will boot/work with FreeBSD. And for rescuing systems that won’t boot off the harddrive (or for imaging systems, or …).
http://frenzy.org.ua/eng/
I did not installed it on *mac*, but check these:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/AppleMacbook
http://wiki.freebsd.org/IntelMacMini
Hi vermaden,
thanks for the links. Apparently a MacMini would be a much better choice.
Bye brejoc
I can’t remember the last version of PC-BSD I’ve tried, maybe 6.x? I’m going to download and install it tonight. Just read that it does in fact support my wireless card on my laptop (B43 in linux) so that is all the more reason for me to try it. Just need to check to see if it supports my soundcard of which I don’t remember the model, and NTFS. Then I’d be all set.
FreeBSD includes read-only support for NTFS.
ntfs-3g is available in the ports tree, which enables read-write support for NTFS. This is the same NTFS support as in Linux.
It has a driver equivalent for B43, yes, but for me the 8.0 release didn’t work with it. I got the WLAN card up and running but soon my logs would fill with error messages and the network connection would be cut for random periods of time and randomly throughout the day. That’s why I had to move my wireless server away from FreeBSD to Linux. Haven’t tried 8.1 yet.
Years ago I tried PC-BSD because it seemed really cool. The installer was way more advanced and far easier than Ubuntu’s installer, even now. I always wanted it to work and this was back when I was considering a move to the BSD’s. But with PC-BSD there was always the problem of the password. I would enter a tough password consisting of letters, numbers and special characters and I would use around 18 to 20 characters. Then once I made it to the login screen the password would never be accepted. Even if that was no longer the case I would never leave Ubuntu nowadays.
can anybody explain why is it impossible to install this thing on smaller setup than 12gb?
what exactly does take so much space?